Lionel Robbins (Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics)

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LIONEL ROBBINS

By the time of his death, the English economist Lionel Robbins (1898–1984) was celebrated as a ‘Renaissance man.’ He made major contributions to his own academic discipline and applied his skills as an economist not only to practical problems of economic policy – with conspicuous success when he served as head of the economists advising the wartime coalition government of Winston Churchill in 1940–5 – and of higher education – the ‘Robbins Report’ of 1963 – but also to the administration of the visual and performing arts that he loved deeply. He was devoted to the London School of Economics, from his time as an undergraduate following active service as an artillery officer on the Western Front in 1917–18, through his years as professor of economics (1929– 62) and his stint as chairman of the governors during the ‘troubles’ of the late 1960s. This comprehensive biography, based on his personal and professional correspondence and other papers, covers all these many and varied activities. Susan Howson is Professor of Economics and Fellow of Trinity College, University of Toronto. She was educated at the London School of Economics (1964–9) and at the University of Cambridge, where she obtained her PhD in 1975. She has held visiting positions in the International Division of the Bank of England in 1979–81; Nuffield College Oxford in 1984–5; and Wolfson College Cambridge in 1991–3. Professor Howson is the author of Domestic Monetary Management in Britain 1919–38 (Cambridge University Press, 1975) and British Monetary Policy 1945–51 (1993) and coauthor with Donald Winch of The Economic Advisory Council (Cambridge University Press, 1977). She edited The Collected Papers of James Meade (3 volumes, 1988) and coedited with Donald Moggridge the wartime diaries of Lionel Robbins and Nobel Laureate James Meade and the Cabinet Office diary of James Meade (1990). Professor Howson began research on the life and work of Lionel Robbins in the early 1990s. She edited a selection of his major articles in economic theory and economic policy under the title Economic Science and Political Economy (1997). Her work on British economic policy has been published in The Economic Journal, Economic History Review, History of Political Economy, Journal of Economic History and Oxford Economic Papers, among other publications. She is also a contributor to the Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain (Structural Change and Growth, Volume III, 2004). The recipient of two prizes for research in economic history, Professor Howson has also held two Connaught Senior Research Fellowships in the Social Sciences in 2004 and 2007 for her work on Lionel Robbins.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON MODERN ECONOMICS

General Editor: Craufurd D. Goodwin, Duke University This series contains original works that challenge and enlighten historians of economics. For the profession as a whole, it promotes better understanding of the origin and content of modern economics. Other Books in the Series: Arie Arnon, Monetary Theory and Policy from Hume and Smith to Wicksell: Money, Credit, and the Economy William J. Barber, Designs within Disorder: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Economists, and the Shaping of American Economic Policy, 1933–1945 William J. Barber, From New Era to New Deal: Herbert Hoover, the Economists, and American Economic Policy, 1921–1933 Fillipo Cesarano, Monetary Theory and Bretton Woods: The Construction of an International Monetary Order Timothy Davis, Ricardo’s Macroeconomics: Money, Trade Cycles, and Growth Jerry Evensky, Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy: A Historical and Contemporary Perspective on Markets, Law, Ethics, and Culture M. June Flanders, International Monetary Economics, 1870–1960: Between the Classical and the New Classical J. Daniel Hammond, Theory and Measurement: Causality Issues in Milton Friedman’s Monetary Economics Samuel Hollander, The Economics of Karl Marx: Analysis and Application Lars Jonung (ed.), The Stockholm School of Economics Revisited Kyun Kim, Equilibrium Business Cycle Theory in Historical Perspective Gerald M. Koot, English Historical Economics, 1870–1926: The Rise of Economic History and Mercantilism David Laidler, Fabricating the Keynesian Revolution: Studies of the Inter-War Literature on Money, the Cycle, and Unemployment Odd Langholm, The Legacy of Scholasticism in Economic Thought: Antecedents of Choice and Power Robert Leonard, Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory Series list continues after the Index.

Lionel Robbins SUSAN HOWSON University of Toronto

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107002449  C Susan Howson 2011

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Howson, Susan, 1945– Lionel Robbins : a life in economics, government, and the arts / Susan Howson. p. cm. – (Historical perspectives on modern economics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-00244-9 (hardback) 1. Robbins, Lionel Robbins, Baron, 1898–1984. 2. Economists – Great Britain – Biography. 3. Economics – Great Britain. 4. World War, 1939–1945 – Economic aspects. I. Title. II. Series. HB103.R6H69 2011 330.092–dc22 [B] 2011002213 ISBN 978-1-107-00244-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Illustrations

page ix

Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

1

1

Father and son

11

2

The Great War

25

3

Postwar

51

4

The London School of Economics

68

5

Iris Gardiner

103

6

New College Oxford

126

7

The young professor

166

8

Fritz and Lionel

206

9

The School in the mid-1930s

242

10

The approach of war

294

11

The economics of war

342

12

Director of the Economic Section

387

13

Anglo-American conversations

424

14

The Law Mission and the Steering Committee

462

15

1944

495

vii

viii

Contents

16

The last months of the war

553

17

The postwar settlement

587

18

Return to the School

642

19

The end of the transition

681

20

LSE in the early 1950s

712

21

Chairman of the National Gallery

760

22

Lord Robbins

826

23

The Robbins Report

858

24

The sixties

897

25

The arts

941

26

The troubles at LSE

975

27

Retirement

1022

Conclusion

1079

Bibliography

1091

Index

1131

Illustrations

All the photographs come from the Robbins family with the exception of 14 (Illustrated London News Picture Library), 20 and 24 (the author) and 26 (Tarlok Singh). Illustration 14 is reproduced by permission of the Mary C Evans Picture Library; 23 with permission of the Financial Times Ltd; 29  Donald Southern Photograph Collection, courtesy of Royal Opera House Collections; and 30 the London School of Economics and Political Science. Illustration 8 is adapted from Basil Liddell Hart, A History of the Great War 1914–1918 (1934), 512; 13 is in the Robbins Papers; 16, now in the Derso and Kelen Collection, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, appears by permission of Princeton University Library. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Sipson Farm, Lionel Robbins’s birthplace Hollycroft: lawn and west windows Hollycroft: the nursery Caroline, Lionel and Winifred Nethania The ‘three blind mice’ 2nd Lt Robbins The Battle of the Lys Lionel and Iris, 1923 or 1924 Lionel’s father, 1925 Lionel in Berlin, 3 May 1932 Lionel and Iris on holiday in Austria Sketch for a Christmas card, 1933 Lionel lecturing in Cambridge in 1940 Hot Springs, 21 May 1943 ‘This happy breed of men . . . ’ ix

page 330 331 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 339 340 341 629 630

x 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Illustrations Lionel and Iris on holiday in Wales, July 1943 Delegate’s card, Bretton Woods, 1944 The family at Hollycroft, December 1945 10 Meadway Close Jacob Viner at Meadway Close Lionel Robbins and Friedrich Hayek Bracken House, 27 November 1962 4 Marine Parade, Lyme Regis Lionel at 4 Marine Parade Arriving at New Delhi, 16 December 1964 Concentration: Montauk Point, September 1967 Lecturing at Bologna, 1971 Lord Goodman and Lionel Robbins The naming of the Lionel Robbins Building, 27 July 1978

631 632 632 633 633 634 635 636 637 638 638 639 640 641

Abbreviations

AGG AUTE BCom BL BLPES BOC BOE BP BSC BSc(Econ) BSE BT CAB CEIS CO COD CSO CU CUL CUP DES DO Docs

ED

Alfred George Gardiner Association of University Teachers of Economics Bachelor of Commerce British Library British Library of Political and Economic Science Bank of Canada Archives Bank of England Archives British Petroleum Ballet Subcommittee Bachelor of Science in Economics Board of Studies in Economics Board of Trade Papers Cabinet Office Papers Central Economic Information Service Colonial Office Papers The Collected Papers of James Meade Volume IV: The Cabinet Office Diary 1944–46 Central Statistical Office Clearing Union Cambridge University Library Cambridge University Press Department of Education and Science Dominions Office Papers Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series I, Volume III Britain and America: Negotiation of the United States Loan 3 August–7 December 1945 Ministry of Education Papers xi

xii

EJ FAH FAO FO FRUS FSC FT GIIS GLC GPC HCDebs HLDebs HMG HMSO IBRD ICR IEA IEG/IER ILO IMF ITO JEM JMK LAC LCES LCR LNU LoN LPC LSE m MAF MAP MERL NACF NATO nd NFU NG NGA

Abbreviations

Economic Journal The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Food and Agriculture Organization Foreign Office Papers Foreign Relations of the United States Finance Subcommittee Financial Times Graduate Institute of International Studies Greater London Council General Purposes Committee House of Commons Debates House of Lords Debates His/Her Majesty’s Government His/Her Majesty’s Stationery Office International Bank for Reconstruction and Development Ivy Caroline Robbins Institute of Economic Affairs Iris Elizabeth Gardiner/Robbins International Labour Organization International Monetary Fund International Trade Organization The Collected Papers of James Meade The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes Library and Archives Canada London and Cambridge Economic Service Lionel Charles Robbins League of Nations Union League of Nations Lord President’s Committee London School of Economics and Political Science million Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries Ministry of Aircraft Production Museum of English Rural Life National Art Collections Fund North Atlantic Treaty Organization not dated National Farmers’ Union National Gallery National Gallery Archives

Abbreviations

NIESR NPG ODNB OEEC OUP PPE Proceedings

RA RACS RBA RES RFA RIIA ROH RP RRR SF SPSL T TDRs TNA UCL UGC UNRRA WD WEA WO

xiii

National Institute of Economic and Social Research National Portrait Gallery Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Organization for European Economic Cooperation Oxford University Press Philosophy, Politics and Economics Proceedings and Documents of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, July 1–22, 1944 Royal Artillery Royal Artillery Cadet School Reserve Bank of Australia Archives Royal Economic Society Royal Field Artillery Royal Institute of International Affairs Royal Opera House Robbins Papers Rowland Richard Robbins Stabilization Fund Society for the Protection of Science and Learning Treasury Papers Treasury Deposit Receipts The National Archives University College London University Grants Committee United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration The Wartime Diaries of Lionel Robbins and James Meade, 1943– 45 Workers Educational Association War Office Papers

Introduction

I have often been asked why I am writing a biography of Lionel Robbins. I usually reply, truthfully, ‘His family asked me to.’ But that is not the answer to the question I am being asked. The English economist Lionel Robbins (1898–1984) left his mark in several ways, in his own country and elsewhere. His legacy remains in at least three areas: the academic discipline of economics; UK domestic and international economic policy, especially in the Second World War; and the arts in Britain. He is most associated with the London School of Economics (‘LSE’ or ‘the School’ to its students and staff), whose Economics Department he headed for thirty years and built up to its preeminent position in British economics. To economists he is still known as the author of An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932 and 1935), which is one of the three most important methodological statements on economics, and the source of its famous definition, ‘Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.’ But he was always as much interested in economic policy as in economic theory, in what he called political economy as distinct from economic science. During the Second World War, he entered government service in June 1940 and became (1941–5) the head of the group of economists advising the coalition government under Winston Churchill. As well as helping to create the British total war economy, he was decisively involved in the preparation of the white paper, Employment Policy (1944), and in the creation of the postwar international economy – a major figure in the process by which the visionary ideas of John Maynard Keynes in Britain and Harry Dexter White in the USA became the Bretton Woods institutions: the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – and in the notoriously difficult Anglo-American loan negotiations at the end of the war, which allowed Britain to participate in the new postwar economic order. He was 1

2

Lionel Robbins

also a lover of the visual and performing arts, who took advantage of his skills and opportunities to serve the arts in the management of the Courtauld Institute of Art, the National Gallery and the Royal Opera House in London. Although he became famous in the 1960s for the ‘Robbins Report’ of the Committee on Higher Education (1961–3), his contribution to the wellbeing of the arts in Britain has been longer lasting. According to the recent historian of the National Gallery (Conlin 2006, 184), ‘The economist Lionel Robbins was probably the greatest of the Trustees to serve in the last century’ and ‘arguably the most effective Trustee the Gallery ever had.’ Lionel Robbins did not intend to become an economist. His first intellectual love was English literature and he first entered university to study it. As he put it in his autobiography (1971a, 29), ‘my chief, indeed my only, real ambition in life was to be an effective poet.’ His father, a very successful farmer and a local magistrate in Middlesex near London, would have preferred him to become a lawyer: indeed he later paid for his son to read for the Bar. The first five chapters of this biography tell the story of Lionel Robbins’s early life and how he came to be offered and to accept his first academic position as a temporary lecturer in economics at New College Oxford in 1924, the sixth how within five years he became a professor of economics at LSE at the age of thirty. Chapters 1 to 4 describe his family background, his school and university education and the development of the close friendships that were to remain important to him for the rest of his life. They also describe his gradual loss of religious faith, his evolving political views – from the Liberalism of his parents to socialism – out of which began his interest in economics, and his growing love of art and music which came to replace religion in his emotional and intellectual life. Like so many of his generation, the First World War interrupted Robbins’s education. After only one term reading Intermediate Arts at University College London (UCL) he entered the Royal Artillery as an officer cadet. He was commissioned in 1916, served on the Western Front in 1917–18 and was wounded and invalided home in April 1918. He returned from the war a socialist, and as a socialist he resumed his education, at LSE in 1920–3, after two years working in the labour movement. As an undergraduate he was a student of political science under Harold Laski. It was also during the Great War that he discovered the theatre, hitherto kept from him by his upbringing as a Strict Baptist, and ballet. At the same time it was from an artist friend, Clive Gardiner (whose younger sister he was to marry in 1924), that he learned to appreciate both Renaissance art and the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, especially C´ezanne. It was his desire to marry Iris Gardiner that prompted him, in his first postgraduate year, to decide to

Introduction

3

become an economist, as Chapter 5 explains. By that time his study of economics had also completed his disillusionment with socialism. After teaching at New College Oxford (1924–5 and 1927–9) and LSE (1925–7) Lionel Robbins found himself with the responsibility of running the Economics Department at LSE. His accomplishments there and outside the School in the 1930s are the subject of four chapters (7–10). He gathered together an outstanding group of young economists, including John Hicks, Nicholas Kaldor and Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek and Robbins first met when Hayek came from Vienna to deliver four public lectures in January 1931. They became close friends, and close colleagues when Hayek accepted the Tooke Chair of Economics and Statistics at LSE in 1932. Lionel himself went to Vienna in April 1933, for the first time since he was an undergraduate. He came back to establish, with the director of the School, William Beveridge, the Academic Freedom Committee which helped Jewish and liberal academics and students to escape Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, his first opportunity to apply economic analysis to practical problems had been distinctly unsuccessful. When the Labour Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald asked J.M. Keynes in the summer of 1930 to chair a committee of economists to provide an ‘agreed diagnosis’ of and possible remedies for the unemployment problem in Britain, Keynes invited Robbins to serve. Keynes was incensed when the young professor refused to follow Keynes’s lead in contemplating protection and public works as means to reduce unemployment and insisted on a minority report of his own. Lionel came later to regret his negative attitude to public expenditure in depressed conditions and to reject the ‘Austrian’ theory he used to analyse the 1930s slump in his second book, The Great Depression (1934). As he noted in his autobiography (1971a, 153), ‘I realized that these constructions [of theory] led to conclusions which were highly unpalatable as regards practical action. But . . . [if they were valid] it was my duty to base recommendations as regards policy upon them. There was a touch of the Nonconformist conscience here.’ But he never regretted nor budged from his free-trade stance or lost his concern for real-world political and economic issues. While his younger colleagues engaged in vigorous theoretical debates, often in the famous graduate seminar he presided over at LSE, his own writing increasingly focussed on international economic problems and the economic causes of war (1937, 1939). The chapters of this biography devoted to Lionel Robbins’s wartime government service are written as a contribution to the political and economic history of the Second World War – reflecting the fact that he participated in so many episodes and the wealth of new material available in his papers and

4

Lionel Robbins

other archives. His active support of Keynes’s ideas on how to pay for the war began as soon as he entered government service and intensified when James Meade (to whom as a student he had lectured at Oxford) joined the economists in the War Cabinet Offices in order to compile the first national income and expenditure estimates. They worked closely together, and with Keynes, for the rest of the war. The first war chapter (11) covers the phoney war period that Robbins spent with LSE in Cambridge and the first year of active war when he and his economist colleagues in government devised the highly popular system of points rationing for food. Thereafter, the Economic Section, with Robbins as director and Meade his deputy, was actively committed to planning for a better postwar world. He was deeply involved in three aspects: domestic employment policy, international monetary policy, and trade and commercial policy. The planning began in the winter of 1941–2 even while Lionel and his colleagues had many more immediate wartime problems to attend to (Chapter 12). The three strands of planning and policymaking then ran in parallel but at different speeds, largely for political reasons: the intrinsic problems of a coalition government and the complicated relations with the US government after the passage of the Lend–Lease Act in March 1941. Robbins played a major role in the Anglo-American discussions on postwar international economic policy in Washington and in London and represented the UK at the United Nations conferences at Hot Springs in 1943 and Bretton Woods in 1944 (Chapters 13–15). Given his background and interests he was throughout the war often engaged in the less fruitful discussions of commodities and agriculture. He was still involved in these and in the still uncompleted discussions on postwar commercial policy as the war neared its end and the problems of the immediate postwar period became more pressing (Chapter 16). The climax of his wartime government service came in the autumn of 1945 with the bitter and protracted negotiations for a postwar loan from the US government (Chapter 17). On this and the earlier missions to Washington, Robbins became personally very close to Keynes in spite of their doctrinal differences in the 1930s. Although, as he admitted to Laski in 1949, there was ‘a side of my character which is very well pleased with administrative and diplomatic duties’, Lionel Robbins was determined not to remain in government service in peacetime. He returned to LSE and resumed his position as head of the Economics Department. As in the 1930s he enthusiastically encouraged the research and helped the careers of a long and distinguished line of students and younger colleagues. He participated vigorously in public policy debate from 1947 onwards. In spite of his desire to distance himself from government, he was

Introduction

5

consulted by two Chancellors of the Exchequer on monetary policy in the 1950s. He was consistently critical of the inadequate use of monetary policy as an instrument for the preservation of balance-of-payments equilibrium under the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. One of his specific recommendations for improved monetary control was adopted by the Bank of England in 1958. In his own work he followed the example of the Canadian economist Jacob Viner, a friend and mentor since their first meeting in Oxford in 1927, and became a scholarly and accomplished historian of economic thought, especially of English classical political economy from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill in two major books (1952 and 1958). These and his other activities in the late 1940s and the 1950s are discussed in Chapters 18–21. The most important of the other activities concerned the arts. The crucial step was his appointment in 1950 to a committee on the export of works of art chaired by his former boss in Whitehall, Sir John Anderson, who became Lord Waverley. He helped to write the report recommending a standing reviewing committee on the export of works of art, which is still in existence. As he later commented (1971a, 249), ‘One thing leads to another’: two days after the last meeting of the Waverley Committee he was asked to serve as a trustee of the National Gallery. In his twenty-one years on its board he served two seven-year terms as chairman. As its liaison trustee on the board of the Tate Gallery he helped to resolve the ‘Tate Affair’ in 1954 (Spalding 1998, chapter 9), an ugly dispute involving the director and the trustees, of whom a friend from his Whitehall days had recently become chair. In 1954–5, at the request of the Treasury, he chaired a committee on the rebuilding of the bombed-out Queen’s Hall, an interesting case study in the economics of the performing arts. The achievements of his first term as chairman at the National Gallery included the restoration of its war-damaged building, the government’s acquisition of a site for its future extension, an eightfold increase of its annual grant from the Treasury, as well as special grants for particular paintings (most notably Paolo Uccello’s St George and the Dragon), and, last but not least, a settlement of the forty-year-old dispute between the British and Irish governments over the thirty-nine continental paintings bequeathed to the gallery by Sir Hugh Lane (Chapter 21). The highlight of his second term was the acquisition of C´ezanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses in 1964. For nearly thirty years he was a director of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. Originally invited to join the board by Waverley on the initiative of Garret Drogheda in 1956, he managed to persuade Waverley of the need for a finance committee, which he then chaired for twenty years, tackling from an economist’s standpoint the

6

Lionel Robbins

chronic funding problems of mounting opera and ballet. He also served on the ballet subcommittee and remained on the board until 1980, intimately involved at the end in the controversial redevelopment of the House. Lionel Robbins’s contributions to ballet and opera at Covent Garden, and his second term at the National Gallery, are the subject of Chapter 25 (continued in Chapter 27). In January 1959 he had accepted the offer of a life peerage. He had also agreed to join the board of the Financial Times newspaper and to become chairman after two years’ experience. As a result, but with great reluctance, he gave up his chair of economics at LSE (Chapter 22) – although he continued to lecture there for another twenty years. He was also reluctant to take on the chairmanship of the Committee on Higher Education, as it meant he could not write the treatise on economic theory he had been planning to write since the 1930s. The committee’s report, which he wrote two and a half years later after intensive study of universities at home and overseas and statistical work on the demand for higher education in Britain conducted by Claus Moser and Richard Layard, encouraged the expansion of British post-secondary education in the 1960s (Chapter 23). He had already assisted directly in the creation of the University of York in England and, as a result of the report, he was to serve as the first chancellor of another new university, Stirling, in Scotland. He was chairman of the Financial Times for ten years: according to its historian (Kynaston 1988, 279), ‘It was in almost every sense a fortunate appointment. Perhaps most importantly, it helped, through Robbins’s academic distinction, to give the paper a certain added intellectual authority – at a time when that was precisely the quality the FT was looking for in order to build on the foundations so painstakingly laid by [the editor Gordon] Newton in the 1950s. Robbins himself never sought to influence editorial policy, but the connection was there.’ Chapter 24 also discusses his academic work – teaching and writing – in the 1960s. Lord Robbins was chairman of the governors of LSE from 1968 to 1973, a turbulent period that included the ‘troubles’ of 1968–9. Although criticized at the time for usurping the role of the director, he can be seen now as having thus prevented further disruption and preserved the academic reputation of the School (Chapter 26). In his ‘retirement’ he further demonstrated his loyalty and devotion in his strenuous and unselfish leadership of the appeal to rehouse the library in what is now appropriately the Lionel Robbins Building. ‘The success of the Appeal was to be his last great gift to the School’ (Dahrendorf 1995, 479). In his seventies he also spoke frequently in the House of Lords on economic policy and on education, travelled extensively, usually to give lectures, and published six books (Chapter 27).

Introduction

7

Having worked closely with him for nearly twenty years, at Covent Garden and the Financial Times and as a governor of LSE, Lord Drogheda pointed out in 1974 that ‘in everyone who has worked alongside of him, Lionel Robbins inspires, in equal measure, affection and respect. The affection is due to his warmth of heart and breadth of understanding, to the knowledge that he is the staunchest of friends, whose sympathy and support is most readily available when it is most needed, whose loyalty, and willingness to help without regard to personal inconvenience, are legendary to all who know him. The respect is due to his massive intellect, his remarkable wideranging knowledge, his intense industry, his great sense of public duty, his utter selflessness; and, coupled with these things, his deep humility.’ These qualities have been repeatedly mentioned by those – younger colleagues, friends and fellow economists – with whom I have talked about Lionel Robbins. As Sir Karl Popper told me, ‘I loved and admired him, most of all for his moral and personal qualities – and as a teacher.’ I am very grateful for illuminating conversations about Lionel Robbins to: the late Iris Robbins, Caroline Robbins and Richard Robbins; Nancy Robbins, Rowland Robbins, Anne and Christopher Johnson and Philip Robbins; the late Anne Bohm, Bernard Corry, Aaron Director, Marjorie Durbin, Lionel Elvin, Milton Friedman, John Ginger, Lord Harris of High Cross, Clarisse Kaldor, Kurt Klappholz, James and Margaret Meade, Edith Penrose, Sir Henry Phelps Brown, Sir Karl Popper, Austin Robinson and John Watkins; and William Baumol, Mark Blaug, Partha Dasgupta, Alan and Shirley Day, Lord Desai, Dorothy and Frank Hahn, David Laidler, Richard Lipsey, Morris Miller, Lord Moser, Robert Orr, Ben Roberts, Lord Roll, Sir John Tooley, Ralph Turvey and Basil Yamey. They have all helped me make sense of the documentary evidence. I have tried to indicate the location of letters and other unpublished documents as economically as possible. Hence for family letters I provide only the recipient or writer and the date. Other material in the possession of the Robbins family that is destined for the archives at LSE is indicated by the name of the file or notebook and RP. The Robbins Papers already there appear with their collection name and file number, for example Robbins 1/1. Other archival material is similarly described, for instance Viner 22–14 for the file of correspondence with Robbins in the Viner Papers Box 22 Folder 14, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Files in the UK National Archives at Kew are identified by their call numbers, for example T230/1. The archives consulted are listed before the published sources (which are referred to in the text by author and date of publication).

8

Lionel Robbins

I am very grateful to the archivists who have helped me locate invaluable material: Sue Donnelly and Angela Raspin of the British Library of Political and Economic Science, Colin Harris of the Bodleian Library, Caroline Dalton of New College Oxford, Alan Crookham, David Carter and Isobel Siddons of the National Gallery, Francesca Franchi Head of Collections Royal Opera House, Marianne Ehrhardt of the University of Queensland Library, Virginia MacDonald of the Reserve Bank of Australia and Caroline Gould of the Museum of English Rural Life. I am also very grateful to Stefania Martinotti Dorigo of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi for sending me the correspondence between Einaudi and Robbins, to the Beinecke Library of Yale University for copies of the correspondence of Ezra Pound with Basil Bunting and Lionel Robbins, and to Alexander Swoboda, director of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, for providing me with copies of Robbins’s correspondence in the Institute’s archives and from the William Rappard Papers in the Federal Archives in Bern. For permission to cite or quote from archival material I have to thank the British Library of Political and Economic Science, the Bodleian Library, the Warden and Scholars of New College Oxford, the Warden and Fellows of Nuffield College Oxford, the Provost and Scholars of King’s College Cambridge, Trinity College Cambridge, Churchill College Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, University College London, Senate House Library University of London, the British Library Board, the National Gallery, Tate Archive, the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Royal Opera House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Bank of England, the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, Library and Archives Canada, the Reserve Bank of Australia, the National Archives College Park, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, the Rockefeller Archive Center, Princeton University Library, Stanford University, the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library, the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library of Duke University, the University Librarian and Director of the John Rylands University Library of the University of Manchester, the Museum of English Rural Life, the Mont Pelerin Society, the Director of the Universit¨atsbibliothek Basel, the University of Klagenfurt Karl Popper Library, the Estate of F.A. Hayek, Seymour J. Weissmann, John Freeman, Elizabeth Johnson, Anthony Thirlwall, John Halliday and the family of James Meade. Letters from Ezra Pound to Lionel Robbins C 2011 by Mary de Rachewiltz and The Estate of Omar S. Pound) are used ( by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. I am especially grateful to the director of the London School of Economics for allowing me to read and quote from Robbins’s Personal File and his Student’s Dossier.

Introduction

9

I am very grateful to the late John Ginger and to Peter Ginger for the opportunity to read and quote from John’s unpublished biography of Reginald Lawson and from his notes of discussions with Lawson and Robbins. I also wish to thank Wilma Johnson, Vicky Johnson and Lizzy Johnson for memories of their grandfather; Ellen Seiler for copies of the letters to her mother from her father Jacob Viner on his first visit to England in 1927; Richard Freeman for two letters in the Foxwell Collection; Philip Clarke and Robert M. Rauner for sending me their recollections of Lionel Robbins while they were students at LSE, Tarlok Singh for his memoir and photographs of Robbins, and Victor Urquidi for his recollections and for a copy of his notes of Robbins’s lectures in 1938–9. Several economists and historians have helped by sending me books, articles or papers: Riccardo Faucci, Harald Hagemann, J¨org Guido H¨ulsmann, Frederic Lee, Philip Schofield and Philip Sherwood. Selwyn Cornish was very helpful with his recollections of Leslie Melville and with his hospitality at the Australian National University in Canberra. I should like to thank Lord Coleraine for providing me with information from his father’s diary, Lord Crowther for correspondence between his father and Lionel Robbins, and Lord Kennet for permission to consult the Kennet Papers in Cambridge University Library. Richard Lambert and David Bell kindly allowed me to read the Financial Times Ltd Minute Book for the years that Lionel Robbins was on the board of Financial Times Ltd and Financial News Ltd. I am happy to acknowledge the support of the Institute for New Economic Thinking in the production of this book. I am very grateful for the generous financial assistance of the Wincott Foundation, of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and of the Connaught Foundation, the School of Graduate Studies and the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto, all of whom have provided me with time to research and to write. With their help I have also enjoyed the assistance of Megan McGarvie, Nathan Nunn and the late Shauna Saunders. Maggie Przywecki helped with translation from Polish. Many friends have acted as unofficial research assistants and in other ways. I should like especially to mention my best friend and colleague Donald Moggridge, who searched archives in the USA for Robbins’s letters when he was looking for Dennis Robertson’s; Patricia Wright in Cambridge; Kathy Rasmussen in Ottawa and London; Dorothy Wigmore in Sweden; Donald Winch in Sussex; and the late Virginia Clark in London. Several friends have read and commented on an earlier version of this manuscript: Anne Johnson, Christopher Johnson, Donald Moggridge, David Laidler, Richard Lipsey, Francine McKenzie, Richard Robbins, Donald Winch, Jeremy Wormell and Patricia Wright. I

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have tried to follow their advice, and that of two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press, but all errors, infelicities and omissions are mine. I thank my family for moral support (and David Chester for introducing me to the history of the Baptists). I should most of all like to thank the members of the Robbins family who asked me to undertake the biography: the late Iris Robbins, Anne and Christopher Johnson and the late Richard Robbins. I am deeply grateful for their friendship. I am only sorry that Iris and Richard will not see the published book.

ONE

Father and Son

Lionel Charles Robbins was born on 22 November 1898, the first child of Rowland Richard Robbins and Rosa Marion Robbins (n´ee Harris), at Sipson Farm in the village of Sipson just west of London. He described his birthplace in his autobiography (1971a, 18): ‘Sipson itself was nothing memorable, little more than a conjunction of four roads lined with labourers’ cottages, three public houses and four farmsteads, of which that of Messrs Wild and Robbins, my father’s farm, was by the far the largest.’ It was one of four villages within the parish of Harmondsworth, the others being Harmondsworth, Longford and Heath Row. Longford was on the main road from London to Bath, Harmondsworth and Sipson to the north of it, Heath Row due south of Sipson on the opposite side of the Bath Road. North of Sipson lay the Grand Union Canal and West Drayton, with the nearest railway station. Today Sipson is bounded by the M4 motorway on the north and, immediately south of the Bath Road, London’s Heathrow Airport. The spur road between them runs across the land Lionel Robbins’s father used to farm. Rowland Richard Robbins (1872–1960) was the eighth of nine children of Rowland Robbins and Caroline Robbins (n´ee Ebbs), with two elder brothers Frank and Arthur. Their father was a prosperous London greengrocer, with two shops in Knightsbridge and Kensington, who was able to send his younger sons to public schools and to set Arthur up as a market gardener in Chiswick to provide fresh vegetables for the shops. After working with Arthur, Rowland, with no prospects in the family businesses, offered himself as a junior partner to Thomas Wild (1848–1932), whose family had lived and farmed in Sipson for several generations. Wild had been seriously ill and unable to run his farm, and his son, another Thomas, was too young to take over. Robbins was highly successful, becoming the senior partner of an enterprise which at its peak farmed more than 500 acres and 11

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employed 200 people. In the early 1930s, when agricultural prices were severely depressed, it was valued at nearly £45,000. The firm specialized in produce for the London market, sending fruit and vegetables up to Covent Garden every weekday evening. Robbins was, according to his eldest daughter, ‘an intellectual farmer [who] learnt farming out of books: he read up about everything he did.’1 He served as president of the National Farmers’ Union in 1921 and 1925. Rowland Richard Robbins (who was usually known as Richard or Dick) married Rosa Harris in March 1896. They lived first in the seventeenthcentury farmhouse of Sipson Farm, Thomas Wild having built a new house, The Vineries, for his family in the village in the 1880s. In the early 1900s the Robbinses moved to Hollycroft, a large early nineteenth-century house in the centre of the village, next to the general store and post office (which is still standing) (Sherwood ed 1996, 114–16). Its name survives in the housing development of Hollycroft Close built on its site after it was demolished in 1964. Lionel Robbins remembered (1971a, 18): ‘Externally it was architecturally undistinguished; but it was roomy and well laid out inside, and with the central heating which my father, always interested in technical innovation, installed almost at once, it was very pleasant and commodious for a family of our size.’ When the renovations were taking place Lionel is said (according to his stepbrother Rowland) to have met one of the workmen and told him proudly, ‘I’m the heir to this estate!’ There were now three children: Lionel, Ivy and Winifred. Twin boys had been born in September 1901 but one, Walter Rowland, had died aged two days; the other was stillborn. Ivy Caroline (who as an adult was always known as Caroline) was born in August 1903 at Sipson Farm, Annette Winifred in July 1905 at Hollycroft. A sixth child, Oliver Percy, was born in May 1907 and died after three weeks (information from Robbins family tree and tombstone in Harmondsworth churchyard). Lionel’s mother was the fourth of eleven children of Charles Centurier Harris and Annette Harris (n´ee Wilson). The size of the Harris clan – nine daughters and two sons – ensured that Lionel and his sisters had many uncles, aunts and cousins. Rosa’s oldest sister, Annette Grace, had married Lionel’s uncle Arthur in 1888; they had five children, including two boys near Lionel in age, and lived nearby in Hounslow. Another sister, Lily, and her husband Arthur Harris lived at Southall, also near Sipson. Rosa’s brothers 1

Information from Robbins family tree, Robbins (1971a, 12–13), Sherwood (1973, 7–10), Rowland Robbins (LCR’s stepbrother) and Caroline Robbins. The comments of LCR’s siblings come from conversations with Caroline Robbins (at Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, 27 November 1991), Nancy Robbins (Heacham, Norfolk, 16 July 1997) and Rowland Robbins (Bedford, 5 August 1997).

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Charles and Herbert married sisters, Lillie and Marie Lawson. The Harris grandparents had fifty grandchildren by their golden wedding anniversary in 1914 (Wilson 1965, 27). They lived in some style at 3 Cavendish Avenue, St John’s Wood, Charles Harris, an architect by profession, having been allowed to marry Annette on condition that he enter the family business of her father, a prosperous wholesale provision merchant. When Rosa was young, they lived at Nethania Lodge, Grove Gardens, just west of Regents Park, an area whose ‘respectability . . . was sadly disturbed in the 1890s, when the Great Central Railway destroyed the villas and broke into the terraces’ to reach Marylebone station (Cherry and Pevsner 1991, 662); by the time she married, the family had moved to Cavendish Avenue, just north of Lord’s cricket ground. St John’s Wood, with its ‘mixture of villas and terraces in generous gardens . . . had until the early C 20 a character decidedly of its own, a comfortable, verdant, early Victorian character, never showy and never mean’ (ibid., 664). They gave their new home the name of their old. ‘The house was called Nethania, a narrow, four-storied rectangle of grey brick with white pillars and cornices, neatly compressed by high walls between two similar structures, as impeccably genteel as the London suburb of St John’s Wood. . . . The name Nethania was taken from the book of Nehemiah, and it meant “Gift of God”’ (Wilson 1965, 27). There grandfather Harris lived in the bosom of his large family, collecting china – of which he was something of a connoisseur – and other objects, and painting in oils and watercolour. ‘Apart from missionaries and other ministers of religion,’ Lionel later wrote (1971a, 14), ‘in all our many visits to his home I do not recollect having ever met anyone except my aunts and uncles, their numerous progeny and other connections of his and my grandmother’s family.’ As with most large families, the generations overlapped. One of Lionel’s uncles by marriage, Reginald Lawson, was to become a close friend (see Chapter 2). He told his biographer: ‘On Sunday afternoons . . . we often went to tea at the Harris’s . . . an enormous tea was provided for about twenty, the [immediate] family numbered twelve, and usually half-a-dozen guests. On Sundays grace was sung. . . . The Harrises were half-Huguenot and talked local chapel gossip with a certain wit. After singing a second grace we went to the drawing room where hymn books were handed round and you might be asked to choose a hymn! Only two or three because it was necessary to walk half a mile to the chapel for the evening service which began at 6.30.’2 2

I am deeply indebted to John Ginger for long conversations about Lawson and for allowing me to read his unpublished biography, parts of Lawson’s autobiography and his notes of interviews with Lawson and LCR (including Lawson’s ‘Written answers to questions’, from which this quotation comes).

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The Huguenot in the family was Charles Centurier Harris’s mother, who had left Paris in 1830. The Harris clan were Strict Baptists and married into families also belonging to this rigidly Calvinist sect, including the Lawsons and the Robbinses. According to Robbins (1971a, 14–15), the ‘appalling doctrines’ of their belief included ‘predestination, original sin, eternal damnation for all but the [few] elect . . . , the literal inspiration of the Bible, the probable imminence of the Last Judgment, the Omnipotence of the Deity and His complete control of the course of history’. He had more sympathy for his maternal grandfather, who feared he might not be saved, than for his maternal grandmother, who was quite sure that she was. He and others have commented that she dominated the household, even as an invalid in her eighties. ‘Gentle though she was, her views were always positive for, like all the Harrises, she saw life never in shades of grey, always in blacks or whites’ (Wilson 1965, 30). The belief common to all Baptists is that Christian baptism should be administered only to believers, not to infants, for which there is no scriptural justification. (Modern Baptists also follow scripture in baptizing by immersion.) But in England from the 1630s there were also Particular as well as General Baptists, the Particular Baptists believing that the redemption offered by the death of Christ was limited to the elect only, whereas the General Baptists believed Christ had died for all men. There have also been differences among Baptists over whether participation in communion and church membership should be open to all professed believers or restricted to baptized believers. In the communion controversy of the nineteenth century many Particular Baptists took the closed-communion side and became known as Strict and Particular or just Strict Baptists (Underwood 1947, 58–60; Dix 2001, 1–3). Local Baptist churches, Particular or General, are autonomous and self-governing; in 1891, when many Particular Baptist churches joined the evangelical ‘New Connexion’ of General Baptists, which had been formed in 1770, the Strict Baptists stayed out (Underwood 1947, 153–64, 201–16; Briggs 1994, 96–157). As one Strict Baptist minister put it (Dix 2001, 266), ‘Strict Baptists were always averse to any kind of change, whether necessary or otherwise. . . . Even the smallest change was greeted with dismay: the introduction of the fourth hymn in the services was seen as “the thin end of the wedge”, opening the way for more serious departures from the old paths. This conservatism was itself a shelter from the winds of change which were blowing across the Victorian religious world.’ By 1900 Strict Baptist churches were about a quarter of the total number of Baptist churches and chapels in England and located mostly in the southeast.

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15

The Harrises and the Lawsons attended the Mount Zion chapel in Dorset Square, London NW 8 (near Marylebone station), where Lionel’s parents were married. Its first pastor, John Foreman, was ‘a determined strict communionist’, recognized by the time of his death in 1872 as ‘one of the heads of the Strict Baptist denomination’ (ibid., 177–81). In Harmondsworth parish there were three Baptist chapels. There had been a Baptist Meeting House in neighbouring Colnbrook since 1708, attended by members of the Wild family; one of its congregation, related to the Wilds, built the Little Chapel in Longford in 1859. The chapel in Harmondsworth village, which replaced an earlier one burnt down in 1884, was owned by Thomas Wild of Sipson, who offered it for sale to the congregation in 1902. Thomas Wild was also responsible for the building of Sipson Chapel in 1891. First used by the Salvation Army, which had been holding services in a shed on Sipson Farm, the chapel became a Gospel Mission in 1897 and in 1905 the members of the Mission resolved to form themselves into a Baptist church (Wild 1993, 28–30). The building survives, converted into residential accommodation in the 1980s, unlike the chapel’s mission hall in Cain’s Lane, Heathrow, which was demolished to make way for the airport in 1944. The Wild and Robbins families also opened the Welcome coffee tavern to provide their workers with an alternative to the public houses. This too was converted into houses, in the 1930s, and demolished in 1989 (Sherwood ed 1996, 113, 115). According to his youngest daughter Nancy, Dick Robbins helped to build the Sipson Baptist Church when he first worked with Thomas Wild. Most of the farm workers in the village were members of the congregation. The Hollycroft gardener, James Mitchell (‘Mitchie’ to young Lionel), was a deacon, as was the man who looked after the stables. Robbins also taught in the Sunday school, of which he was the superintendent, and his oldest son graduated from pupil to teacher at an early age. The hours of the Sabbath not spent in chapel or Sunday school were to be kept quietly: because non-religious books could not be read on the Lord’s day, in his teens Lionel ‘ploughed through endless works on the history of Nonconformist sects, martyrology and missionary enterprise, not to mention a good deal of Calvinistic theology’ as he began to have doubts about his parents’ beliefs (Robbins 1971a, 28). Those beliefs were sorely tested by Rosa’s illness and death from cancer at the age of thirty-nine, when Lionel was eleven. Her faith was not shaken, and her husband’s recovered, in spite of the further tragedy of the death of Winifred eighteen months later. But Lionel and his sister Caroline, who was only six when their mother died, could not thereafter easily believe in

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Lionel Robbins

a beneficent and omnipotent God (ibid., 26): ‘I had been taught sedulously that with God all things are possible. If this were true, therefore, and if it were true moreover, what I was also taught, that His knowledge and foresight were infinite, it followed inexorably that the evil and the suffering in the world were of His deliberate manufacture, that since He could do anything, He could have done without them. And while I perceived, in my immature way, that there was much cruelty and misery in the universe, I could not believe that it was as miserable and cruel as this.’ Rosa was buried on 30 July 1910 in the family plot in the burying ground beside the Harmondsworth parish church of St Mary, where the two dead sons were already interred. Thomas Wild and his family lay in the adjacent plot. On the stone are engraved a religious poem and the words of Revelation XXII.4: ‘They shall see his face.’ Her husband Dick was devastated. On the evening of her death he sat up all night playing Bach on the pianola at Hollycroft (Lawson, ‘Written answers to questions’). In October 1911, at the Mount Zion chapel, he married his deceased wife’s sister Estelle May (Stella), who had moved to Hollycroft to look after the three children. Their marriage would have been disapproved of in the established church (the Church of England) but not by nonconformists. As the Robbins tombstone records, ‘She lit many fires in cold rooms.’ She and her brother-in-law had been married only two months when Winifred died after an operation that was performed at home; they later had two children of their own, Nancy Estelle born in 1913, and Rowland Clive, born in 1918 (and hence twenty years younger than Lionel). Lionel and Caroline were both very fond of her. Although they called her Mother, they did not think of her as such: she was after all their aunt (and eleven years younger than their mother). Nancy was always amused that her stepbrother and stepsister were also her cousins. Their mother’s death meant that despite the five-year difference in age Lionel and Ivy Caroline were very close – as children and as intellectual companions from their undergraduate days on. As Caroline remembered it, she readily abandoned any belief in God. For Lionel it took longer to accept, and he continued to struggle with his loss of faith until his late teens. While they lived at home they continued to attend chapel, so as not to upset their father and, especially, their more pious stepmother. All the Robbins children remembered their father as a very tolerant man, while she, as a Harris, was much more evangelical, and her children became devout evangelical Christians. Lionel’s mother’s early death meant that his father was to be the most important influence on Lionel for most of his life. From his mother, who was a beautiful young woman, Lionel inherited his own good looks. He also acquired her love of poetry, which she read

Father and Son

17

to her children as well as writing it. Some of her poetry was published in The Earthen Vessel and Gospel Herald, a monthly magazine for Strict Baptists.3 Lionel’s love of music probably came more from his father. Both parents, especially his father, encouraged his voracious reading. Having left school early, at just under fifteen years of age, when his own father offered him the alternative of learning farming from brother Arthur, Dick Robbins had effectively completed his education by reading widely. His study at Hollycroft was full of the works of the major nineteenth-century English writers, such as Carlyle and Ruskin, which he obliged his son to begin reading when Lionel was about twelve (Robbins 1971a, 28–9). On an Easter holiday in April 1913 Lionel reported to his father that he had just finished ‘“Gladstone on Church and State” [1838] and also “Civil Disabilities of the Jews” [Blunt 1830].’ Caroline’s judgment was that ‘the brains were on the Harris side, administrative ability on the Robbins side’ of the family; as the Harrises were ‘passionately fond’ of art and literature, ‘Lionel probably got his taste from his mother’s side, his tolerance and efficiency from his father’s side’. The business of Wild and Robbins was thriving and expanding as Lionel and Caroline were growing up. Robbins owned half the share capital of the company, the two Wilds the other half of the total (£40,000 in 1920), and Robbins was the managing director (Memorandum of Association and Articles of Association of Wild & Robbins Limited, 28 March 1920, RRR, RP). It continued to be prosperous right up to 1939, thanks to technical innovation and to the concentration on crops for Covent Garden market, for which the fertile brickearth soil surrounding the villages of Sipson and Harmondsworth was particularly suitable. The valuation of the farm on Lady Day (31 March) 1931 listed the growing vegetables as ‘cabbage lettuce leeks kale spinach broccoli New Zealand spinach rhubarb chokes potatoes beet greens Brussels [sprouts] onions marrows parsnips’. Four huge glasshouses provided table grapes, peaches and tomatoes. As a history of agriculture in the parish notes (Sherwood 1973, 9), ‘The marketing of such a large variety of vegetables requires much enterprise and organisation and a constant adjustment of production to meet the needs of a changing market. To be successful therefore a market-gardener has to be in a position, not only to produce the crops, but to have them in a continual succession so that there is never a gap in supplies and never a glut . . . Market-gardening is thus 3

A notebook of her poems written in the early 1890s and a copy of ‘Flowers’ published in The Earthen Vessel and Gospel Herald in September 1894 survive in her son’s Papers. The Gospel Herald, or Poor Christian’s Magazine, first published in 1833, and The Earthen Vessel, first published in 1845, merged in 1887 (Dix 2001, 142–6 and 186–8).

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both more profitable than other forms of farming and also more risky.’ The 1931 valuation also records that while the farm still had seventeen horses (which would have been used in earlier days to transport the produce the fourteen miles to Covent Garden), its ‘rolling stock’ comprised ‘1 steam lorry 1 superheated lorry 1 petrol lorry 1 Ford truck 1 New Ford [motorcar] 4 tractors [and] 3 ploughs.’ The new Ford was driven by the chauffeur; neither Lionel nor his father learned to drive it. The farm generated its own electricity, which lit Hollycroft and The Vineries, the only houses in the village with electricity when Lionel and Caroline were young (Sherwood 1973, 8). Even in the 1920s, Nancy remembered, these were the only electric lights in the village: ‘when we turned them out, the village had to go to bed.’ Most of the workers lived in tied cottages built by Wild and Robbins. The solid bourgeois comfort of Hollycroft included, besides electricity and central heating, well-proportioned and well-furnished rooms, with a fine archway across the welcoming entrance hall on the east side of the house and French windows from the drawing room to the lawn and garden on the west side. Judging from faded photographs, the furnishings were in the fashion of the period: wallpaper by J.H. Dearle or another of Willam Morris’s associates, patterned rugs and heavy dark furniture which was not too large for the big rooms. In the nursery was a wooden rocking horse for young master Lionel. For all the children, however, the chief delight of Hollycroft was its garden. Its two and a half acres, ‘well timbered with a very beautiful cedar tree shading the lawn by the house, an extensive rock garden with a summer house, an abundance of rosebeds and herbaceous borders, and stables with a loft’, afforded ‘almost infinite scope for sophisticated games of hide and seek, [an] enormous mulberry tree where one could climb up and read for hours unobserved by one’s elders, . . . [and] sedate garden parties with croquet on the one lawn, tennis on the other, and the uncles and aunts listening deferentially to my father as he unveiled horticultural arts or expatiated on local politics’ (Robbins 1971a, 19). According to Lionel’s younger brother Rowland, the croquet games of his childhood went on for hours, often finished by torchlight after darkness had fallen, while tennis was made more exciting by the roots under the court of the black Italian poplar which stood beside it. On one side of the house was the village, on the other the fields and one of the orchards of the farm. In the early twentieth century there were many other orchards in the villages of Harmondsworth and adjacent parishes – the Cox of Cox’s Orange Pippin apples is buried in Harmondsworth churchyard – but these decreased afterwards with the expansion of market-gardening. There were also holidays for the children, usually with their mother or stepmother and some of their sisters, as their father was often too involved

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with the farm or local politics to get away. These were frequently seaside holidays, and Lionel’s fondness for swimming began at a young age (postcards and notes to Papa dated July 1900, 15 July 1904 (from Felixstowe) and April 1913 (Shanklin, Isle of Wight)). Lionel and Caroline were at first educated at home by governesses. Lionel then went to a preparatory school, Hounslow College, as a weekly boarder. The first school report kept by his father, for the term ending at Easter 1908 when Lionel was nine years old, records his highest marks for Reading (98 per cent), Latin and French (90 and 91), and his lowest for Writing (59 per cent) and Homework (65). His conduct was ‘Good’. In later reports from this school, Writing was usually at the bottom of the grades, Reading always near the top but overtaken by Scripture in December 1908 and April 1909. Lionel later (1971a, 23) thought this school was ‘one of his father’s mistakes’: the headmaster was a mild sadist as far as corporal punishment was concerned; ‘the staff were mediocre; the food was poor; and the control of the few boarders almost non-existent.’ By Easter 1909 his father had decided to send Lionel elsewhere. He had also decided not to send him to a public school. Dick Robbins had been sent to Taunton School in Somerset. Although the school was favoured by nonconformists (later pupils included the economists Henry Phelps Brown and Evan Durbin, both from dissenting backgrounds), observation of juvenile homosexuality had apparently horrified Robbins, who declared to his son that ‘No boy of mine shall be exposed to what I was exposed to’ there (ibid., 24). So he sent his son to the local state secondary school, Southall County School. Lionel Robbins does not, therefore, truly belong to the young men of Noel Annan’s memoir, Our Age, for whom ‘more important than their family connections was the old school tie’ (Annan 1990, 8–9). He travelled to the school each day by bicycle, using the towpath of the Grand Union Canal for part of the way, in good weather, or by train from West Drayton in bad. At the end of his first term, in July 1909, he was reported to be ‘Very untidy, work needs care’ and placed twenty-seventh in a class of twenty-eight, but his conduct was ‘good’. In his first full year at the school (1909/10) he made considerable progress and was soon in the top third of the class. The following year he was in the top five. After gaining a prize for English, he slipped back in that first term of the 1911/12 school year, the time of his sister Winifred’s death: ‘Work has been irregular and often careless. More serious effort is needed. Conduct V. Fair.’ He made the effort the next term and by the end of the year was back near the top of his class. There he remained until he entered the sixth form, coming top at Easter 1913 and again in July 1914 (when, however,

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Geometry ‘require[d] particular attention’). Meanwhile his sister had been sent to Bournemouth Collegiate School, where she enjoyed a much happier experience. If his first three years at Southall School were shadowed by his mother’s and sister’s deaths, his last two or three years there were enlivened by one of his schoolmates, Edwin (Eddie, sometimes Teddy) Rose, who became the centre of a group of boys who were interested in music and literature. (The school was coeducational, but although Lionel had friendly acquaintance with the girls who travelled to school by train, his close friends were, in the manner of adolescents, all male.) Eddie and Lionel, and another of the group, George Davidge, were to be lifelong friends. As schoolboys Lionel’s father christened them ‘the three blind mice’ (Mrs H.L. Davidge [George’s mother] to RRR, 3 December 1917). Years later Lionel’s first recollection of Eddie was seeing him at the top of the school playing field ‘leaning with his back against one of the uprights in the wooden fence, his fine brow forward, plunged in deep meditation’; he had seen him before and had heard that he was very clever but this was ‘the first time I became aware of him as a presence’. (Eddie recalled in November 1923 [Personal letters from Iris & Clive etc, RP] seeing Lionel playing tennis: ‘I thought “How I should like to know that boy!” but I had no pretext for making your acquaintance.’) Once they became acquainted they spent many evenings at Eddie’s home in Southall near their school. Eddie was an exceptionally gifted musician, a performer and a composer, who could also explain music to his friends, who would sit listening to him play the piano and talk about the music he was playing. He could talk equally knowledgeably about literature. On those evenings ‘our little group sat entranced in his music room, littered with scores and secondhand editions of classical literature, listening, oblivious of time, as those powerful fingers passed from one example to another of the musical conceptions he was expounding; or debating with each other the new vistas which each day of reading was discovering – Shelley, Sir Thomas Browne, the first part of Goethe’s Faust.’ Lionel thought he was a genius, one of the only three he ever met, the others being G.H. Hardy the mathematician and John Maynard Keynes the economist, as he told those gathered at the unveiling of a memorial to Eddie in October 1960 at the parish church where he had been choirmaster (Eddie Rose, 1897–1958, 27 October 1960, Biographical Notices, RP): ‘An odd judgment, you may think, and biassed by youthful friendship, for the world has not heard of him thus and never will.’ Eddie studied at the Royal College of Music after obtaining a University of London degree in English, but, after converting to Catholicism in his early twenties, spent much of his career teaching,

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‘underpaid and unappreciated’, in a Catholic school (Robbins 1971a, 32). Lionel was relieved to learn that by the time of his death in 1958, when he had been for some years a lecturer in music at a teachers training college, Eddie had reverted to the Church of England in which he had been brought up (LCR to ICR, 16 October 1960). Lionel’s friends also visited Hollycroft. His father kept in touch with some of them after they left school, writing regularly, for instance, to George Davidge when he was with the British Army in Salonika in 1917 and 1918. At Hollycroft Robbins Senior would talk about current events and politics. In these years before the First World War he was becoming involved in politics, at first local, as well as good works related to his church. He was a member of Middlesex County Council for fifteen years, from 1913 to 1928. He became a magistrate and sat on the Middlesex bench for over fifty years. As far as national politics was concerned, he was a lifelong Liberal and free trader. Lionel took over these beliefs, although he did not maintain the tradition of the Robbinses and the Harrises, and other nonconformist families, of consistently supporting the then great Liberal Party. The imperial preference crusade of the Conservative Joseph Chamberlain in 1903 had reunited the Liberals, divided over Home Rule for Ireland since 1886, in defence of free trade and cheap food. In December 1905, after ten years out of office, the Liberals came to power when the Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour resigned. The subsequent general election of January 1906 returned them in a landslide victory. Lionel recalled the local Liberal candidate visiting Hollycroft during the campaign, but the local seat remained Conservative. In April 1908 Herbert Henry Asquith became Prime Minister, with David Lloyd George as his Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was Lloyd George who introduced the famous ‘people’s budget’ of 1909, which raised direct taxation and made it more progressive, taxed the drink trade and took preliminary steps towards land taxation in order to finance social reform measures, and which the House of Lords rejected. The resulting constitutional crisis was only resolved by the passing of the Parliament Act in 1911. British politics then bogged down in the question of Irish Home Rule, which the Unionists in Parliament were determined to prevent. Lionel shared his father’s disgust and contempt for Conservatives such as Sir Edward Carson, who led the resistance to Home Rule, and Lord Northcliffe, the owner of The Times and Daily Mail newspapers – and his low opinion of Lloyd George, ‘the Welsh rat’, but that came later, after Lloyd George had replaced Asquith as Prime Minister in 1916 (LCR to RRR, 15 December 1917 and 4 January 1918).

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The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) was formed in 1908, developed from the Lincolnshire Farmers’ Union founded by Colin Campbell, and by 1913 had 20,000 members, mainly tenant farmers. It excluded landowners (as distinct from owner-occupiers), who were more than sufficiently represented in Parliament in the House of Lords (Whetham 1978, 67–8). In 1918 it reorganized itself and acquired a London headquarters. Dick Robbins became a member of one of its new subcommittees, the Fruit and Market Garden Committee, and, a year later, a member of the Council as well as of the Finance and General Purposes Committee and chairman of the Costs and Labour subcommittee. When he was proposed as president-elect in February 1920, he was described by Campbell, alluding to his work on the government’s Agricultural Wages Board and to his membership of the Council, as ‘A man of great ability and untiring energy, who never spared himself any trouble or time to attend to Union affairs, even by neglecting his own’. When Robbins responded that he was merely a grower of vegetables, ‘not an ordinary farmer’, one member called out ‘No, you are an extraordinary one.’4 Robbins had been a member of the Agricultural Wages Board since its creation in 1917. The Lloyd George government, worried by the wartime shortage of imported food, had initiated a food production campaign to increase the output of grain and potatoes from British farms. The Corn Production Act of 1917 established guaranteed minimum prices for wheat and oats for the crop years of 1917–22, provided for a national minimum wage in agriculture of 25s a week and for a national Agricultural Wages Board supplemented by district wage committees in England and Wales which could impose higher minimum wages in their own areas, and restricted the raising of agricultural rents (Royal Commission on Agriculture 1919, para 10; Whetham 1974, 39–40). In 1919, with postwar inflation came demands for increases in agricultural wages, which were eventually granted, but under the Corn Production Act the guaranteed grain prices were to decline in the next three years and end in 1922. Robbins, as one of the employers’ representatives on the Agricultural Wages Board, argued for a policy of conciliation rather than confrontation, and with the president of the NFU and another employers’ representative on the Agricultural Wages Board had been to see the Minister of Agriculture in March 1919 to put the farmers’ case. The NFU position was, reasonably enough, that it ‘[did] not object to 4

Information from minutes of Annual General Meeting 27 February and Special Meeting of Executive Committee 2 July 1918, Council 26 March and 9 April 1919, and Annual General Meeting 25 February 1920, NFU AD1/2, MERL.

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the proposed increased wages, subject to the prices of farm produce being raised in the same proportion.’5 Dick Robbins was also a member of a Royal Commission appointed in July 1919 to enquire into the economic prospects of British agriculure. The majority of the Commission, including Robbins, recommended that guaranteed minimum grain prices, with their extension to barley, should continue unless and until Parliament gave four years’ notice of their withdrawal. The government adopted these recommendations (except for barley) and introduced the Agriculture Act 1920, continuing the guarantees for wheat and oats (Whetham 1974, 42–6). The Minister of Agriculture appointed in August 1919, Arthur Lee – the recently ennobled Lord Lee of Fareham – had already as Director General of Food Production in 1917 antagonized many Tory landowners with the Corn Production bill. He had to fight hard to get his new bill through the Cabinet in the spring of 1920, and even harder to get it through the two Houses of Parliament at the end of the year. According to Lady Lee’s diary for 23 December (Clark ed 1974, 202), ‘The Commons sat all through the night and up till 7.0 p.m. the next day on the Peers’ Amendments to A’s bill. Then it went back to the Lords, and at 10.30 p.m. back to the Commons again. At this moment it looked like a fatal deadlock, and the Cabinet was hastily summoned at midnight. . . . [Some Cabinet members] were prepared to jettison it altogether. L.G. himself seemed weak and wavering – at times almost hostile – and A had to fight as for his very life. Eventually he won out. . . . ’ (But within a month Lloyd George shifted him from Agriculture to the Admiralty.) Robbins decided that Lee was a man who kept his word – an assessment which was to have unexpected personal consequences for his son many years later (see Chapter 18). Six months later the government, alarmed by the prospect of falling prices in the summer of 1921, repealed the crucial part of the Act. It also abolished the Agricultural Wages Board, although allowing county wage committees to continue on a voluntary basis. As president of the NFU Robbins was heavily involved in negotiations with the government (see Chapter 4). After he served a second term as president in 1925, the county branches of the NFU presented him and Mrs Robbins with a motorcar and a music cabinet 5

Joint Conference between the Employers’ Representatives on the Agricultural Wages Board and the Executive Committee of the National Farmers Union, 26 February 1919, Executive Committee 18 March 1919 and Council 9 April 1919, NFU AD1/2. By the spring of 1919 farmers were paying at least twice prewar wages: in the south of England the 1919 increase took minimum wages up to 40s a week compared with 15s a week before the war.

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‘as a small [sic] token of gratitude and esteem’ (Council 18 March 1926, NFU AD1/7). He also chaired the NFU’s Legal and Parliamentary Press and Publicity Committees for a decade, having demonstrated his skill in dealing with the complexities of legislation in preparing amendments, which Lee introduced, to the Agriculture bill in 1920.6 His skills as a negotiator and conciliator were often utilized again on the Agricultural Wages Board when it was re-created in 1924 – and in NFU meetings. As his son was to find himself doing in similar situations, he would ‘suggest the adoption of the following resolution with a view to uniting the Council’, other members would withdraw their resolutions in favour of his, which was carried, and by the end of a contentious meeting he would have drafted a document to be sent out on behalf of the NFU (Special Meeting of Council 15 January 1929, NFU AD1/11). At one point he contemplated standing for Parliament but thought better of it, not wishing to be beholden to a political party according to his youngest daughter. He refused the offer of a knighthood from a Conservative Prime Minister in 1923 (LCR to RRR, nd but November or December 1923). He finally declined to remain on the Council and its committees at the end of 1931, when another coalition government introduced agricultural protection. His example of commitment and integrity was one his son sought to follow. 6

Finance and General Purposes Committee 10 June, Council 28 July and 15 December 1920, NFU AD1/3; Council 18 January 1921, NFU AD1/4.

TWO

The Great War

To a later generation the events of the summer of 1914 that led to the Great War read as a chapter of bizarre and sinister accidents. On 28 June, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo by a student revolutionary agitating for the separation of Bosnia-Herzegovina from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and union with its eastern neighbour Serbia. After obtaining a guarantee of support from Germany in case Russia actively supported the Serbs, Austria first threatened Serbia, as it had often done before, and then declared war on it on 28 July when the Serbian government had refused to allow Austro-Hungarian troops to enter Serbia in search of conspirators. Serbia had already mobilized its forces; in support of Serbia, Russia ordered general mobilization on 30 July. Germany responded by declaring war on Russia on 1 August, and on Russia’s ally France two days later. Belgium refused a German demand to allow its forces to cross Belgium to get to France; Germany invaded Belgium; and Britain, who had guaranteed Belgian neutrality, declared war on Germany on 4 August. No wonder the outbreak of war ‘came like a bolt from the blue to all [the Robbins] family circle’ (Robbins 1971a, 33). In August 1914 Lionel Robbins was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy. He was expecting to stay at school for two more years before going to university. As he recalled (ibid., 29 and 35), his only ambition in life was to be ‘an effective poet’ – his father naturally had other ideas – and his early reaction to the war was poetic: ‘I wrote a poetic drama, in the mode of Shelley’s Hellas, entitled Peace Exiled. . . . I remember getting up very early in the morning to get naturalistic detail for a chorus about sunrise which was to mark the turning-point of the allegoric entity who was the central figure of the action. . . .’ The earliest surviving poem in his papers is ‘Sunrise, Hymn to Dawn, August 1914’. 25

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Lionel Robbins

In subsequent poems written in that first year of war, sunset and night were more in evidence. At the end of 1914 he ‘saw the dying year tonight’ as the sun set and then ‘I saw the full moon tonight / She wore a robe of dew and light / I saw the old year sad and hoary / Stealing away from his blighted glory / While the new year came into wrong and pain.’ In August 1915 he drew a contrast between the quietness of night at home and the noise of war in France, although it was hardly realistic: ‘But there the noise of cannon rends the night / And bugles for the combat loudly blown / The sky is lurid with reflected light’ (‘The Old Year, December 31st 1914’ and ‘Moonlight, August 1915’, RP). By the end of 1914 the war on the Western Front had already claimed nearly a million Allied casualties. After the British Expeditionary Force had retreated on 24 August from Mons to the Marne, they and the French forces won a tactical victory over the Germans on 6–9 September. Although the Allies held the line against the German offensive, the cost in men of the first battle of Ypres of late October and early November led Lord Kitchener to call for 300,000 volunteers. As well as this ‘psychological landmark’ – the recognition that it would be a long war – the first battle of Ypres is also a military landmark. The trenchline had been dug from the Swiss border to the Belgian coast, bulging out round the notorious Ypres salient in Belgium. To quote the most famous military historian of the Great War (Liddell Hart 1934, 65), ‘The power of modern defence had triumphed over attack, and stalemate ensued. The military history of the Franco-British Alliance during the next four years is a story of the attempts to upset this deadlock, either by forcing the barrier or by haphazardly finding a way round.’ By the end of the first year of the war these attempts had included the second battle of Ypres (April and May 1915), failed British offensives at Neuve Chapelle in March and Festubert in May and the disastrous ANZAC landing at Gallipoli on 25 April. After a holiday at Towyn on the North Wales coast with his cousins Kenneth and Ralph Robbins, enjoying the scenery, the swimming, reading Ruskin’s Two Paths and his cousins’ company (LCR to Mother and Papa, [August], LCR to Papa, 2 September), in September 1914 Lionel Robbins began his sixth form studies at Southall County School. He continued to excel in English and to have to work hard at mathematics. In the first term the headmaster noted that his ‘Arith[metic] must be improved’ and in the second his algebra needed particular attention, but he had done ‘commendable work’ in geometry, the previous year’s weakness. He slipped to the bottom of the form in the second term, as a result of many days absent, presumably through illness, but by the end of the year he had

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‘done well’ and could be commended for his work in algebra, geometry, arithmetic, English, history, chemistry and geography (School Reports, 18 December 1914, Easter 1915 and 29 July 1915, RP). He passed the London Matriculation Examination, which included papers in English, Elementary Mathematics, a language and two other subjects. His father then decided he should go immediately to university instead of spending another year at school. As Lionel explained it (1971a, 36), his father thought that as his son was bound to serve in the war sooner or later he should have a year or two of university study first. Dick Robbins had indeed thought from the outbreak of war that his son ought to prepare for active service and Lionel had assured him in his letter from Towyn on 2 September that he would join the school cadet corps as soon as it was formed. He also wanted his son to have the university education he had not. Having joined the cadet corps, Lionel and his friend George Davidge went to camp with them at Marlborough in August 1915. In his first letter home on 2 August he proudly reported that he was on guard duty and ‘I being Corporal have to keep awake all night to change guard every two hours. The others rest in “stints” of 4 hours.’ He asked his father to compare his letter with those written from Wales a year earlier (in one of which he had claimed that German atrocities showed ‘their help cometh not from the Lord but from the devil’) and to ‘remark the lack of hysteria’. Otherwise his letters were full of comments on the food (or lack of it). After an interview with the ‘incredibly formidable’ Provost, Dr T. Gregory Foster (ibid., 36), Lionel was admitted to University College London to read for an Arts degree in October 1915. The Intermediate Arts Course required four subjects, including two languages, one of which had to be Latin or Greek. Lionel chose English and English History, Latin and Roman History, and French. He later remembered lectures by the professor of English W.P. Ker, the mediaeval historian F.C. Montague and the Tudor historian A.F. Pollard. For the ‘junior class’ Ker offered lectures on the history of English literature from 1500 to 1800 ‘with exercises in composition and special study of the following books’: Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Coriolanus, Milton’s Aeropagitica, and Book III (the eighteenth-century section) of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics. Montague and Pollard lectured respectively on general English history up to and after 1485. There was also a class on the history of the English language with texts from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and an elementary course in Old English, which students intending to read for English Honours after their first year were required to take. In history there was also a class for discussion of essays and

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the study of prescribed texts. The Latin class involved grammar, composition and unseen translation, with Livy Book XXII and Ovid’s Metamorphoses I and II as set books; the lectures in Roman history covered the period BC 280 to the death of Augustus. The junior class in French met three times a week with a fourth meeting for ‘Conversation and practical exercises’.1 But, of course, Lionel Robbins wanted to be in the war. At UCL he found himself (ibid., 37) ‘tall [6’21/2”], well built at that time, and not obviously under military age, together with a few less martial types, in classes predominantly feminine.’ He joined the University Officer Training Corps, ‘attended all parades, slept at nights with the horses under the eaves of the Old Foundling Hospital in Guilford Street, then used as temporary stables’, and ‘plagued my poor parents to do something to get me into the Army without having to tell a definite lie about my age’.2 According to his autobiography, ‘Shortly after Christmas 1915, with the aid of some War Office friend of our family solicitor [Arthur Ellis of Ellis & Fairbairn], I was admitted as cadet at the Royal Artillery Barracks at St John’s Wood, and almost immediately posted to a training centre at Topsham, just outside Exeter’. According to letters and papers kept by his father, however, he left UCL on 3 January 1916, a little more than a month after his seventeenth birthday, while his father tried to pull strings in order to ensure he would obtain a commission, preferably in the artillery, and he moved to the Royal Field Artillery training school at Topsham two months later. In joining up in January it appears he had taken advantage of the scheme devised for Asquith, then still Prime Minister, by Lord Derby whereby men of military age ‘attested’ their willingness to serve in the armed forces. After Lionel entered the RA Barracks, Robbins senior contacted three barristers of his acquaintance: the chairman of the Middlesex Bench Montague Sharpe, a member of the Middlesex Territorial Force Association (who could not help as the Middlesex TFA had no artillery); the Liberal MP Hamar Greenwood, who wrote that he did not know any colonel to whom he could write; and W.L. Ainslie of Dowson Ainslie & Co, who knew two. Ainslie received an encouraging letter from Brigadier General C.H. Alexander, the commanding officer of the East Anglian Divisional Artillery, and passed it on to Lionel’s 1

2

Information from University College Calendar 1915–16 19, 27–48; Harte and North (1991, 122, 156); and LCR’s student record at UCL. According to the timetable in the Calendar, the French conversation classes and the Roman history lectures were given at the same time, so LCR cannot have attended both. The Foundling Hospital, demolished in 1928, was on the site of what is now known as Coram’s Fields, between Brunswick and Mecklenburgh Squares.

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father who wrote to Alexander at the beginning of March 1916.3 A couple of days earlier Lionel had been ordered, with some thirty other cadets at St John’s Wood, to ‘report with full kit in 1/4 hours time to proceed to Exeter’, as he told his father on 4 March. When he received a copy of his father’s letter to Alexander he told him on 7 March that it was ‘ideal[:] I do not think my case could have been better stated and his reply will be very useful at the end of 4 months [training].’ He was acutely aware he was well below the minimum age (eighteen and a half) for a commission and hoped that ‘Alexander’s letter will get me out of any tight corners I may run into.’ The crude conversation and behaviour of Lionel’s fellow cadets came as a rude shock. Apart from his shortlived experience of a preparatory school he had lived at home and attended a coeducational grammar school. As his father had hoped, his knowledge of ‘perverse sexuality was purely academic until I came across public school men in the army’ (LCR, ‘Property, I Autobiographical Preface’, nd but 1922, RP) and he was not used to the coarse ways of describing heterosexual activities either. He strongly and priggishly disapproved of the drunkenness he witnessed among his companions. The intellectual contrast between university lectures and army training courses was also stark. Resentful of boring methods of instruction and disliking his companions (1971a, 38–9), he later claimed to have enjoyed only the ‘strenuous hours in the riding school, which I loved, and . . . wonderful surcingle rides in the early morning over the Devonshire hills, exercising the horses on Saturdays against their lack of work on the Sabbath.’ Other cadets, who arrived at Topsham from public schools, ‘had no difficulty in adjusting to . . . army life’ but found the riding school the most difficult and even dangerous part of the training (Paish 1998, 10, 13): Lewis (1937, 97) claimed that several were killed there while he was at RACS Topsham. At the time Lionel’s frequent letters home revealed only some of his difficulties. On first arriving at RACS Topsham, he thought it a great improvement over the barracks at St John’s Wood, which he now told his father (on 5 March) had been ‘H-ll’. He had had to sleep in a room of twenty-seven men, filled with smoke due to a blocked chimney. ‘Every morning we woke up coughing. . . . Our hours were 5.30 to 8.15. At ten to six every morning we paraded in stables and carried the d-ng in our arms. The Bedding was like 2 year old manure. It was succulent! We then stood on the square in the cold . . . and did an hour’s physical exercise – sitting down in the mud to get 3

RRR kept a copy of letters from Sharpe, 31 January 1916, Greenwood, 28 and 31 January, and Ainslie, 29 January and 7, 8 and 12 February, and his own letter to LCR, 6 March. His letters to and from Alexander do not survive in the file.

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warm! After knocking off in the evening we had nowhere to go except the smoky sleeping room – There we had to make our beds and clean buttons boots etc till bed time. There was one small table with a pot of ink and no pen.’ At Topsham living conditions were far better: smaller bedrooms, which were well ventilated and warm, a reading room with writing material, and excellent food. But after a week, in telling his father that he was free from 5.15, except for dinner at 7, he told him on 10 March that he was spending his evenings in the gun park: ‘There is nothing to do in the town [of Exeter] except galivate [gallivant] about the shops with barmaids etc – an occupation which several of the “British Public school boy type” seem to find amusing. Some of the men here are very nice, others especially these overfed fools are not worth troubling about.’ His father was sympathetic but warned his son not to be ‘too supercilious & contemptuous in your manner towards those whose education has not taught them to think’ (RRR to LCR, 12 March and 12 April 1916). By the end of his first month Lionel was miserable: he and the other occupants of Hut 17 were isolated there because of a case of measles and he himself had a bad cold. Later letters in April 1916 vented his complaints about the snobbish behaviour of the regular officers, especially the graduates of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, the boorishness of his companions in Hut 17 and his own persistent cough. When he was well again his letters were more cheerful, and slightly more tolerant of his fellow men, with a few of whom he began to have arguments about socialism or religion. When they were no longer confined to barracks he dined in town and went to the cinema with a friend from the OTC at UCL, but otherwise he let his fellow cadets go out without him. He began to do better in the coursework, having been held back as a result of falling sick (LCR to RRR, 5, 19 and 25 May 1916). He continued to worry about his age, even after he completed the course at Topsham and moved on to a more congenial finishing course at Shoeburyness in Essex. At Topsham he had been summoned before the major, who asked him his age. ‘I said,’ he told his father (nd but April 1916), “I have attested as 18–6 Sir” in a tone of voice that invited criticism. He said nothing but passed on! I have found out that there are other chaps of 17 here. As we are all attested they must have had recourse to the same expedient.’ Although he also told his father his conscience was clear, because he had not actually lied about his age, he was relieved a couple of weeks later to have to fill in a form of application for admission to an officer cadet unit with a view to a wartime commission and to give his correct age. He asked his father if he could get in touch with General Alexander again (LCR to RRR, 27 April and 10 May 1916).

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He enjoyed the work of the month’s course at Shoeburyness, worked hard and did well in the final examinations. He wrote himself to General Alexander, whose reply was friendly but did ‘not clear matters much’ and the sword of Damocles remained suspended (LCR to RRR, 7 June 1916). When he left Shoeburyness he sent his father a photograph of his group: he described a few as ‘decent fellows’, others as non-entities, and one as ‘The absolute consummation of the abominable public school boy . . . an absolutely loathsome specimen.’ At the time (26 June) he thought ‘it quite on the cards that the next few weeks may show developments in the situation – events that may shorten the war considerably’: he was referring to the coming offensive on the Somme. He completed his training that first week of July 1916 back in Devon, at the RA practice camp at Okehampton, from where he wrote his father on 3 July that he had at last been ‘under fire’. Yesterday I was at the guns. We fired something like 120 rounds and made ourselves all deaf and tired. . . . Today I was at the observation station. We could hear the shells shrieking all over our heads all the time. When one came particularly close someone exclaimed and our officer said you’ll get worse than that this morning. We were then led to a dugout and engaged a target 200 yds in front. The firing was very erratic one shell burst 12 yds away on percussion several burst just over head. It was quite an experience and quite enjoyable.

Then he went home on leave to await news of his commission. It was a wait of several weeks, which was, according to his autobiography (1971a, 19), ended only after ‘a further process of wire-pulling by our friend’s friend in the War Office’ (which may in fact have been the only piece of wire pulling). He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery in the Special Reserve of Officers on 19 August (The Times, 22 August 1916). In the intervening weeks he had written again to General Alexander for advice and had received only a moderately helpful reply, but when he wrote to his old headmaster to inform him he had been gazetted he also told him that ‘the W[ar] O[ffice] were a bit squeamish about my age and were going to leave me alone till I was eighteen. Happily through a friend of Mr Ellis (the solicitor . . . ) we were able to push things through.’ He also wrote to Ainslie who replied congratulating him on his commission and adding, ‘I have the greatest respect for your Father, and cannot wish you better than that you will prove yourself as good a man.’4 4

The letters kept by RRR include LCR’s draft letter to Alexander and Alexander to LCR, 2 August, draft letter to Mr Pollitt, 30 August, and Ainslie to LCR, 29 August 1916.

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Lionel Robbins

Second Lieutenant Robbins was posted first to RA Woolwich, the huge Royal Artillery complex centred on the Royal Arsenal built in 1717. The scale of the barracks, commenced in 1775, ‘can only be compared to St Petersburg’ (Pevsner 1952, 455): with a facade over 1000 feet long looking over the parade ground, the buildings behind the facade could accommodate 4000 men. Because Robbins was well under the minimum age (nineteen) for service overseas, he spent a little over a year there, instructing recruits in handling the guns and going on advanced courses in gunnery, map-reading, gas warfare and so on. Some of his notes for these or his earlier courses survive in a notebook that also includes instructions for the two main guns used by the Royal Field Artillery in 1914–18. His year at Woolwich was ‘not . . . by any means one of the happiest in my life’ – he was not impressed by the regular officers and he was not comfortable with his contemporaries, especially the public school boys from RMA Woolwich – but it had its advantages. At eighteen, ‘a callow second lieutenant . . . rather shy [and] still very unworldly’, he was free of home, with an income of his own and an account with Cox & Co, the army bankers; he had ‘comfortable quarters in a Georgian building which was part of the main complex bordering the great parade ground . . . a man to look after me . . . [and] a horse at my disposal on which I could ride carefree on the neighbouring common or, better still, on nearby windy Blackheath’ (1971a, 40). He could also escape in the evenings by train to central London, to concerts and to the theatre, which had been denied him while he lived at home. The RFA was intended to provide the most immediate fire-support to the British army on the battlefield and to keep pace with the infantry. The tactical unit was the brigade, which was divided into four batteries, each subdivided into two (sometimes three) sections of two guns each, and an ammunition column. The two main field guns used by the RFA in 1914– 18 were the 18-pounder, quick-firing field gun and the 4.5-inch howitzer, which lobbed heavier shells, shorter in length and larger in diameter, with a higher trajectory than the field gun. There was usually one howitzer battery among the four in a brigade. Both guns had a range of about 7000 yards; in action they were therefore positioned about two miles behind the infantry in the front line, while the wagon lines, with the ammunition wagons, the limbers for moving the guns, and all the horses (each gun needed a team of six horses to move it), were two or three miles further back, out of the range of enemy guns. Each gun was manned by six men, with a senior non-commissioned officer in command, with a further four in reserve. The officers in a battery comprised the battery commander, usually a major, with a captain as second-in-command, and four or five subalterns, who

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took turns in the gun lines, the wagon lines and the observation post (OP) forward of the gun line. A brigade would thus number about thirty officers, a thousand other ranks and the same number of horses.5 The training for officers therefore included artillery tactics, gun drill, the various methods of ‘ranging’ the guns and getting them on target (a complicated business when the enemy’s guns cannot be seen), the practicalities of choosing locations for gun lines, wagon lines and billets, as well as riding. A horse was the normal method of getting about, behind the guns, for any officer, who also had to learn to supervise the moving of the guns, by taking turns at riding each of the three mounted horses of the six in a gun team (Paish 1998, 10–13). One result of Robbins’s long stay at Woolwich was that he was more confident of his abilities at the technical tasks of an artillery officer when he went to the front than many of his equally young contemporaries. As he noted (1971a, 40): ‘in the brief period in which I took part in open warfare in France, I was the only officer in the battery save the major, a regular soldier, who could lay guns on concealed targets by anything but the mechanical use of maps and a protractor.’ Artillery officers and men on the way to the front passed through RA Woolwich, where Robbins was posted for duty not for draft to the 19th Reserve Battery. As he told his father on 8 September, ‘We have the (supposed to be) fully trained men up from the various depots and put them through their paces for three weeks or so. Then we take them over to France and deliver them to the base camp at Harfleur’ and return after a day in Le Havre. He paid his first visit to France a week after his arrival at Woolwich, sailing from Southampton overnight on 11/12 September. It was not as enjoyable as he anticipated: the conditions on board ship were disgusting given the number of men and horses crammed together, he was detained three days at the base waiting for a ship for the return voyage, and in Le Havre what little he ‘saw (and smelt) was filthy.’ On the way back, however, he witnessed ‘a sunrise of such intense beauty’ that it compensated for the discomfort of the voyage. Reaching London, he called on his grandparents at Nethania: ‘they fed me clothed me and let me wash’ and he talked about art with his grandfather (LCR to RRR, 16 September 1916). Woolwich was a natural target for air raids, first by Zeppelins (airships), later conventional aircraft because the airships were so easy to shoot down. During his first raid Lionel happened to be the brigade orderly officer. When the order to ‘take airraid action’ was given, ‘the duties, I must say, were arduous. They consisted of sitting in the orderly room smoking innumerable 5

Information from Haythornwaite (1996, 821–3), and LCR’s artillery notebook.

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cigarettes and reading “The Experimental Psychology of Beauty” . . . [thus] remain[ing] true to my intellectual pursuits’, as he smugly reported to his father on 24 September. But he admitted to excitement when he sighted the Zeppelin and when it started dropping bombs and the anti-aircraft batteries got to work: ‘Charlie Chaplin wasn’t in it I can assure you for thrills. . . . [I] found I was trembling with excitement.’ When the airship burst into flame, ‘Every body went mad! We rush about shouting stop that – noise but made no impression. The whole barracks was cheering and all the subs in the world couldn’t stop them.’ He shared the feeling of elation and brooded about it only later. When he got used to the raids and when not on duty he slept through them (LCR to RRR, 3 October 1916). He was also at Woolwich when a fire in the TNT plant at Silvertown, on the opposite side of the river, caused a massive explosion in January 1917. Even at that distance the blast, which killed seventy-three people, blew out part of the glass dome over the officers’ mess at Woolwich (Paish 1998, 17–18; Cherry, O’Brien and Pevsner 2005, 315). Lionel and other young officers witnessed the devastation of Silvertown firsthand as they were put in charge of working parties sent over to help to clear the debris, ‘turning over the rubbish in one direction and then another, sometimes finding a body sometimes not’ (LCR to RRR, 20 January 1917). The RA mess at Woolwich was ‘nearly as stupendous as Solomons Temple. . . . The food is excellent but the accommodation is more so.’ Lionel also described his colleagues in the 19th Reserve Battery to his father on 8 October. Major Warren, brought back from retirement, was ‘a major of the old school – a dug out perhaps but devoted to his duty’; when he was posted elsewhere he was replaced by Major Knox from RACS Topsham who committed suicide in April 1917 (Robbins 1971a, 40–1). Robbins got on best with Captains Hatcher and Kinersley who had been promoted from the ranks; the fact that he drank with them in the mess did not endear him to the more snobbish of his contemporaries. The subalterns in the battery comprised two from the ‘shop’ (RMA Woolwich), whom he thought had ‘too much of Shop taints and morals and an easy going definition of duty’; one who had been in the Territorial Army in peacetime; another described to his father only as ‘another “sub” a very nice fellow’; and his roommate Dunkley, who at thirty-eight had worked in the City for many years and was ‘not very good as a “gunner”’. The hazards of being a junior wartime officer at Woolwich are exemplified by one of Kinersley’s stories about Dunkley, which Lionel retailed to his father in October 1916: ‘Kin’s best story of him is that one day when lecturing on the 18 pdr [field gun] to a squad of gunners after he had talked for 3/4 hr, one of the NCOs said “you don’t know

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anything about this gun sir.” He looked up and to his horror found he had been using a 4.5 Howitzer.’ Lionel enjoyed teaching the new recruits. On 11 November he told his father he was ‘working my hardest with a squad . . . I do everything with them Lectures marching gun drill etc and am very pleased with the work. They are mostly boys of 18 or so called up on coming of age so I find them malleable material. The others are fairly well educated men – elementary school masters etc and I find great pleasure in leading their feet into the military way of peace as the prayer book will have it.’ One of this squad was his schoolfriend George Davidge, who was admitted to the RA Barracks at Woolwich when he turned eighteen in October 1916. Although Lionel took care not to acknowledge him on parade, Dav would come to Lionel’s room in the evenings where they would ‘thrash out together the old problems of life art etc’ (LCR to RRR, 25 October, 6 and 11 November 1916). In his year at Woolwich Lionel saw Eddie Rose frequently: they went together to promenade and other concerts at the Queen’s Hall, and also met, sometimes with Davidge before he left for Salonika in February 1917, at Eddie’s sister’s house in Eltham. Eddie had started to read for a degree at East London College (now Queen Mary). According to his autobiography (1971a, 42–3) Lionel contrived to get Rose enlisted as a gunner in the 19th Battery when Eddie was called up. His two friends both hoped the ungainly and absentminded Eddie would not be sent overseas; fortunately he was not and he spent most of the war at a reserve depot at Arborfield near Reading (Davidge to RRR, 15 May 1917 and 12 January 1918; Rose to RRR, 18 April 1918). Robbins made several lifelong friends while he was at Woolwich. He met Frank Paish, who became an economist and a colleague at the London School of Economics in the 1930s. Paish had been admitted directly from Winchester College to RACS Topsham in July 1916 and arrived at Woolwich on his way to the front at the end of the year. In January 1917, working together or spending their spare time riding on Woolwich Common, the always optimistic Paish would try to cheer up a rather gloomy and often depressed Robbins (Paish 1998, 16–17). Lionel found this infuriating – for instance when they were picking over the debris at Silvertown and Paish remarked that this grisly task was ‘such a change from the dead monotony of the gun park you know . . .’: he made a deliberately sarcastic reply (LCR to RRR, 20 January 1917). When they met again in 1932, they ‘at once resumed the disputations about prospects and policy which began when we took six o’clock stables together . . . , he ebullient, I despondent’ (Robbins 1971a, 42). He met Nathan Isaacs, whose intellectual interests were in philosophy and

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psychology and who ‘loved argument’, one Saturday in the winter of 1916– 17 outside the synagogue at Woolwich (‘Remarks at the Commemoration Ceremony for Nathan Isaacs 13th June 1966’, Biographical Papers, RP): ‘I had been detailed to march the troops of the Jewish persuasion to their weekly service. I had done this and was just about to give the order to file in, when there stepped forward a serious-looking young gunner who said very solemnly, “I beg to be excused. I am an agnostic.” Needless to say, I excused him; and breaking all the regulations of the day, we walked back up the hill together and founded a life-long friendship.’ The two men did not meet much during the rest of the war but they were very close in the years afterwards. Reginald (Reggie or Reg) Lawson was the youngest brother of the two Lawson sisters who had married Harris uncles of Lionel’s. He had known the Harrises since childhood as his mother was an active member of the Mount Zion congregation. (His father, Harry Lawson, was a nonconformist though not a Baptist; he was also an unscrupulous, and initially very successful, company promoter who had been convicted of fraud.) Lionel met him soon after his posting to Woolwich at one of the parties given by one of the two Harrises in St John’s Wood (the two men’s recollections differ on which). Reggie was playing the piano. Lionel was fascinated by the piano player; Reggie was ‘immediately attracted by the younger man . . . [whose] underlying boyishness was accentuated by a slightly clumsy manner and a habit of shaking his head to throw back the lock of hair that fell across his eyes’ (Ginger 1991, 35). Reggie found that ‘His interest in and appreciation of my piano-playing were a new inspiration to me. The more I played the more pleased he seemed to be, and the more pleased he was the more I desired to play. This was an ideal arrangement, and he very soon knew all my friends’; Lionel told Reg’s biographer that he was ‘a most talented performer of modern music – Debussy, Ravel, other French composers, a good interpreter of Bach’ (information from John Ginger). As he told his father on 5 January 1917 Lionel took Eddie Rose to Uncle Charlie’s to meet Lawson: ‘They were all charmed with him and I see vistas of pleasant evenings opening up before us.’ Seven years older than Robbins, Lawson had already served in the war, enlisting in the Honourable Artillery Company in August 1914 and serving in France until April 1915. But during officer training he had suffered a breakdown; he was on compassionate leave and studying the piano with Monsieur du Mont, who had been a pupil of Busoni’s in Paris, when Lionel met him (Ginger 1991, 30–4). In spite of the difference in their ages, they had tastes and interests in common, as well as their Strict Baptist background

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from which each was in his own way rebelling. In 1916 Lionel was the same age Reggie had been when he first encountered contemporaries with wide cultural interests. He was also ‘sensitive, fastidious and with an intuitive understanding of others’ hopes and fears which was quite exceptional’; realizing the young man’s emotional and cultural needs he introduced him to his circle of friends, including Clive Gardiner, with whom Lionel was until Clive’s death in 1960 to maintain ‘the greatest male friendship of my life’ (Robbins 1971a, 44). Clive was also seven years older than Lionel. Although he and Reggie had attended the same school, University College School, they did not meet until Reggie began to attend services led by the gifted preacher Robert Horton at the Lyndhurst Road Congregational church in Hampstead. At Dr Horton’s house Reggie met Clive as well as Horton’s sister Constance and her friend Jessie Monk; they joined him in attending musical evenings at the du Monts’ (Ginger 1991, 23–6). Clive, the eldest son of the great Liberal journalist A.G. Gardiner, was then (1910) a student at the Slade School of Fine Art. When Lionel met him he was well on his way to becoming a professional painter. Unfit on medical grounds for military service, he was working in the Ministry of Munitions (Reade 1963). Lionel came to know Clive during 1917 when Robbins’s father, ‘hearing my enthusiastic talk of my new acquaintance and anxious to have some record, other than photographs, of my appearance, before, as he feared, my almost inevitable death on active service, gave Clive a commission’ for a portrait of his son (Robbins 1967b, 13). In the sittings Lionel learned (1971a, 45) that ‘Clive had vision and imagination . . . [and] beyond that . . . judgment, a sense of proportion and quality, coupled with a modest and disarming candour of a kind I had not encountered before. At this turbulent and rebellious period of my development, this was just what I needed.’ When the painting was finished Lionel told his father on 17 September 1917 that ‘It was a stroke of genius on your part to have the portrait painted. It enabled me to gain a far greater intimacy with Clive than I should have done and to form a friendship that I hope will not be severed easily.’ He suggested his father commission his own portrait from Clive, but Dick Robbins preferred to buy one of Clive’s paintings exhibited at the New English Arts Club in 1918. Clive was particularly pleased with the one he chose, because ‘we discussed it so much together when it was in its early stages, and his [Lionel’s] enthusiasm and spirit helped it along enormously’ (Gardiner to RRR, 25 February and 14 March 1918). In the next three years the three men were to go about together in London a good deal: with his two tall friends Reggie was ‘inevitably the small man

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in the middle’ (Ginger 1991, 36). Clive took his two friends to the galleries, especially the National Gallery: it was with Clive that Lionel acquired his love of Italian early Renaissance art and of the Impressionists and PostImpressionists. The three together discovered the ‘Lane Bequest’ – the thirtynine foreign paintings, including major works by Degas, Renoir and Manet, acquired by Sir Hugh Lane who had gone down with the Lusitania in 1915 – which was first exhibited in the National Gallery in January 1917. This was, recalled Lawson, ‘really intoxicating’ (‘Written answers to questions’). There was one aspect of Reggie’s life that Clive and Lionel did not then know about. He was already well aware of his homosexuality and of the moral dilemma it posed for him. He found the beginning of the solution in conversion to Roman Catholicism, but that was later, after the war. Before the war, when he was working as a clerk for Myers & Co, and in 1917–18 when he returned to Myers & Co, he found lovers in the City. But he refused to regard these ‘attachments of a sentimental and utilitarian kind’ as real friendships like those with Clive and Lionel. He kept his lovers and friends strictly separate (Ginger 1991, 27–8). Lionel also went to the musical evenings at the du Monts’. Reggie described the evenings to his biographer (‘Written answers to questions’). The garden flat in Swiss Cottage consisted mainly of a large room with two grand pianos. Sometimes du Mont’s pupils played the two pianos, sometimes the ‘Master’ with his best pupil. Monsieur . . . was a brilliant player of Chopin, Beethoven and Brahms, not so brilliant at Bach, and we influenced him to take a greater interest in modern stuff . . . Madame . . . always reclined on a long seat that was part of the wainscoting. Some coloured stuff over an electric lamp suffused a candle light over her corner and suited very well her sallow features and black hair, and velvet dress which she usually affected, with all kinds of Liberty coloured scarves and wraps. She had a mind which kept everything in place, and us too, as we all sat around on low stools and armchairs, while she dispensed evening tea and delicious cakes.

Lionel was less impressed with Madame, at least in retrospect, telling John Ginger in 1979: ‘a character out of Flaubert [she] imagined herself holding a salon. . . . Her culture was something superficial – something which she paraded. Her husband was genuine – but he felt that he wasn’t sufficiently appreciated. . . . [He also] put up with a lot – R’s and Clive’s adulation of Madame.’ In his first few months in the army Lionel still attended chapel occasionally: when he went to Topsham he asked his father in March 1916 for names of ‘old friends of yours if any in Exeter also of ministers (if faithful)’.

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His father (who knew only of friends of Mr Ellis in Exmouth) wondered on 12 March if he would ‘find a place [of worship] which in any way approaches your ideals. I hope so – but do not be too particular – & in any case do not neglect the house of God.’ But, as he commented on 15 April, ‘You are having plenty of opportunity of putting to the test your theory that it is just as easy to worship God without attending “a place of worship” – I wonder whether you really find it so.’ Lionel intensely disliked the compulsory church parades, ‘hear[ing] the [Anglican] clergyman spoil all the prayers in the prayer book by intoning them’, and the pomp and ceremony of services in Exeter Cathedral (LCR to RRR, 20 April and 8 May 1916). After Lionel had enjoyed a weekend’s leave at Hollycroft in May 1916 his father told him on 16 May that he was worried: ‘I cannot help feeling grieved & somewhat anxious on the account of the fact that you seem to have lost so much of the joy of salvation – I know how difficult your surroundings are – I know from past personal experience something of the deadening influence of those doubts which haunt me in moments of depression but I do beg of you not to resign yourself to your doubts – nor yet to cut yourself off from Christian fellowship.’ Perhaps acting on this advice Lionel went to the Wesleyan Methodist chapel on 21 May, where he had to listen to a poor sermon he had already heard before at Exmouth when his father had visited him one weekend. His father responded on 24 May that he might try the Presbyterian Church: ‘as a rule they have very good men.’ At RA Woolwich Lionel could attend the Woolwich Tabernacle of which Dr John Wilson was the well-known and popular minister (Clayton 1927). But he began to enjoy church parades, as he told his father on 6 October 1916: We have a lovely Garrison church here built by Gunner officers subscription. In architecture it is one of the best I have seen especially internally. The chaplains there preach very well and the whole affair is absolutely ‘chic’. Personally if it was not for Mr Wilson I should always attend there: the preaching is very good. Simple but philosophically deep and the lovely spiral window settings make one worshipful. Also a beautiful choral service.

(The church was gutted in the Second World War and left as a ruin; built in 1863 as ‘an Early Christian-Italian Romanesque basilica’ it was ‘an ambitious forceful building, with much structural polychromy and marble and mosaic decoration inside’ [Cherry and Pevsner 1983, 279].) By the time he left Woolwich Lionel was enquiring of his father on 17 September whether they could meet in London rather than at Hollycroft: ‘Weekends, in some ways, are not the best times to meet – I mean Mother gets so upset if I don’t go to

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Chapel twice that it quite reacts on me – almost as much as if I went and I hate causing unpleasantness even I don’t appear to.’ In these months before he was sent to the front Robbins read widely. The musician Harry Blech remembered him when he was visiting Clive’s father, ‘coming in with a mass of books under your arm . . . with either Eddie Rose or John Polimeni’ (another friend of Clive’s).6 When the mess library proved to be empty of books he took to borrowing from the local public library, which he found was ‘well stocked with the literature of religious and social rebellion’ (LCR to RRR, 6 October 1916; Robbins 1971a, 43). His reading reflected the literary interests he shared with Eddie, his discovery of the theatre and the visual arts, and growing disillusionment with politics and the conduct of the war – especially after the formation of the Lloyd George coalition government in December 1916. Lionel avidly read Nietzsche, Ibsen and Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Shaw and Wells. He was ‘greatly impressed’ by Ibsen’s Brand, he told his father on 8 October 1916, explaining that ‘It is a religious drama of present day life. . . . The tragedy arises from his too severe view of God.’ A few months later he sent him a copy of Shaw’s pamphlet, The Sanity of Art – in which Shaw defended modern developments in art (Impressionism, Wagnerism, Ibsenism) against charges of ‘degeneracy’ – telling him on 13 June 1917 that Shaw could enlighten him better than he could as to ‘the aim and creed of a modern artist’. In his letter he added some arguments of his own, criticizing the puritans in his own family for appreciating only works which tallied with their religious beliefs. His father responded sympathetically on 18 June, ‘admit[ting] the force of many of his [Shaw’s] arguments’ and some of Shaw’s claims for the worth of artistic endeavour, but he pointed out that he agreed with Ruskin’s claim that high ideals could only be attained ‘by daily hourly yea momentarily waiting upon God for grace’ and not by art alone. On 17 September the latest book Lionel had for his father was ‘an interesting book . . . by P. Kropotkin – no anarchism this time only a treatise on the possibility of agriculture and industry – called “Fields, Factories and Workshops” [1913].’ The Russian anarchist had written and published this book, first as a series of articles in 1888–90, while he was living in exile in England; in it he argued for decentralized manufacturing industry producing on a small scale for local markets, intensive agriculture 6

LCR remembered the meeting but he connected the recollection ‘much more than Eddie Rose than with John Polimeni, although both were close friends of mine’: Blech to LCR, 9 October, LCR to Blech, 23 October 1962, General Correspondence March 1962-January 1963, RP.

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(especially market gardening), and education which combined manual and intellectual work. 1917 was the year of the Russian revolutions: the February Revolution in March (by the Western calendar) and the October Revolution on 7 November. Against this background Robbins read the works of many socialist writers. According to his autobiography (1971a, 56) he was put off by the opacity of Marx’s Das Kapital and found the writings of the English ‘guild socialists’ such as G.D.H. Cole much more congenial. With roots in both French syndicalism and the writings of William Morris and his followers, guild (or gild) socialism envisaged a society in which the workers took control of their workplaces and of their output from the capitalists, and formed themselves into ‘national guilds’ in which they worked for themselves, in cooperation with each other and with the state which would own the means of production. The New Age, the lively ‘weekly review of politics, literature and art’ (as it described itself), was the main forum for discussion of guild socialist ideas. Reg had been acquainted with the magazine since he had read it regularly to Dr Horton before the war; in 1917 or (more probably) 1918 he and Lionel went together to guild socialist meetings (Ginger 1991, 25). When he left the army in 1919 Robbins regarded himself as a committed (guild) socialist (see Chapter 3). He continued to write poetry, experimenting with styles and subjects, but within traditional prewar modes. A few semi-religious poems survive with his letters to his father; one at least was written when he was on active service in France in December 1917 (tss The Shepherds (1917-if you will!), The Three Maries, A Madonna of the Pure Heart, and LCR to Lawson, 31 December 1917). Others he kept and revised after the war (Orpheus and Eurydice, A Peony: Imitation of Flecker, and an untitled one marked ‘Woolwich 1917’, Youthful Miscellanea, RP). The war in France and Belgium dragged on. When Lionel Robbins turned nineteen on 22 November 1917, he was sent to France, sailing from Southampton to Le Havre on the night of 5 December. On a very calm crossing – ‘“Fair stood the wind for France . . . etc”’ – he slept and dreamt of his parents and of the National Liberal Club where he often met his father (LCR to Papa & Mother, 5 and 6 December 1917). From the base camp at Harfleur he wrote also to Reg and to Eddie, mostly about music (Bach and Cesar Frank in particular) and painting, specifically the two pictures of which he had reproductions with him: Leonardo da Vinci’s Head of the Christ and Botticelli’s Madonnna of the Magnificat. The few books he had brought included a pocket Shakespeare: he read both parts of Henry IV and, as he told Reg, was ‘greatly cheered . . . by the delightful coarseness of

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Old Falstaff ’. He spent four days at Harfleur, before being sent up the line to join his unit, the 64th Army Brigade RFA, where he was posted to A Battery, a field gun battery.7 His brigade had been fighting in the Third Battle of Ypres – the campaign known for its culmination, the capture of the village of Passchendaele, ‘synonymous in British annals for mud and useless waste’ (Haythornthwaite 1996, 39). This extended the bulge in the front around the war-ruined mediaeval cloth town of Ypres by five miles at a cost of over 300,000 casualties. As Liddell Hart (1934, 330) explained, ‘the Ypres offensive was doomed before it began – by its own destruction of the intricate drainage system in this part of Flanders’ which was reclaimed marshland. With the dykes destroyed by bombardment the area predictably turned into a swamp. Robbins saw the result (1971a, 46): ‘a flat, desolate expanse of shell-holes filled with water, ruins, duckboards and mud. Mud, endless polluted mud’ – polluted with the corpses of men and horses. Robbins arrived to find the 64th Brigade moving back from the positions east of Ypres where they had lost in action several officers and men even after the main battles were over. After their relief on 12–14 December they were billeted for a few days in Oudezeele, in France, and then moved to Watou just inside Belgium. Robbins was sent ahead as battery officer for the Brigade Ammunition Column. At Watou the brigade spent Christmas 1917. ‘It was a grim winter, and nowhere worse than around Ypres’, according to the official history of the Royal Artillery (Farndale 1986, 259); the brigade’s war diary reports cold or snow or hard frost day after day (WO95/295, TNA). In his first letter from the front Lionel asked for ‘socks, socks, socks, I can’t have too many’, as well as for such things as a wristwatch, a torch and reading material.8 The men were kept busy with training, when the weather permitted, and football matches (between teams from the four batteries, HQ and the Brigade Ammunition Column, for the Brigade Football Shield which was won by D/64, the howitzer battery). Christmas Day was a ‘Whole holiday. Great day for the men, all units had good dinners. Several concerts were arranged. The C.O. [Lt Col P. Barton DSO] wished the men a happy Christmas’. On Boxing Day Lionel wrote home that he had just received a second package of socks plus cigarettes and chocolates and the third book of 7

8

LCR to Rose, Saturday [8 December], LCR to Lawson, Friday [7 December 1917]), LCR to RRR, 9 December 1917. LCR wrote frequently to both friends while he was in France and Belgium; they both kept in touch with his father and passed on some of his letters which RRR kept with LCR’s. LCR to RRR, 12 September 1917. The brigade’s war diary for November 1917–April 1918 is the main source of the factual information in the next few paragraphs. I have also found invaluable the memoirs (Campbell 1977 and 1979) of another young artillery officer who served with another RFA army brigade in the same sector of the front in those months.

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Georgian Poetry edited by Edward Marsh (1917) ‘at which I danced all round the room in ecstasy’ (but he was critical of its contents in later letters home). The day before he had been ‘about the only sober man in the Brigade’. While the brigade was at rest Lionel assured his parents that he was ‘twenty or thirty miles behind the lines on a lovely farm and beautiful country’ and described the agricultural landscape at length (LCR to RRR, 16 and 17 December 1917). On 6 January 1918, there was ‘Frost all day. Batteries prepared for move. The Grenades [the brigade concert party] gave a second performance of their concert in the evening.’ Over the next two days, in the snow, the brigade marched south through Hazebrouck en route to new positions in front of Armentieres. Robbins was again in the advance billeting party, as he could make himself quite well understood in French. This gave him ‘a good bed for the night in a decent old fashioned estaminet’ in a little village. The brigade was billeted in villages south of Hazebrouck for several days, while the guns were taken to the army range at St Hilaire for calibration in preparation for the next round of fighting. For 2nd Lieutenant Robbins this last task meant he was ‘in the saddle for nearly 18 hours of the 36’. On the 19th the brigade marched to the Steenwerck area and Lionel reported home that they had moved into huts, were making beds out of old chunks of timber and wire netting, and asked for some Medici Society reproductions of Old Masters to adorn the canvas walls (LCR to RRR, 6, 17 and 20 January 1918). A Battery moved into its new position in a brickfield just east of Armentieres on 21–22 January. The officers ‘messed and slept in a brick kiln which was said to be proof against medium artillery’ where they played poker in the evenings. The wagon lines and the brigade headquarters were on the other side of the evacuated and deserted town, through which it was an ‘eerie experience’ to ride at night, with ‘a full moon, a clear sky and the lonely hoofs of one’s horse striking sparks from the cobbled pavements’. The front was quiet, with only intermittent artillery activity, including some on the part of A/64, and Robbins ‘did a good deal of forward observation, watching at a distance enemy movements which were almost negligible’, otherwise whiling away the long hours in the OP by reading Shakespeare (1971a, 48). An artillery battery was inevitably a very close-knit community. Campbell (1979, 6) recalled that the half a dozen officers of his battery ‘were like brothers, sleeping side by side, within touching distance, sharing whatever possessions we had and the contents of any parcel that came for us’. At first Robbins was dubious about the major (W.J.F. Halliday DSO) of his own battery, ‘a regular who habitually spoke of the working classes as if they were dirt’, but he was a brave man whom Robbins came to respect.

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The captain (A.J. Gardiner) was a ‘thoughtful schoolmaster’ and his fellow lieutenants ‘agreeable and without side’ (Robbins 1971a, 47). His greatest friend was 2nd Lieutenant H. Beresford, who won an MC and was killed in May 1918: Halliday managed to get him to a dressing station but he died within a few hours (Halliday to LCR, 11 August [1918], Personal letters from Iris & Clive etc, RP). With Beresford Robbins would ride out of the lines, on one occasion, on a ‘bright shiny day in midwinter’ to Bailleul (1971a, 47–8): ‘the only reminder of the war was when, having lunched splendidly, we turned our horses’ heads back towards the line and the sensitive creatures, so co-operative going out in the morning, jibbed and shied and continually slowed their paces returning to the anxieties of the line.’ Bailleul was then relatively untouched by the war: a ‘still unshattered civic illusion, with its little market place behind the church always filled with waiting horses, its long Grande Place of cleanly shops, the packed Officers’ Club, with its air of Victorian tradition and much good company’ (Blunden 1982, 232). It was destroyed during the Allies’ retreat three months later. In early February 1918 the batteries of the brigade were active in support of a couple of infantry raids on the German trenches, before they were relieved on the nights of 16 and 17 February. In a new position in the Fleurbaix sector of the front ‘life became much less agreeable’ (and Robbins’s letters home scrappy and uninformative). ‘As a preliminary to the offensive which was being prepared down south, the German guns began systematic bombardment of the areas behind our lines; and there was singularly little pleasure or peace of mind sitting waiting, wondering what time of day it would be our turn. . . . We were moved about a little and had some nasty times, chiefly on the road.’ The first of the officers to be killed while Robbins was with A Battery, 2nd Lieutenant Millard, was badly wounded in the head on 24 February, died the next day and was buried on the 26th. Robbins described his ‘baptism of fear’ (1971a, 49–50): We had been moved down a little south; and while the gunners lived in a reinforced cottage, we officers billeted in a farm which was still inhabited. The war was hotting up again and there was some shelling of adjacent areas. But our guns were reasonably well concealed, and nothing to speak of had come our way. Then one night, just as I was about to put one of Debussy’s Arabesques on the portable gramophone, there were distant clicks from the German lines and the whine of the shells, which hitherto had passed well to the right or the left, deepened into a sickening shriek and culminated in a deafening explosion just overhead. . . . The blast threw me to the ground; and as I picked myself up in a daze, I heard the major say: ‘For Christ’s sake get him out of here!’ . . . The front door was blocked. So each seizing the body, the major the legs, I the shoulders, we dragged it out through the back window . . . As we dragged our heavy load round the building, . . . from time to time we would be

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blown over by blast so that, if there had much life left in poor Millard when we started, it would have been substantially diminished by the rough passage. As it was, when at last we got him into an open field in the sinister moonlight, myself almost vomiting at the sight of my breeches steeped in his blood and fragments of his brain, it was clear that from the outset there had been no hope.

The collapse of the Russian army on the Eastern Front in 1917 and the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk with the new Bolshevik government allowed the German high command to prepare for a major offensive on the Western Front to defeat the Allies before the Americans, who entered the war in April, arrived. General Ludendorff’s plans included an attack codenamed Michael on the Somme to be followed by attacks further north and south. The first began on 21 March, the second, the Battle of the Lys, on 9 April. The March offensive was expected by the Allied armies (although its success was not); in the 64th Army Brigade on 10 March ‘Reserve battery positions were inspected on the N. Bank of the R[iver] LYS just east of BAC ST. MAUR in case of a break through’ (see Illustration 8). Systematic German shelling forced a move of the brigade headquarters on 15 March, and on 22 March A Battery crossed the River Lys to the north bank, the other batteries following over the next seven days. On the 27th ‘Better news was received from the war down south’ as the German offensive was halted before Arras. Lionel told his parents on 26 March that his brigade had gone into action on 20 January and pulled out on 22 March and was now ‘nowhere near’ the battle zone. He also told them he had been promoted to Lieutenant. In the evening of 30 March the 64th Army Brigade RFA moved forward only to receive on arriving orders to return, as a ‘Special Operation’ had been cancelled. For a week the brigade’s diary has little to report except a change in its commanding officer; on the 7th ‘The Huns were expected to attack the Portuguese [whose 2nd Division was directly in front of the brigade] on the following morning’, but on the 8th there was ‘Nothing to report’. The battle began on 9 April just after 4 a.m. (Buffetaut 1988, 47). Robbins (1971a, 50) woke up to a drum-fire of artillery on the front different from anything I had ever heard before;. . . . Almost at once orders came through that we were to go into action on predetermined targets, which we did amid a good deal of shelling from the enemy. As the morning wore on, there began to drift through the guns forlorn little groups of Portuguese retreating discreetly from what was happening on the line. Thenceforward all was confusion. Groups of enemy infantry appeared in the fields . . . [on the other side of the river]; and in some way or other which I do not recollect – if I ever knew – we were authorized to pull out.

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In his only note home between 5 and 13 April Lionel admitted: ‘I hear the Portuguese have let us down. Met one still many miles behind the lines. If I had had a rifle I would have plugged him.’ The confusion and chaos are captured in the brigade’s record: 9th Very heavy Hun bombardment on front and back areas. H[igh] E[xplosive] and gas shell from 4 AM to 9 AM – 5 AM Brigade H.Q. hit – Capt Attkins wounded. Batteries opened [fire] . . . All wires cut. Visual impossible all morning owing to thick mist. . . . 11 AM Bde ordered to retire . . . 11.15 AM orders cancelled. Brigade remained in action at BAC-ST-MAUR. 2.30 PM Bde retired . . . A/64 withdrew under heavy rifle fire . . . Batteries in action 4 PM firing on the SAILLY-ESTAIRES road in support of 50th [Infantry] Division. All gun teams kept close to guns. . . . 6 PM Huns captured CROIX-de-BAC and BRIDGEHEAD E. OF ESTAIRES. . . . 10th During the night batteries fired on the SAILLY-ESTAIRES road. . . . Huns started advancing . . . 8 AM. . . . During the morning batteries withdrew 700x as they were in full view of SAILLY CHURCH. 12 noon 285th Bde RFA on our left retired precipitately stating Huns were within 500x . 1 PM having fired all ammunition away batteries commenced to retire . . . Orders cancelled . . . A/64 never moved. – Brigade contiued firing N of the River on the same front. . . . 6 PM Brigade ordered to retire . . . Brigade fired . . . [on] crossings over the LYS during the night. 11 . . . A counter attack was ordered at 10 AM but cancelled as infantry were in a very demoralised state. Huns captured STEENWERCK . . . 3 PM Huns broke through . . . infantry retire . . . – 64th Bde retired to BLEU.

On the 12th Robbins was wounded in the left arm by a sniper’s bullet. He had been detailed to go forward with a corporal and a telephonist to see what was happening to the infantry, ‘confusion regarding our position being even greater than ever’. Having found the line and seeing no enemy about, they pushed on and climbed to the loft of an abandoned farmhouse to see further. Spotting some Germans, ‘we descended fairly quickly with the intention of resuming contact with the infantry’; the infantry having disappeared, they started to walk back to their battery across a ploughed field. ‘Suddenly I felt a blow on my left arm as though I had been hit by a very fast (and heavy) cricket ball. . . . Blood was spurting up from my arm like a fountain . . .’ A tourniquet applied by Corporal Otto stopped the bleeding and Lionel was ‘fully resolved not to report it but to continue with the battery. As we walked, however, the effects . . . began to be felt. My arm swelled up. It became quite black . . . [and] almost intolerably painful . . . although I was still upright, I was just a mass of appalling agony and, I suppose, outwardly appearing about to collapse.’ When his companions spotted an ambulance they pushed him, ‘almost tearfully protesting’, into it (Robbins 1971a, 51–3). He wrote to his father the next day:

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. . . I have a tiny rifle bullet wound in the left forearm which doesn’t hurt at all and which will be well in no time. . . . If I get home – and there seems a chance amongst these streams of wounded – I shall need a total new kit as master Boche has every stitch except Shakespeare and the things I was wearing when we retired. As to the battle I have never had such a thrilling time in my life. I am fearfully annoyed to be out of it. It makes me sick to read in the papers the rot about the gallant stand of the Portuguese. They didn’t. They ran like hares and the filthy cowards they are and were shot by our own men in heaps for their base cowardice. We fought our guns till we were being sniped from 400 yds off and then got the teams and guns away under fire. There followed the most exciting of open action in which A/64 covered itself with glory.

He admitted in his autobiography that ‘war, moving war, can be exciting and even enjoyable – however disgusting in retrospect’. It was a blighty wound: after a night at the field station and a few days at the base hospital at Calais he was sent back to England. The brigade war diary recorded: 12th . . . 8 AM Huns started attacking. Shelled cross roads at BLEU. 10 AM Huns break through . . . 29th and 31st Div were in a very exhausted state. A/64 and D/64 retire . . . followed by B/64 and C/64. . . . Great difficulty in finding out where our Infantry were . . . lack of OPs and communications. . . . It was now [3 pm] very difficult to place the batteries, as the 31st Div had retired in disorder . . . The line was more or less restored by nightfall.

The brigade retreated further the next day but on the 14th when the Australians relieved the 29th and 31st infantry divisions, the brigade supported the Australians in holding the front. By the 16th ‘Situation [was] settling down. Orders to dig in.’ On the next quiet evening the tally of casualties since 9th April was recorded: Capt Attkins and Lt Robbins wounded, 2nd Lt Marriott gassed, Major Baker wounded but at duty; 3 men killed, 21 wounded and 10 missing, 1 wounded and at duty; 60 horses killed or wounded; and five field guns lost. The brigade suffered several more casualties before its relief by a New Zealand brigade on 26 April. The 11th of April was the day Field Marshall Haig issued his historic order: ‘Every position must be held to the last man. . . . With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.’ But Operation Michael had been so swiftly successful that Ludendorff failed to capitalize on it (Liddell Hart 1934, 399–401). When he attacked further north, on the Lys, his troops again made initial rapid progress, but were held up before they could reach the railway junction

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at Hazebrouck. After two less successful attempts to resume the offensive on 25 and 29 April this German offensive was abandoned (Buffetaut 1988, 52–60). A month later the Germans broke through further south and reached the river Marne. In July, however, when Ludendorff launched another major attack the Allies, who had had time to build up their trained forces, launched a counteroffensive three days later. With German reserves depleted, Ludendorff was ‘forced (on 20th July) to postpone, if not yet to abandon, the offensive in Flanders, and the initiative definitely and finally passed to the Allies’ (Liddell Hart 1934, 372). The spectacularly successful battle of Amiens on 8–12 August led by seasoned Canadian and Australian troops was followed by further Allied gains in September. In October the Germans sought an armistice from US President Wilson, Ludendorff resigned on 26 October, and the Armistice was signed at 5 a.m. on 11 November. Robbins spent the summer of 1918 at home at Hollycroft. One of his younger sister Nancy’s early memories is the arrival of the telegram reporting him a casualty. Her mother fainted. Her older sister Caroline, however, ‘looked at the telegram, said he’s alright, seriously wounded officers don’t get sent to that hospital.’ Lionel’s father rushed up to town to see his son, who was in the Prince of Wales’ Hospital for Officers (the converted 700room Great Central Hotel) at Marylebone. He had received at least two communications on 16 April: a telegram from the War Office informing him his son had been admitted to the Red Cross Hospital Boulogne with a ‘Gunshot wound forearm slight’ and a card from the Prince of Wales’ Hospital that Lionel was there. Lionel also sent a telegram from the hospital to his father at the Agricultural Wages Board. On 3 July Dick Robbins received another War Office telegram stating his son had been wounded on 28 June, and in September a letter cancelling this, by which time Lionel was at Hollycroft on convalescent home leave. During his leave Lionel got to know his younger sister, then five years old. She already knew that he ‘was such a nice person to play with’; in 1918 she helped him work on the garden with his useless arm, the gardener Mitchie having been directed to war work. From Hollycroft he could go up to town for daily electrical massage treatment on his arm. He could also meet Clive and Reg and again attend concerts and visit the galleries with them. He kept in touch with Miss Horton and Miss Monk, but he did not return to the du Monts’. Madame had written passionate letters to him in France: she ‘evidently thought that

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I should marry her daughter’. In the last of them she had accused Clive of cultivating Lionel only for the sake of his sisters; he had told Clive and Reg and they and Madeleine (the daughter) had had a quarrel about him while he was away. As he also told John Ginger, ‘This probably led to the end of the evenings.’ When it became clear that Lionel would not quickly recover the use of his left arm (it was paralyzed for about a year), he sought to be passed fit for office work in London. His father called on Major Wigan at the War Office, ‘who knows something of Lt Robbins’ record as a Cadet’, and indicated that his son would be particularly interested in an instructorship (RRR to Military Secretary, War Office, 28 September 1918). In October Lionel was posted to the RA Barracks at St John’s Wood, where his army career had begun. On 11 November he ‘was making my way along the north side of Trafalgar Square by the National Gallery when the signals went off. . . . In a matter of minutes, the square and the neighbouring streets were filled with dense masses of people inspired by uninhibited joy. . . . Strangers embraced one another. Tears of happiness rolled down our cheeks. Traffic came, more or less, to a full stop; and even late that night it was not easy for the average civilian to get about quickly.’ He spent the evening with Clive and Reg, making their way through the crowds more easily thanks to his sling and uniform (Robbins 1971a, 54). Among those who observed the scene was Osbert Sitwell, in a taxi with Sergei Diaghilev the Russian ballet impressario and his choreographer Massine (1949, 1–4): ‘it was impossible to drive through Trafalgar Square: because the crowd danced under lights turned up for the first time for four years – danced so thickly that the heads, the faces, were like a field of golden corn moving in a dark wind. . . . there were many soldiers, sailors and airmen in the crowd which, sometimes joining up, linking hands, dashed like the waves of the sea against the sides of the Square, against the railings of the National Gallery, sweeping up so far even as beyond the shallow stone steps of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.’ Diaghilev ‘gazed with an air of melancholy exhaustion at the crowds. . . . The dancer [Massine] was watching intently the steps and gestures of the couples.’ Lawson recalled (information from John Ginger) that ‘We all danced . . . in front of the Mansion House at midday, and climbed lamp-posts in the Strand that evening. I finally got home after midnight, carrying a number 24 bus-direction-board.’ At home at Hollycroft that autumn Lionel was in a more sombre mood. ‘Roaming about/The empty garden/One October morning/It was cold and misty/There were no flowers but drenched roses/And damp yellow

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leaves/Strewing the paths/I thought of my friend/Who lay dying/Under a cart . . . I wondered/“Where is he now?”’ (Return from the war, RP). He found ‘The Flat Country (Home i.e.)’ (the title of another poem written at this time) grey, joyless and desolate. And he wrote a poem ‘H. Beresford’: Now all the stacks are made The work is done: The grain is harvested And the sythes [sic] are laid Back in the shed Yet sometimes there comes to one Thought like a sudden cry What of the dead who lie Under the mould? The dead? There is no word to say. There is no song to sing. There is nothing that one can do. Nothing.

He later added a note ‘Died May 1918 occupying a post I should have held had I not been wounded six weeks previously.’

THREE

Postwar

The immediate postwar period was a time of hope and of disillusionment for Lionel Robbins as for many others in Britain. In the heady atmosphere of postwar optimism hopes of reform and reconstruction flourished. The Lloyd George coalition reelected in December 1918 promised a land fit for heroes to live in, reflecting the aspirations of the few remaining Liberals in the Conservative-dominated government. Many of the measures planned in the wartime Ministry of Reconstruction were begun in 1919. But after the breathing space of the demobilization period and a shortlived frenetic postwar boom in 1919–20 there came a severe and prolonged slump. UK unemployment, which is estimated to have fallen as low as 2–3 per cent by the spring of 1920, was over 20 per cent a year later. As officially measured, it did not fall below 1 million or 10 per cent of those insured under the national insurance scheme, which commenced in 1920, for the rest of the decade. Social reform gave way to public expenditure cuts and to the restoration of the gold standard at the prewar parity. Guild socialism withered as dreams of revolution or at least radical change faded. In the ‘breathing space’, which lasted for about six months, the exodus of people from the armed forces (and from munitions factories) was greater than the absorption of workers into peacetime employment. The government tried to slow down demobilization, by giving priority to men with definite offers of employment, skilled workers in certain key trades, and men on leave producing written offers of employment. This looked particularly unfair to those who had served longest, to older men and to married men, seeing newer recruits and younger or unmarried men released before them, and had to be abandoned early in 1919. Out of a total of 3.7m other ranks demobilized between 11 November 1918 and 20 February 1920, 1.8m were released in January–March 1919; the peak periods for officers released were February and April 1919 (Pigou 1947, 22–7 and 216). On release servicemen 51

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received twenty-eight days’ paid leave and a war gratuity. Once the boom began, however, the demand for labour increased rapidly and by the end of the year there was something like full employment along with rapidly rising prices and wages. Lieutenant Robbins was demobilized on 28 February 1919 (LCR to RRR, 3 March 1919). This was sooner than he anticipated but his commanding officer suddenly decided to let him go. As he explained it later (1971a, 54–5), at the RA Barracks in St John’s Wood he and a senior lieutenant had been appointed demobilization officers: they decided that ‘since the orders we were getting did not make sense, the best thing to do was to get on with the job and demobilize all but the regulars as quickly as we could. This we did, without cavil from above, with such expedition that, by March [sic] 1919, there was nothing left for me to do but to get demobilized myself.’ He was twenty years old and had spent three of his twenty years in the Army. At first he was in an optimistic frame of mind. The general enthusiasm for reconstruction encouraged those who wished to reform the economic and social system, including Liberal reformers, Fabians and socialists of all kinds. Lionel ‘hoped to be able to participate in . . . the forthcoming transformation of society’ as a guild socialist (ibid., 56), telling his father on 3 March 1919 that he ‘felt very strongly the necessity of doing what seems to me right rather than adopting the line of least resistance.’ Guild socialism as an idea had many attractions, proposing as it did an economic system without the most disagreeable features of capitalism, especially as they had been seen during the war. And in ‘the somewhat unreal atmosphere’ of 1918–19, when ‘the individuals and groups with ideas of a new society thrived, and the workers seemed to go along with them’, it seemed almost practical politics (Carpenter 1973, 72). The revolutions in Russia were in the very recent past. The position of the workers was strong while the post-Armistice boom lasted. To the guild socialists (Reckitt and Bechhofer 1918, 3), The fundamental basis of the revolutionary case against Capitalism is not that it makes the few rich and the many poor – though this is true; not that it creates social conditions which are a disgrace and an amazement in a civilised community – though this also is true; not that it brutalises the rich by luxury, stifles beauty, and frustrates the hope of craftsmanship for the worker . . . but that it denies and degrades the character of man by the operation of a wage-system which makes the worker of no more account than a machine to be exploited or a tool to be bought and sold.

Before the war guild socialism had been expounded in The New Age by S.G. Hobson and by the editor, A.R. Orage, who published Hobson’s articles as

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a book in 1914. During the war the idea had been taken further, practically with the founding in April 1915 of the National Guilds League and theoretically in Self-Government in Industry (1917) by the Oxford intellectual G.D.H. Cole. Hobson (1914, part I) had despaired of the Labour movement as it had developed in Britain. The trade unions in seeking higher wages for their members had gained little real improvement in the standard or quality of life of the workers. Attempts at political action, either through ‘permeation’ of the Liberal Party or through the setting up of the Independent Labour Party, had achieved even less. Fabian proposals for nationalization and state ownership of major industries would only substitute one employer, the state, for another, the private capitalists. The only ray of hope he had seen was the strikes organized by more militant trade unionists in the wave of industrial unrest in 1911–12. The ‘emancipation’ of the worker could only come through a direct attack on capitalism and the wage system. ‘The way out is to smash wages.’ Capitalism where workers were ‘wage slaves’ forced to sell their labour as a commodity had to be replaced by an economic system in which workers controlled the product of their own labour, and profits, rent and wages did not exist. Associations of producers could determine their own remuneration and their working conditions, enabling them to cooperate in working for themselves and to enjoy their work, as was believed by William Morris and his followers to have been true of the mediaeval craftsmen’s guilds. The new guilds would be ‘national’ in that they would include all the workers in a particular industry in one country, but they would not be the owners of their industry, which would be owned by the state, with which the guilds would have to cooperate in order to look after the interests of the citizens as a whole. Guild socialism ‘differs from State Socialism or Collectivism . . . [because] the Guild manages its own affairs . . . [and] rejects State bureaucracy’; at the same time it ‘rejects Syndicalism, because it accepts co-management with the State, . . . subject to the principle of industrial democracy . . . for the simple reason that the policy of a Guild is a public matter, about which the public, as represented by the State, has an indefeasible right to be consulted and considered’ (ibid., 132). Hobson (1914, part II) moved on to discuss what he saw as the practical details of his guilds – which industries should constitute separate guilds, how the guilds would be managed internally – without stopping to explain on what matters the guilds would cooperate with the state. Cole was much clearer: the state would represent the citizens as consumers. His conception of society and state was pluralist: he attacked the notion of state sovereignty, which Hobson took for granted, and pointed out that ‘a State is nothing

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more or less than the political machinery of government in a community’; a society could contain many associations formed for different purposes, of which the ‘state’ or national government was only one (Wright 1979, 32–49). The starting point of Cole’s book (1917a) was the situation in which the trade unions found themselves as a result of the war. The major unions had volunteered an ‘industrial truce’ early in the war and agreed to allow departures from their restrictive practices – such as the replacement of skilled labour by unskilled – for the duration. It was essential, argued Cole, that the prewar rights and privileges of the unions should be restored after the war; the trade unions should then use the opportunity of the reconstruction period, when labour would be in great demand, to reorganize themselves into industrial rather than craft unions, as a first step towards the formation of national guilds. Guild socialism was nothing if not utopian. Cole and Hobson wrote all too easily. They were short on analysis of the economic problems, of the matching of supply and demand for particular goods and services, or of the maintenance of capital, that would have to be solved in a guild socialist society.1 Aware of the existence of some of the problems – guild socialists were idealistic but not naive – they assumed they could be avoided administratively or politically. Cole in particular tried to devise institutional arrangements to prevent exploitation by powerful guilds and to protect the interests of consumers. His suggestion (ibid., chapter IX) of a system of taxation of the guilds agreed between a Guild Congress representing the producers and the State representing the consumers clashed with Hobson’s conception of the state. This and their other differences were well argued in their rounds of entertaining debate in The New Age in 1917–18 (Hobson 1920; Cole 1917b, 1918). Cole was the more pragmatic. It might be sensible to accept nationalization as a halfway house to guild socialism: it would reduce the economic power of the capitalists and it would probably be easier for unions gradually to wrest control of their workplaces from management in nationalized industries. Cole, who had worked for the unions during the war, always envisaged ‘encroaching control’ by the trade unions as the way forward (Carpenter 1973, 88–90). Lionel Robbins joined the National Guilds League at the time that Cole was at the height of his influence. He listened ‘green with envy’ to lectures and speeches by Cole, ‘whose apparently effortless command of his subject 1

Hobson’s economic analysis of the wage system under capitalism was tacitly Marxist, with a subsistence theory of wages and a Marxian theory of value.

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and superiority of manner seemed to me, at that time quite unacquainted with this kind of university product, to be beyond the ambition of any ordinary mortal to achieve’ (Robbins 1971a, 58). (He was later to call Cole a ‘B[loody] F[ool] [who] needs to be sat upon on every possible occasion’ [LCR to Cannan, 17 October 1930, Cannan Papers 1030, BLPES], but by then he had been a colleague in economics at Oxford.) The London lectures organized by the National Guilds League included talks on political and industrial policy by trade unionists and Labour Party activists as well as by intellectuals such as Cole and Bertrand Russell.2 Lionel reasonably decided that the way forward for himself was to find a job in the labour movement. He aired his views and ambitions vigorously at home. This led to long and vociferous arguments with his father, who ‘felt that I was throwing away all the advantages which his hard work had procured for me, that I was repudiating the moral basis of our family life’ and who ‘did not conceal his feelings’. His son was equally determined and obstinate: in one quarrel ‘he asked me if I wanted any [of his money] and I told him he could keep it. He said he was going to alter his will but I suspect he did not do it.’3 It cannot have helped that his father was in the spring of 1919 involved in difficult negotiations with the workers on the Agricultural Wages Board. Lionel’s first idea was to find a job as a union organizer. He applied for such a position with the British and Allied Waiters’ and Chefs’ Union, who were seeking to unionize waitresses at Lyons teashops. When he was called for an interview, ‘it did not take long for them [the union executive] to decide that ex-Lieutenant Lionel Robbins was emphatically not suitable for their job. . . . Whatever had been my relationship with drivers and gunners in the R.F.A., my contact with women of any kind, outside the family and my educational institutions, had been non-existent’ (1971a, 60). More practically, he talked to J.J. Mallon, a friend of Clive Gardiner’s father, who had wide contacts in the labour movement. He ‘asked him advice as to my possible usefulness in the labour world either as a factory hand or a lickeron of stamps to some official. He was very kind and sympathetic’ and offered to take young Robbins to meet G.D.H. Cole and W.N. Ewer of the National Guilds League ‘to see what can be done’. ‘I imagine,’ Lionel told his father on 3 March 1919, ‘that the most they will be able to do will be to recommend 2

3

The lectures in Kingsway Hall on Thursdays evenings in the autumn, winter and spring of 1919–20 were advertized and sometimes summarized in The Guildsman in September, November and December 1919 and January 1920. LCR, ‘Property, I. Autobiographical Preface’, [nd but 1922], RP. If RRR altered his will, he changed it again. According to his last will and testament his estate was essentially divided equally between his four children.

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me work in some industrial centre where later on I could be of assistance with propaganda. Till I have fixed up something definite I shall stay on here.’ ‘Here’ was 44 Hamilton Gardens, St John’s Wood, where Lionel lived for about eighteen months as one of the lodgers of a Mrs Smith. He asked his father to send him some of his books and ‘seditious brochures’ from home to join his ‘Woolwich collection’; the resulting ‘nucleus of a very useful students reference library’ included ‘Marx the truculent obscurantist who exercises a policemanlike guard over the more frivolous members of my “ideology”, [Clive] Bell with his incisive wit and exhaustive aesthetic and my beloved Diabolonian Nietzche’ (LCR to RRR, 3/7/19). He stayed away from Hollycroft in order to avoid quarrels with his father which upset his stepmother. After he had not seen his father for about three months he sought to meet him in town instead, and he returned to Hollycroft to celebrate his twenty-first birthday in November at a small party which included Eddie Rose and George Davidge (LCR to RRR, nd but June, 30 July and 20 November 1919). While he was still in the army Lionel had resumed the life and friendships in London he had begun to enjoy when he was at Woolwich. In the autumn of 1918 he and Clive Gardiner and Reg Lawson began to go to the ballet: Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes opened its first London season since before the war at the Coliseum on 5 September. Lawson told John Ginger (‘Written answers to questions’), ‘We were fascinated and went as often as we could.’ The company gave one ballet each afternoon and evening as part of mixed music-hall acts: the first two presented were Cl´eopˆatre with Tchernicheva as Cleopatra and The Good-humoured Ladies, the first Massine ballet to be seen in London, with Lopokova (later known to economists as the wife of John Maynard Keynes) as the maid. The season was so successful that Diaghilev was able to arrange a proper season, with three ballets a night, at the Alhambra theatre in Leicester Square from 30 April; it was there in June and July that the Massine ballets La boutique fantasque – in which Lopokova and Massine appeared as can-can dancers – and The Three-Cornered Hat, with their designs by Derain and Picasso, were first performed. The season opened with Petrushka, the first performance in England since the war. A third London season in September–December 1919 included the English premiere of Parade, with music by Satie, designs by Picasso and plot by Cocteau, but without Lopokova who had vanished in July (Buckle 1979, 345–60). Lionel and his two friends watched the Massine ballets and the dancing of Lopokova, Tchernicheva, Massine and Woizikovsky with, according to Lawson, ‘a reverence and devotion that most people associate with their religion’.

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Their favourites were The Good-Humoured Ladies, The Three-Cornered Hat and Petrushka (Ginger 1991, 36). Lopokova, who danced the part of the doll many times, said (1983, 211) of Petrushka: ‘One of the best music-drama compositions ever invented is Stravinsky’s Petrushka. . . . Diaghilev, Benois [the designer], Fokine, Stravinsky . . . created out of . . . [a proposed] piano concerto this peculiar Russian folklore drama. . . . Reality and symbolism perfectly blended, half-obvious, half-hidden and unfathomable, to which every spectator can give his own meaning.’ Lionel particularly remembered Lopokova in La boutique fantasque at the Alhambra (June 1919): she was ‘enchanting’ (information from David Laidler). In 1918–20 Clive had a studio at 6 Bedford Gardens, Kensington, which became the centre of Lionel and Reg’s social life. Reg’s Bl¨uthner piano was there, Clive and Lionel having helped to buy it at the bankruptcy sale after Reg’s father was convicted of fraud for the second time. Clive’s younger sister Iris remembered evening parties at the studio with guests including Lionel, Reggie, Eddie Rose, John Polimeni and Lilian Lancaster. John (Giovanni) Polimeni, whose Sicilian father ran the English end of the family fruit importing business, had been a friend of Clive and Reg’s since before the war; he had a powerful tenor voice and a passion for Debussy.4 Lilian Lancaster, who married Clive in 1921, was a fellow artist, one of Walter Sickert’s first pupils; they met at the Brighton School of Art when Clive was teaching there in 1918 (Reade 1963, 9; Sutton 1976, 145–6). At Christmas 1918 the three friends produced a ‘morality play – like Everyman’ for which Lionel wrote a poetic prologue and Reg played the piano; other members of Clive’s and Reg’s families were roped in to act or to dance (Clive Gardiner to IEG, nd but November 1918; Ginger, ‘Interview with Lord Robbins 4/4/79’). In 1919 Lionel saw more of Clive than of Reg. At the end of 1918 Lawson, the stage manager of his friends’ parties, found himself a job in the new film industry, at the Barker Studios in Ealing, and in 1919 he went to Haarlem, Holland, as assistant to the producer Bernard Doxat-Pratt and worked there for two years (Ginger 1991, 40–8). Clive was painting portraits and teaching at the School of Art at Goldsmiths’ College. One of his early pupils remembers him ‘as a young, shy, faintly mocking and sarcastic figure . . . bespectacled [and] intellectual-looking’. It was from him that ‘One heard for the first time such names as C´ezanne and Matisse and we were shown reproductions of their work’ (Sutherland 1963, 4–5). C´ezanne, in contrast to Degas and Gaugin, was still controversial in London in the 4

Information from Clive Gardiner to AGG, 28 November 1919, Gardiner 2/8, BLPES, John Ginger and Iris Robbins.

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early 1920s – with the Tate Gallery, for instance, refusing the offer of a loan of two paintings in 1921 and declining to purchase others in 1922 (House 1994, 12–13). Lionel saw the major exhibition of Matisse’s work at the Leicester Galleries in London in November–December 1919 with Clive, as he did subsequent exhibitions of the work of Gaugin, Van Gogh and C´ezanne (Robbins 1967b, 13; Cachin et al 1996, 589; Robins 1997, 159– 61). He learned from Clive to look at works of art ‘for what they conveyed through their own media rather than what I felt could be projected into them, in my own medium, as it were, of words’. He had read Clive Bell’s Art (1914) with enthusiasm and swallowed its message of ‘significant form’ whole: he admitted later (1971a, 243) that for some years he ‘more or less refused to recognize or admit the essentially mixed content of any visual art which was not deliberately formal’ – a narrow view that his friend did not share. According to Robbins (1967b, 13–14), Clive always had a strong impulse to figurative art and after experimenting with new techniques in the 1920s, with C´ezanne the main inspiration, ‘the old impulse to figurative composition, never entirely dormant, . . . reasserted itself’ in the 1930s; nonetheless ‘through all the vicissitudes of his style, Clive retained a quite special reverence for this master’, C´ezanne. Clive was one of a fairly large, close-knit family. His father, A.G. Gardiner, was the editor of the Daily News, one of the leading Liberal newspapers, from 1902 until September 1919, when, after a long period of disagreement with the owners over his opposition to Lloyd George, he resigned. He and his wife Ada had six children: Stella, who married J.J. Mallon in 1921, Clive, Gwen, Iris, Phyllis and Gilbert. In the years immediately after the war Lionel came to know the family well, though not Iris who was living away from home. In London they lived until 1921 at 613 Finchley Road, at the Golders Green end of Hampstead, but they had a country home in the Chilterns, in ‘the lovely hamlet of Whiteleaf [Buckinghamshire], with its sixteenthcentury thatched cottages sheltering under the deep woods of Whitecross Hill and looking over Princes Risborough and the wide Wycombe valley to Bledlow Ridge’ (Gardiner quoted by Koss 1973, 165). There Gardiner had a house built, The Spinney, which backs onto the local golf course; this became the family’s main home from 1917. It was a hospitable home; for Lionel it was ‘a model of what English family life at its best can be’, and the days he spent there were ‘among the happiest days of my life’ (LCR to IEG, 20 February 1924). He remembered (1971a, 98) Mrs Gardiner, the ‘focus for the love and devotion of all’, as ‘a truly beautiful person’. He got on well with A.G. Gardiner, for they shared interests in history and public affairs and a love of English literature. He was a great admirer of Gardiner’s

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writings, especially of his regular columns in the Star under the pseudonym ‘Alpha of the Plough’: he had taken the first published collection (1916) of these with him to France in 1917 (LCR to RRR, 23 December 1917). Mallon’s friendship with Gardiner dated from about 1906 when he was working for the National Anti-Sweating League which Gardiner supported strongly in the Daily News (Koss 1973, 77–9). The League was formed to campaign for a minimum wage in industries which employed sweated labour; it succeeded with the passage of the Trade Boards Act 1909 which set a minimum wage in several industries. In November 1919 Mallon, who had worked for the University Settlement at Ancoats, Manchester, before moving to London, became Warden of Toynbee Hall, the universities’ settlement in Whitechapel, East London. In the spring of 1919, when Lionel met him, he was working in a variety of labour-related activities – for instance as a member of the National Industrial Conference and as treasurer of the WEA (Pimlott 1935, 207–8; Briggs and Macartney 1984, 91–5). When he and Arthur Greenwood were asked to organize the Labour Campaign for the Nationalization of the Drink Trade, he suggested Lionel come and work for them. The existence of this organization requires some explanation. Wartime concern over excessive drinking and absenteeism among munitions workers had led to restriction of the opening hours of public houses – including from 1916 the ‘afternoon gap’ which lasted until 1990 – and the reduction of the alcoholic strength of beer and spirits. In some areas the government Central Control Board provided industrial canteens; in others it took over the pubs: at Enfield Lock near the Royal Small Arms Factory, at Invergordon and Cromarty around the Cromarty Firth naval base and, on a larger scale, in the Carlisle area following the establishment of a large munitions factory at Gretna. There ‘The newly arrived workers had nowhere to spend their leisure time, except in the streets and the public-houses. . . . it is not surprising that the public-houses in the district became the haven of the Gretna workers out of working hours. By the middle of 1916 the situation was deplorable. . . . Carlisle became a city of degrading sights . . . and the Liquor Control Board decided to acquire, on payment of compensation, the whole of the liquor trade, both wholesale and retail, in the district, in order . . . [to be] able to take drastic action to improve the prevailing conditions.’ The drastic action included the closing of some pubs, the remodelling or rebuilding of others, the provision of food in pubs, and the payment of salaries to the managers, as well as the manufacture and distribution of alcoholic beverages in the whole area. The Carlisle experiment was very successful, not just in reducing drunkenness locally and in ‘making the

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public-house less of a mere drink shop and more of a real social centre’, but also improving the working conditions of the workers in the industry and making a profit (Greenwood 1920, 15–22). The Central Control Board suggested extending the experiment to the whole country, and the government did set up committees during the war to examine the financial implications of nationalization of the whole trade. At the end of the war the ‘trade’ and no doubt many members of the public hoped for relaxation of the wartime restrictions, while temperance reformers were urging further control, even prohibition as in the USA. There had always been a strong temperance movement within the Liberal Party, while the brewers (who owned or controlled most of the public houses) and distillers were traditionally strong and generous supporters of the Conservative and Unionist Party. In the Labour Party opinions on drink were mixed. The Labour campaign for public ownership and control of the liquor trade was inaugurated in order to ‘focus what the [management] committee [of the campaign] regard[ed] as the general opinion of the organised Labour movement on the drink question’ (ibid., 29). Insobriety might be an evil but abstinence would not solve social and economic problems, which were not caused by drink. Prohibition was anyway quite unrealistic. What was desirable and possible was a reduction in the consumption of alcohol, for, as Greenwood (85–6) put it, ‘If half the amount of money now expended on alcoholic liquors and half the energy sapped by the drink shops were devoted to education and political and industrial organisation, Labour would be able to realise some of its most cherished aspirations within the next few years.’ Regulation of a privately owned drink trade would not be sufficient because it would always be in the interests of the owners to encourage increased consumption. Nor would regulation remove the political influence of the owners. Under state ownership it would also be possible to improve the amenities of licensed premises as in Carlisle and the quality of the beer. Robbins worked for Greenwood and Mallon for just over a year, in the campaign’s office at 45 Mecklenburgh Square, where Mallon already had his office. ‘At first all went well. The job of organizing an office and arranging systematic propaganda for a cause was new to me. For a time it occupied most of my physical and mental energies. We arranged conferences. We addressed – or caused to be addressed – thousands of envelopes. We compiled lists for circularization. We prepared literature . . . Greenwood even wrote a book [1920] . . . We engaged a regular organizer, whose duty it was to go round the country imparting the gospel of drink nationalization to local Labour Parties and trades councils. On a few occasions when Greenwood or others

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were prevented from functioning, I myself went out speaking. It was all quite strenuous’ and interesting (Robbins 1971a, 63). Greenwood was by all accounts including Robbins’s ‘a very decent man’. He had been a lecturer in economics at the University of Leeds before he moved to London during the war to work for the Ministry of Reconstruction. After the war Gardiner on resigning from the Daily News approached him to see if he would be prepared to succeed him as editor; he had pointed out he was too far to the left as well as too anti-Lloyd George to be acceptable to the owners (Greenwood to AGG, 4 August 1919, Gardiner 1/14). He ran the research and information department of the Labour Party before he was elected to Parliament in 1922. Lionel worked as Greenwood’s personal assistant. He wrote letters for him and transcribed his drafts.5 As he told his father in June 1919, he helped to prepare the pamphlets published under Greenwood’s name, Publicans and Politics and The Brewers Repentant (Greenwood Ms Eng c 76, Bodleian Library Oxford). At an early stage he gathered data on brewery profits and carried out other research for Greenwood’s book; although he later described the book as ‘compiled entirely hearsay second hand information which I had cut from papers’ (‘Socialism’, Essays on Trade & the Depression, RP), it is readable and well argued. Full of factual information on the economics and organization of the drink trade in Great Britain, it made a serious case for public ownership of the trade moderately, dealing fairly with the critics of public ownership. An attractive feature of the book is that it does not claim too much for its proposals. In August 1919 Lionel took a holiday on the Sussex coast with his old schoolfriends Eddie Rose and George Davidge, which he commemorated in a short poem (‘Newhaven 1919 – to E.C.R.’, RP). George had returned from Salonika in the spring and with the encouragement of Lionel’s father had decided to become a schoolteacher. After passing his Intermediate Arts examination in the summer he went up to East London College, where Eddie had returned to complete his degree in English (Davidge to RRR, nd but September 1919; Rose to LCR, 4 November 1918, Personal letters from Iris & Clive etc, RP). In the autumn Lionel, along with Nathan Isaacs and his friends Joseph Pole and Phoebe Rickards, attended a London University extension course on psychology given by Susan Brierley. Her ‘very well 5

One consequence of Robbins’s working for Greenwood was that he altered his handwriting to imitate Greenwood’s way of writing e’s so as to be able to sign his letters for him (1971a, 79). The result is not easily legible but since Robbins returned to a more conventional hand at the end of 1921 (see Chapter 4), it is a boon to his biographer as it allows the dating of many otherwise undatable documents in his papers.

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composed’ lectures were followed by a hour of discussion. Nathan who had already read widely in psychology ‘very soon became the main questioner and “they were at it hammer and tongs” . . . Susan was very poised, rather prim, and very clear and lucid, with never an obscure sentence’ (LCR quoted by Gardner 1969, 50–1). Lionel followed the course for two terms, claiming later that he ‘always felt a bit of a psychologist . . . just after sitting through that one course’ and doing the associated reading. Nathan married Susan – but not until 1922, for she avoided him for a couple of years until she decided to leave her first husband. With Nathan’s active intellectual and moral support she became the famous and influential child psychologist Susan Isaacs. He continued to think and write on philosophy and psychology – and to argue with Lionel – while working in the City for a firm of metal merchants.6 In March 1920 Lionel suffered a bout of influenza from which he took time to recover. Away from work he took himself off to the White Horse Hotel at Rottingdean, five miles east of Brighton, which he had visited with Clive several times during his ‘“wounded” period’, occupying himself with walks on the downs and on the beach below them. Judging from his letters to his father he was still quite content with his employment. In the summer, however, when the annual Labour Party Conference failed to support the state purchase of breweries and pubs, he was contemplating resignation. He was also beginning to have his doubts about guild socialism. Like other ardent young socialists before and since, he was disappointed to learn that British trade unionists and Labour Party workers had little inclination for revolution. At the same time the naive attitudes of some of his fellow young revolutionaries irritated him – for example the plain young woman at a party who apparently believed the way to stop the army from putting down a revolution was ‘to give ourselves to the officers’ (1971a, 63–5). Guild socialism itself was also changing and losing its way. Late in 1918 Orage had met ‘an extraordinary man, a Cambridge graduate and engineer by profession, at present a Major’, C.H. Douglas, who had his own peculiar theory of money and credit. Orage was immediately converted; Hobson was not and ceased writing for The New Age (Hobson 1938, 193–4). Douglas’s first book (1920) appeared in serial form in The New Age in 1919, his second (1921) in 1920. Douglas gave lectures to the National Guilds League, some of which Robbins attended. 6

LCR, Remarks at the Commemoration Ceremony for Nathan Isaacs, 13th June 1966, Biographical Papers, RP; Smith (1985, 169–82); Isaacs (1949); Hardeman (1976); see Chapter 7.

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Douglas’s theory rests on a simple fallacy which is not, however, immediately obvious to non-economists. He made his essential point on a few pages of his first book (1920, 59–62), namely that of the cost of any manufactured item, for instance ‘a steel bolt and nut weighing ten pounds’ and costing 15s 11d only a small portion (6s 10d in his example) constitutes payments to employees. ‘Without proceeding to add selling charges and profit it must be clear that a charge of 15s. 11d. on the world’s purchasing power has been created, of which only 6s. 10d. is distributed . . . and that if the effective demand exists at all in a form suitable for the liquidation of this charge, it must reside in the banks.’ Thus to keep the capitalist economy going it is necessary for the banks continuously to create money by lending to manufacturers, but the resulting inflation further reduces the purchasing power of the workers. The fallacy of his ‘A + B theorem’, which he introduced in his second book, where A = the payments to individuals (wages, salaries and dividends) and B = the payments to cover all other costs of production, is that the B payments are not lost as he claimed to the flow of available purchasing power. Indeed they must be made in order to provide for capital investment and ensure the continuous flow of manufactured goods. The fallacious A + B theorem thus cannot explain the lack of effective demand at times of economic depression (Robbins 1932h, 414–18). To Douglas his interpretation of factory costing implied the need to take money-creation away from private financiers, and for some form of ‘social credit’ where loans are made to produce goods actually desired by consumers and prices are somehow fixed so as to provide adequate rewards to the producers. Orage took up this idea eagerly: neglect of finance had always been a weak point of guild socialist proposals. He and Douglas developed a scheme involving producers’ (ie trade union) banks and price control for the mining industry, which they put to the National Guilds League in the spring of 1920. Although the League agreed to conduct an enquiry into the proposals, it decisively rejected its report at a special conference in December 1920 (Carpenter 1922, 126–37). The Labour Party even more decisively rejected the scheme, and Douglas’s theories, two years later in the scathing report of a special committee in July 1922 (Dutton and King 1986, 259–79). Orage’s attempt to press Douglas’s ideas on the National Guilds League only served to exacerbate the divisions in the League, already badly split over its attitude to the Bolshevik Revolution. By the end of 1920 guild socialism was effectively dead. The young Robbins, impressed by Orage’s earlier writings on guild socialism, was inclined to follow his lead over the new social credit ideas. Although they did not fit well with most of the tenets of guild socialism – the

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establishment of producers’ banks was hardly the way to abolish interest, for instance – ‘If the propositions were correct, were they not the answer to the most pressing social and economic problems of the day and was it not the duty of all men of goodwill to give them immediate attention?’ (1971a, 66). His employers in the Labour Party, like most members of the National Guilds League, were, however, dismissive of them and Lionel found himself obliged to try reading orthodox economic writings in an attempt to understand what was going on. He told Ezra Pound (who, like Orage, had been converted to social credit on meeting Douglas in 1918) on 18 September 1934 (Pound Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale): ‘I went into Economics after the war because I was convinced that Douglas had found the orthodox economists out & I wanted to learn their jargon so as to put things right.’ The importance of The New Age in English cultural history does not lie only, or even mainly, in its advocacy of guild socialism or social credit. When Lionel tried to persuade his father to subscribe by making him a present of a quarter’s subscription in the summer of 1920, he pointed out, ‘It usually deals with quite non controversial matter (noncontroversial in the ordinary sense I mean) and should make very good discussion when we meet.’ It had established itself as an innovative literary journal, providing informed comment on new writing and the arts, and publishing contributions by such authors as George Bernard Shaw, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett. Walter Sickert regularly contributed art criticism and drawings in 1910–14 (Baron 1992, 43–5). It had a very good drama critic, A.E. Randall. Orage himself contributed a literary column ‘Readers and Writers’ (signed RHC). Pound was a frequent contributor, providing essays and art and music criticism (pseudonymously) as well as poems. It is probably in The New Age that Robbins first read Pound’s poetry of which he became a great admirer. Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, with its ‘irreverent wit, . . . sardonic parodies of imperial rhetoric . . . [and] mercurial shifts of mood and tone’ (Moody 2007, 349–50), appeared there in six parts in June-August 1919. Robbins shared his enthusiasm for Pound with a new friend. Basil Bunting, who later became known as a ‘northern’ poet as well as a disciple of Pound, was the son of a Newcastle doctor. Educated at Quaker schools, he had refused military service in March 1918 and was imprisoned as a conscientious objector. He obtained his release by going on hunger strike and, with the encouragement of his father who knew several of the early Fabians, he moved to London, where he worked for a while for the (Liberal) MP for Newcastle East, Major Harry Barnes (who later joined the Labour

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Party). Bunting probably met Lionel at the Fabian Research Department. In 1920 he registered as a student at the London School of Economics; he also tried to visit Soviet Russia via Scandinavia, but he failed to obtain a visa in Copenhagen and was deported from Northern Norway (Bunting to LCR, 12/10/20, RP). When he abandoned his studies in 1923 he followed Ezra Pound to Paris.7 Bunting later told Pound (August or September 1934, Pound Collection, Beinecke Library) that Robbins [is] a bloke abt a year or two older than me, good war record, son of the chap who used to be president or secretary or something of the National Farmers Union – anyway a man of some importance. I met him just before I went to the L.S.E. . . . He was one of the first people I met to show any interest in Douglas. Subsequent hostility is at least not result of ignorance, as in many cases. Tastes more or less better class Bloomsbury – i.e., aware of a lot of things you might not expect a prof of economics to have heard of. First person, I think, to show me any of [T.S.] Eliot’s work, certainly first to show me bits of [James Joyce’s] Ulysses in The Egoist (or was it Portrait of J.J.?). . . . He used to like yr works and probably still does.8

When Lionel was contemplating resignation from the Labour Campaign for the Nationalization of the Drink Trade in August 1920, he decided to spend his annual holiday in Paris. In his autobiography (1971a, 68) he described a lonely and miserable experience: ‘I spoke to no one save waiters, hotel servants and a prostitute in one of the grands boulevards whose offers I politely declined. I trudged round to many famous public places and buildings, but, with one exception, without much comprehension or enthusiasm, my thoughts being pre-occupied with my own private problem. The exception, of course, was the Louvre where the works of art held me enthralled, especially the “Collection Camondo”’ of Impressionist and PostImpressionist paintings. ‘Here I would sit morning after morning, gazing in rapture at C´ezanne’s “Vase Bleu”’. He was also despairingly reading Dostoyevsky, as Clive had been doing in a more cheerful frame of mind a few months earlier (Clive Gardiner to AGG, 28 November 1919, Gardiner 2/8). When he wrote to his father on 29 August after his first few days in Paris, he reported that his hotel was ‘a nasty poky little hole behind the Boulevard Montmartre’ in which he remained only because he hoped George Davidge, who was touring France on a bicycle, might contact him there. Since he did 7

8

Bunting’s several biographers (Alldritt 1998; Caddel and Flowers 1997; Forde 1991; Makin 1992; Terrell 1980; Williams 1968) provide conflicting accounts of his activities in 1919–23: for instance, he worked for Harry Barnes either before (Makin) or after (Alldritt, Caddell and Flowers, and Forde) his time at LSE, which is usually dated 1920–2. In fact he left LSE in April 1923 (see Chapter 5). Some of the remaining puzzles could be solved by his LSE Student’s Dossier which has unfortunately gone missing. It was Ulysses to which Robbins introduced Bunting (Stock 1970, 211–13).

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not now expect to hear from George he was thinking of leaving Paris: ‘A fortnight is a long time to be alone and I am not sure that I should not prefer to spend some of it, at least, right away from the strange people, who only annoy one, right in the heart of the French country where there would be no interference with one’s thoughts.’ He went on to complain of the ‘flagrant unreality’ of the city and its classical buildings. When he sent his father on 6 September a postcard of Leonardo’s St. Anne in the Louvre, however, his ‘only complaint . . . about this place is that it doesn’t remain open all night’. In London he had met several students from the London School of Economics (Robbins 1971a, 69). ‘In the diggings [sic] which I then inhabited at St John’s Wood, there was also residing a student from the London School of Economics’, who introduced him to other students. Through Basil Bunting he met Jacques Kahane, then a student at LSE reading for the BSc(Econ) degree and later a close friend. From what he heard from Kahane and the others, ‘it was clear that this offered just the course of study and environment which would be most congenial to me’. When Bunting decided to study for the same degree at the School Robbins was tempted to follow suit. But how could he possibly finance this? He decided that the only thing he could do was to go into business and earn enough money to enable him to continue his studies later. ‘I was just about to accept an offer of a post at £500 p.a. in the City when I met my father who hearing what I had decided to do very generously offered to provide me with enough money to return to college immediately. I accepted this offer [and] he placed £750 to my account at Cox’s [bank]’ (LCR, ‘Property I. Autobiographical Preface’, RP). Dick Robbins later made a similar offer to his youngest daughter Nancy when she wanted to go to medical school; he also offered to, and did, pay for the medical education of one of his wife’s nephews, the missionary doctor and leprosy specialist Paul Brand (Wilson 1965, 50–3). In his autobiography (1971a, 70–1) Lionel elaborated on this incident which took place a fortnight after he returned from Paris. The post he had been offered was in the intelligence department of the stockbrokers Pember & Boyle, of which Reggie’s elder brother Jack was a partner. He met his father in a Lyons teashop at Tottenham Court Road when he was on his way from Mecklenburg Square to have dinner with Jack Lawson in Hampstead and realized he was going to arrive too early. As I entered the shop, whom should I see at a distant table but my father, who had presumably just dropped in after an afternoon . . . transacting business for the National Farmers’ Union . . . I decided that I might as well advise him of my

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change of plan and my intention that evening. So I strolled across and related my news. . . . the news that I intended to become a stockbroker can hardly have been very welcome to him; for although he believed profoundly in private property and free enterprise, as a puritan he always had a slight suspicion that there was something rather dubious about this way of making a living. But he rose magnificently to the occasion. He listened sympathetically and then said ‘If you will undertake not to accept this offer and tell me how much you need to keep yourself for a full university course, I will give you the money here and now and never question you how it is used.’

Lionel quickly reckoned he would need £250 a year, hence the £750. He kept his dinner engagement, declined the job offer and registered at LSE the following morning – informing his father by postcard later in the day (28 September 1920).

FOUR

The London School of Economics

When Lionel Robbins entered the London School of Economics in October 1920, this Fabian institution was twenty-five years old. On 3 August 1894 Sidney Webb learned that he was an executor and trustee of the estate of the late Henry Hunt Hutchinson whose will instructed him to spend most of the estate on ‘the propaganda and other purposes’ of the Fabian Society and ‘to advancing its objects in any way they [the executors] deem advisable’. Over breakfast the next day Webb persuaded his wife Beatrice and his friends Graham Wallas and George Bernard Shaw that they could spend some of the money on founding a school of economics. Within a few months he had a director, W.A.S. Hewins, who was not a socialist or a Fabian, Wallas having declined the position, and on 10 October 1895 classes and lectures began (Dahrendorf 1995, 1–24). A year later the School had a library, the British Library of Political and Economic Science. It became a college of the University of London in 1900, moving to its present location, Clare Market, just off Aldwych, in 1902 (Hayek 1946, 9–14). With that history it is inevitable that LSE should be regarded as a left-wing institution, even when most of its staff, like the first director, were not. In 1920 it was physically still very small – construction of the main building in Houghton Street, now long since known as the ‘Old Building’, had just begun – and many lectures had to be given in temporary buildings to cope with the postwar influx of students, many of them like Robbins ex-servicemen. The students were not in the mood to complain: ‘Ex-soldiers, as the majority of us were, we thought we were lucky to be alive and where we were’ (Robbins 1971a, 72). It was in 1919 and 1920 that ‘a number of those arrived at LSE who were to determine more than others the character and appearance of the School for decades to come’, including Robbins and Arnold Plant (Dahrendorf 1995, 144). Plant had served as a private in the Royal West Kent Regiment in 1918; 68

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after demobilization in January 1919 he had been general manager of the engineering works at the Steam Fittings Co. The historian of the School also singles out Sydney Caine, who like Plant became a close friend of Robbins in their undergraduate years; Caine was younger than Robbins and Plant, too young to have served in the forces, but entered a year earlier, as did Frederic Benham (London School of Economics 1934). Robbins’s fellow students included his existing LSE acquaintances Jacques Kahane (a year ahead of him) and Basil Bunting. The BSc(Econ) degree for which Robbins registered had been established at LSE in 1901, two years before the Economics Tripos at Cambridge (Hayek 1946, 14). It was a broad degree in the social sciences, especially in the first year. At the end of this year students were required to take the Intermediate Examination, which comprised four papers in economics (industrial and commercial history; principles of economics; currency, banking, trade and finance; and ‘passages from French and German works on [these] subjects for translation and comment’), two papers on the British Constitution, one in geography ‘with specific reference to Industry, Commerce and Politics’ and two in either mathematics or logic and scientific method (LSE Calendar 1920–1). The last was the only choice allowed. Robbins chose logic and scientific method – which was probably a mistake, as he realized when he encountered ‘mathematical formulae . . . his old betes noirs’ in economics (LCR to RRR, nd but early 1921). In the second and third years students could work for a pass or an honours degree, in both of which they had to take economics, history (with accounting as an alternative in the pass degree) and public administration. The honours degree also allowed some specialization in one of a range of subjects in economics and political science. While Robbins was an undergraduate the first reform of the degree changed the requirements for the candidates for honours in the Final Examination. Robbins was involved in several future reforms of the BSc(Econ) and tended to look back on the degree he took as a model to be preserved or recreated. The first lecture Robbins probably heard at the School was a public lecture opening the session on the first day of the Michaelmas term, Monday 4 October 1920, by the director, Sir William Beveridge, who expatiated on the virtues of ‘Economics as a liberal education’. He defined the objects of a liberal education as twofold – ‘The training of the mind’ and ‘The understanding of one’s environment so as to be in harmony with it’ – both of which the study of economics and the other social sciences, especially in the form of a broad degree such as the BSc(Econ), could easily provide (Beveridge 1921, 15–17). Lectures for the Intermediate Course began the next day, with Geography from Mrs Ormsby at 10.45 and Foreign Trade from

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Mr Gregory at noon. On Wednesday Dr Knowles lectured on The Growth of English Industry at 10.45, Mr Drummond Smith on The Elements of Industrial Organisation at 12. Dr Wolf offered Logic and Scientific Method at 11 on Thursdays, with a class following each lecture. On Friday Mr Dalton gave his lectures on Elements of Economics at 10.45, and a class at 2.30, and Mr Lees-Smith lectured on the British Constitution at noon. Beveridge was beginning the first of his eighteen years as director of LSE after eleven years as a civil servant. In the Board of Trade before the war he had the opportunity to put into practice his preferred solutions to the unemployment problem – labour exchanges in 1909 and compulsory unemployment insurance in 1911. During the war he served in the Ministry of Munitions and the Ministry of Food and had been appointed permanent secretary of the latter when Sidney Webb suggested in April 1919 that he become director of the School (Harris 1997, 252–60). Hilda Ormsby (n´ee Rodwell Jones) had been a student at LSE before the war, on the staff since 1912, and in naval intelligence during the war (Harrison Church 1974, 15). Gregory was of the same vintage of LSE students as Mrs Ormsby: born Theodore Guggenheim in 1890 he had been a student and a junior member of the staff before the war; during the war although he changed his name he was not allowed to join the forces (or for a while to teach at LSE) because of his German parentage. Robbins found his lectures on British foreign trade more interesting than Ormsby’s: ‘He was not the easiest of lecturers. He wrestled with his subjects like Jacob with the angel and would not let them go until he was blessed with some clarification. But from the outset he treated his audience as adults and vividly conveyed to us not only his passionate interest in problems, but also his independence and objectivity in dealing with them’ (‘Sir T. Gregory’, 3 February 1971, Biographical Papers, RP). Lionel attended many more of Gregory’s lectures, by choice, in the next two and a half years. Lilian Knowles, Reader in Economic History, became the first woman professor of economic history in 1921. A student at Girton College Cambridge, she had been trained in the Historical School of economics, which her writing and teaching reflected. ‘A county tory, a patriot and an imperialist’, she wrote and lectured on commerce, trade, transport and especially the empire (Berg 1992, 316). Her students nicknamed her Britannia (Burns 1983, 8). Her Michaelmas term lectures began with ‘The physical conditions which helped to make England a great power in the Eighteenth Century’ and continued with the development of agriculture and industry from the later mediaeval period to the eighteenth century and the industrial revolution. Robbins’s notes of these lectures are much less full than his notes of

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Gregory’s lectures – but it has to be said that Knowles provided extensive printed synopses for her lecture courses. Along with William Cunningham’s Growth of English Industry and Commerce (1890) and Outlines of English Industrial History (1895), her recommended books included W.H.R. Curtler, A Short History of English Agriculture (1909), which Robbins read early in his first term.1 James Drummond Smith, a graduate of the University of Aberdeen, where he had lectured on economics for three years before the war, was a lecturer in commerce at LSE for only four years, leaving in 1924 to go into business. While he was at the School he was president of the students’ Christian Union. He was notionally Lionel’s supervisor in 1920–1; Lionel went to see him only once when ‘on revealing that I had no interest in games, [I] was told that I must come to tea with him one day, an invitation which, to my great relief, never materialized’ (1971a, 76). Abraham Wolf’s Logic course had been a feature of the undergraduate curriculum at LSE since 1905. Reader of Logic and Ethics, he held his post jointly at University College and LSE and continued to give his course at the School until his retirement in 1941. His published work includes several textbooks growing out of his lecture course (Wolf 1919, 1925, 1926, 1930) as well as studies and translations of Spinoza and a history of science, technology and philosophy. Lees-Smith on the British Constitution was another long-running feature: H.B. (Hastings Bernard) Lees-Smith had been on the staff as a lecturer in public administration since 1906. A Liberal member of Parliament in 1910–18, he was later, having joined the Labour Party in 1919, a Labour MP and Postmaster-General in the second Labour government 1929–31. His British Constitution course began with the doctrinal aspects of the subject, with J.S. Mill’s Representative Government (1861) and A.V. Dicey’s Law of the Constitution (8th edition, 1915) as essential reading. In the later part of the term he moved on to the working of the British Cabinet system, party government and Parliament in Britain.2 Robbins received his first teaching in economic theory from Hugh Dalton, who was already active in the Labour Party. (He has long been better known as a Labour MP, a junior minister in the second Labour goverment 1929–31 and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the third Labour government 1945–7.) 1

2

Synopsis for Economic History First Year 1760–Present Day, ms notes ‘Dr Knowles Michaelmas Term Lectures’ and ‘Notes on Curtler’s “A Short History of English Agriculture” ’, RP. Ms notes on ‘The British Constitution – Mr. Lees Smith’ in Public Administration (British). CENTRAL GOVERNMENT. The Constitution (Principles) notebook, RP; ms notes on ‘British Constitution. Prof. Lees Smith’, Plant 152, BLPES.

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Dalton had read economics at King’s College Cambridge in 1906–10 and worked as a research student at LSE before the war. He returned to the School, and joined the staff, in 1919 after serving as an artillery officer on the Italian front. In 1920 he (along with Gregory) became Reader in Commerce following the large benefaction from Sir Ernest Cassel and published his first book on The Inequality of Incomes based on his prewar research. He was an outstanding teacher: With his infectious vitality and his big booming voice, capable of drowning the noise of the cranes and excavators which disturbed the peace of the Bush House [building] site which was then where L.S.E. lectures were held, he could hold the attention of any audience, however miscellaneous. He had a splendid capacity for lucid exposition, with no undue fuss about inessentials and a strong perspective of salient relevant points (‘Lord Dalton’, 19 February 1962, Biographical Papers, RP).

Even after nine decades his lectures – as recorded in the notes of his students – have an appealing freshness and clarity. He was also unstuffy, genuinely interested in his students and readily accessible to them. In the early postwar years he was ‘particularly good at communicating with young men who shared his experience of war and his urgent desire to see that war should not happen again’ (Pimlott 1985, 135). In that first lecture on 8 October 1920 Robbins was introduced to the difficulties of defining the boundaries of economics. According to Plant’s notes (‘Elements of Economics Prof. Dalton’, Plant 153), Dalton gave three definitions of economics: (1) (Cannan) The aim of economics is the explanatn of the general causes on wh. the material welfare of human beings depends. (2) (Marshall) Economics is the study of man’s actions in the ordinary business of life. It enquires how he gets his income & how he uses it. (3) (Clay) Economics is the study of business in its social aspect, the word ‘business’ being used in its broadest sense to cover all lawful ways of making a living.

Comparing them, Dalton criticized Cannan’s definition for equating material welfare and economic welfare. In his second lecture Dalton indicated his attitude to economics, an attitude Robbins found particularly congenial in the state of mind in which he entered the School. Dalton told his students to be open-minded: ‘Be critical of existing organisations: but be equally critical of all plans to alter existing institutions.’ As he explained (in the words of Plant’s notes), ‘The great uncertainty is, how far is the existing system of society adequate, & how can it be made more adequate. In 20 yrs. time it will be different, owing

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to experiments. First we must know all about existing systems, before we can alter them.’ Lectures were the main means of instruction for first year undergraduates. The ‘classes’ were in fact meetings of the lecture audiences where the lecturer or his assistants were available to answer questions. The students were also required to write short essays which were marked by the assistants. In 1920/1 a BSc(Econ) Intermediate student was supposed to write ‘at least five essays in Economic Theory; three each in Geography, Economic History and Public Administration; and one each in Currency and Banking, and Foreign Trade. He should not, however, attempt more than 20 essays or papers altogether on these subjects’, although he (or she) had also to write essays in logic or answer problem papers in mathematics, according to the minutes of the Professorial Council on 28 September 1921.3 In the Michaelmas term 1920 Dalton’s essay topics included: ‘What is economic welfare? Are there any exceptions to the general rule that an increase in econ. welf. is socially desirable?’ and ‘Discuss the adv.s & disadv.s of the division of labour.’ Unfortunately Robbins’s answers to these questions have not survived.4 In his first year at LSE Robbins lived in lodgings at 66 Denbigh Street, Pimlico. Here in the evenings he struggled to write undergraduate essays for the first time since his brief stay at UCL, having lost his youthful selfconfidence and being out of practice. He was still writing poetry, short pieces reflecting unsettled moods. At the end of his first week at LSE he contemplated ‘The Arc Lamp Reflections in the clammy autumnal streets./ An Orange in the dark, flawless pool’. A fortnight later he noted ‘Those pigeons I saw on the pavement/ Stars in my dark mental night’ and commenced a longer poem which began: ‘Here as the lamplight flicks on the whitewashed wall/ An unstable mood is maintained.’5 Some of his poems survived in ‘a sort of diary in which I used to jot down vindictive remarks about the universe’ (LCR to IEG, 27 May 1924). The entries are often obscure, only 3

4

5

The minutes of the Professorial Council (later expanded and renamed the Academic Board), the Court of Governors, the Emergency Committee (later the Standing Committee) which consisted of the director and a few governors, and other School committees are all in LSE MINUTES, BLPES. A few only of Robbins’s undergraduate essays remain in his papers. Some of his notes of Dalton’s ‘Elements’ lectures are there, although he later reorganized his lecture notes, reading notes and early drafts of papers in economics together in notebooks for particular topics (eg wages, population, capital). The lecture courses he attended, and the marks he received for some of his essays, are recorded in his LSE Student’s Dossier. The pieces are dated ‘9.20’, ‘23.10.20’ and ‘24.10.20’; the third uncompleted poem is reproduced with changes of punctuation in Robbins (1971a, 90).

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occasionally dated, and some have been obliterated or torn out, but they do record meetings with friends – and present a somewhat different picture of Robbins’s undergraduate days from that he portrayed in his autobiography. In his first months at the School he concentrated on his work. He read avidly, and much more than he needed to pass the Intermediate examinations, as he realized later. At the time of his twenty-second birthday he was ‘finding it all I can do to keep up with the day to day work of the class. The four year break is not so easy to surmount as I had hoped.’ At the same time he decided not to take advantage of the exemption from two papers he had just discovered his war service would allow: he wanted to get as much as he could out of his three years and knew he needed the spur of examinations to do so (LCR to Mother, November 1920). He continued, however, to see a good deal of his closest friends – Gardiner, Lawson, Rose, Davidge and Isaacs – and once he had survived his first term he began to spend more time outside lectures with his fellow students. Lawson returned from the Netherlands at the end of 1920, with a retainer from his employers in Haarlem, to continue to work in the film industry in London. He had decided to become a Roman Catholic and, having learned from John Polimeni of the Dominicans’ priory on Haverstock Hill, he was received into the Catholic Church by Father John-Baptist Reeves in February 1921. He then decided he wanted to become a lay-brother in the Dominican Order. Father J-B vetoed this for the time being but found him some editorial work for a Dominican house journal; when Father J-B moved to Oxford Reggie moved there in the summer of 1921. A year later he arranged for Reggie to join Eric Gill’s community at Ditchling Common, Sussex (Ginger 1991, 56–62). Lionel, on the other hand, was now settling comfortably into agnosticism. As he commented in his diary early in his second year at LSE, ‘One vindication of Agnosticism – If a god be worth believing in, it were a sin against him as much as against ourselves to believe in him before we have adequate proofs of his existence.’ Before Reggie went to Oxford he and Lionel were frequent companions, going to the circus at Olympia in January 1921, visiting the Misses Horton and Monk, going to dances. And, as Lionel enjoyed ‘communicating to others my rather naive enthusiasm on discovering things . . . I always used to talk more “shop” with Reggie than anyone else’ (LCR to IEG, 24 June 1924). Lionel was still a socialist. He was no longer convinced of the virtues of guild socialism, but Nathan Isaacs was nonetheless surprised he did not attend the special National Guilds League conference in December 1920 (Isaacs to LCR, ‘Thursday evening’ [16 December 1920], Personal letters from Iris & Clive etc, RP). He had serious doubts about the British labour

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movement but he still believed in the desirability of an alternative to the capitalist system. By his own account he ‘Read every book [he could] lay hands on. Went [to] every lecture [and] discussion’ (‘Socialism’, Essays on Trade and the Depression, RP). The LSE student magazine, Clare Market Review, reported that the Socialist Society was revived in the Lent term 1921 with David Goodfellow as secretary, after inactivity in the Michaelmas term. Cole came to speak in March 1921; Orage and Douglas both promised to speak and did so later in the year. Basil Bunting organized a London University Social Credit study circle (Finlay 1972, 231, 250). Of one Socialist Society meeting Lionel wrote, cryptically, in his diary, ‘A meeting. Bunting and “absolute dictatorship”. The reassuring effect of proper names. Mr Tcherniakoff and the moon. Mr Goodfellow and the decay of empire. Coffee afterwards. I become “almost human”.’ Goodfellow and David Tcherniakoff were both fellow students for the BSc(Econ) Intermediate of whom Lionel saw a good deal during his first year.6 Lionel and Nathan Isaacs spent many long evenings together, often also with Joe Pole and Phoebe Rickards (later Mrs Pole). Nathan would argue for hours on philosophy – especially epistemology and scientific methodology judging by the comments in Robbins’s ‘diary’. Other evenings were spent with George Davidge: of one (unknown) episode with George and Elsie May his girlfriend, Lionel wrote that he was ‘so shaken out of my skin that I was almost natural – at any rate I have the recollection of being extremely and quite genuinely affable’. Passing Denbigh Street eighteen months later George remembered, ‘What a variety of queer things happened there, like parts of the threads of a Dostoieffsky novel.’ By then Davidge had unfortunately failed his finals at East London College and taken up supply teaching for the London County Council until he found a more permanent position, first at a private school in Margate in 1922 and later at an elementary school in Dover (Davidge to LCR, nd but probably autumn 1922, and other letters written in 1921–3 in Personal letters from Iris & Clive etc, RP). In the Lent and Summer terms 1921 the main lectures for first year students reading for the Intermediate examination continued. By the end of the Michaelmas term Knowles had reached the industrial revolution, LeesSmith was still talking about the UK parliamentary system, and Dalton had just started on the theory of value. Dalton had devoted a good deal of 6

Tcherniakoff, who had ‘strong communist leanings’ as a student, later earned a (poor) living teaching languages to Foreign Office officials: LCR to Carr-Saunders, 23 June 1952, Director Correspondence April 1946–Dec 54, RP. Goodfellow became a lecturer in economic history at the University of Cape Town (Goodfellow 1931).

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his first term’s lectures to explaining what economists mean by wealth and income, production, labour and productivity before discussing one of his favourite topics – population – including the determinants of the size of a population and the question of an optimum size of population. The lectures had become more technical at the end of term when Dalton introduced price theory.7 On 14 January Dalton opened the new term’s lectures by setting an essay ‘Is taxation in proportion to income taxation according to ability to pay?’ and spent the rest of that and most of the next lecture discussing the concept of saving. Marshallian supply and demand curves appeared in the third lecture of the term, followed a week later by competition and monopoly (with diagrams to illustrate monopoly pricing). The determinations of wages, interest and rent were then treated as applications of the theory of value in five lectures in February and March 1921, before Dalton turned to another favourite, the distribution of income. He continued with income distribution and the causes of inequality for the first five weeks of the Summer term and ended the course with four lectures on ‘Money’ – mainly a Marshallian treatment of the quantity theory of money and the price level. The final lecture on 24 June was a rushed affair concluding the discussion on exchange-rate determination and international trade (‘Elements of Economics Prof. Dalton’, Plant 153; LCR notes in ‘Distribution Earnings – Wages’ and ‘Economic Theory. Distribution’ notebook, RP). Lionel’s notebooks indicate that of Dalton’s recommended textbooks he read the American economist F.W. Taussig’s Principles of Economics as well as the introductory books by Edwin Cannan, Wealth and Money. Lees-Smith meanwhile had been concentrating on the ‘imperial aspects’ of the British Constitution – discussing federalism and the government of India, Egypt, Canada, Australia and South Africa and setting essays on ‘What light does the British Empire throw upon the problems of Federalism?’ and ‘What are the chief differences between the Federal Constitution of Canada and that of Australia?’ – until he returned to the workings of British central government in the middle of the Summer term. In the Lent term he also gave a shorter course on local government, covering the duties and responsibilities of the English local authorities, especially in education, health and the poor law (‘British Constitution. Prof. Lees Smith’, Plant 152, ‘Local Government. Prof. Lees-Smith M.A.’, Plant 241). Knowles continued with the industrialization of Britain in the Lent term. In the Summer 7

‘Elements of Economics Prof. Dalton’, Plant 153. LCR’s notes for Dalton’s lectures on population are in a notebook labelled: ‘Economic Theory. Production: Mechanics History of the Term Labour Land and Population’.

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term she dealt with nineteenth-century factory and health legislation, the history of trade unionism and poor law legislation, and Britain’s move to free trade (printed syllabuses, Economic History: The Growth of English Industry Lectures by Dr. Knowles Lent Term and Economic History: First Year Summer Term, RP). Lionel also attended Gregory’s lectures on foreign trade and the foreign exchanges in the Lent term and his lectures on The Elements of Currency and Banking in the Summer term. From these he learnt a good deal of recent monetary history as well as the organization of the UK financial system. The issues Gregory raised were certainly topical. The pound sterling had been defined as a weight of silver, then of gold. Since 1914 it had been merely a piece of paper, in the form of a currency note issued by the UK Treasury. In 1918 the Cunliffe Committee on Currency and Foreign Exchanges after the War had recommended the restoration of an effective gold standard, and the phasing out of the Treasury notes, but the timing of the return had not been settled in 1921. By the vacation Lionel was ‘in very high spirits’. The term had been ‘ever so much more successful than last, from the work point of view at any rate, and in every subject but one I am now more or less up to date. I have made a good many new acquaintances lately as well and no longer find the School unsociable – indeed my chief difficulty is to contrive to turn down half the invitations etc. I receive without being offensive’ (LCR to Mother, 18 March 1921). Reggie Lawson was best man when Clive Gardiner married Lilian Lancaster at Easter 1921. After their marriage they held regular Saturday evening parties at 67a Marloes Road, Kensington. Of the people whom Lionel met at these and other gatherings his diary mentions, besides his old friends, Helen Rowe and a formidable and eccentric Miss George. Helen Rowe was a friend of the painter Nina Hamnett; Bunting was in love with her and may have lived with her for a short time. But, as Lionel recorded in his diary, by 1921 she had a child by Dr Hans Egli, who was also at LSE in 1919–21 and whom she married. Lionel did not identify her husband, but Bunting did when he wrote to Ezra Pound in December 1926. She was a fine writer, Bunting told Pound, ‘who was about to do good work, when she got married, produced three infants and became so taken up with domestic duties that I doubt whether she will ever make time to do anything.’8 Miss George is described (in Robbins’s ‘diary’ in early 1921) as disliking poetry 8

Information from Hamnett (1932, 322); Alldritt (1998, 27, where she is mistakenly called ‘Helen Moore’); Obituaries, LSE Magazine, Winter 2000, 38; and Bunting to Pound, 2 December 1926, Pound Collection, Beinecke Library.

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and having a hard head; a couple of years later, when she was a frequent guest at Clive and Lilian’s on Saturday evenings but still referred to as Miss George, Lionel remarked that he ‘could listen to [her] for almost ever’. By that time she had been speculating in the German mark, was contemplating attending lectures at LSE to learn more about finance and ‘had just written a prose tragedy’ (LCR to IEG, 7 October, 3 and 10 November 1923). Of women of his own age there is no mention in the diary that survives. In the Summer term Robbins was more confident and more cheerful than he had been when he entered LSE six months earlier. Less often did he find himself with ‘a mind suddenly paralyzed like my arm’, enjoying in May ‘A day of ecstatic mental clarity – Oh life giving sun’, although he recorded ‘dejection’ on 1 June (entries in his ‘diary’). Before the exams he was ‘rather tired’ and took himself off for a long weekend at the White Horse in Rottingdean to finish his revision. He passed the Intermediate examination in July without difficulty: before the results came out he thought he had not done badly in any subject except geography (which had bored him) (LCR to RRR, 30 June and 15 July 1921). Of ninety-five candidates sixty passed, including Bunting by dint of borrowing Lionel’s lecture notes (Professorial Council 28 September 1921; Robbins 1971a, 76). Lionel now had to decide on the subjects he would specialize in for the BSc(Econ) Final Honours course. He told his father on 15 July that he was thinking of taking the History of Political Ideas: ‘not perhaps so practical as some of the others but it is certainly more fitted to whatever specialized capacity I may possess . . . I feel that it is a subject at which I can work wholeheartedly and I have come to think that it is foolish to be “disobedient to the Heavenly vision”.’ In the meantime he was going to take a short holiday with Eddie and George before settling down at Hollycroft to try to learn German and ‘the easier forms of elementary mathematics’ during the vacation. Until its first reform the Final examination consisted of three compulsory papers in economics, history and public administration, two essay papers and four papers on one of ten special subjects. For the examination which Robbins would take in October 1923, the scheme was three compulsory papers in economics, one of which was an essay paper, one required paper in each of history and political science (political theory and public administration) and three in the candidate’s special subject. There was a language requirement: one of the papers in the special subject consisted of passages from French and German works for translation and comment (LSE Calendars 1921–2 and 1922–3). Robbins’s friends Plant and Goodfellow both took Economic History as their special subject, as had Benham and Caine a year earlier; Kahane (also a year earlier), Bunting and Tcherniakoff chose

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Banking and Currency (Professorial Council 28 September 1921). Lionel chose the History of Political Ideas in spite of his enthusiasm for Dalton’s lectures and his interest in finance as taught by Gregory. He would have to take plenty of economics and currency and banking anyway, and, as he put it in the 1930s, he was still searching for the holy grail of ‘a body of serious thinkers or at any rate literature justifying confidence [in the socialist] diagnosis & the absence of reservations [in the] remedies suggested to ignorant followers’ (‘Socialism’, Essays on Trade and the Depression, RP). Still later (1971a, 80) he explained his choice as ‘offer[ing] more scope for the wide reading of the great international literature in which the leading minds of the past had explored the possibilities of alternative patterns of political society’. It was also the case that his marks in essays for Knowles and Lees-Smith had been better than those in economics. As there were only five lectures a week (plus some classes) for the compulsory papers there were plenty of choices to be made of other lectures to attend. The possibilities were increased by the fact that most lecture courses were delivered twice, in the day and in the evening. Robbins’s choices meant that in each of the two years he read a good deal of economic theory, of history, economic and political, and of political philosophy; in his second year he took public administration from both Lees-Smith and Wallas; and in his third year he went to Gregory’s advanced courses in currency and banking. For his second year at LSE Lionel found himself ‘an exceedingly clean, convenient and inexpensive, unfurnished room’ at 94a Guilford Street, just south of Mecklenburg Square. He was to live there for three years. It was on the top floor of ‘a five storey basement lodging house’, which has since been demolished. (The building was on the site of what is now Goodenough College.) From his window he had a view of brick walls and water piping and above them the ‘gentle and gracious . . . foliage’ of the plane trees in Mecklenburg Square. He had a gas-fire (with a meter) but no bath; a housekeeper cleaned the rooms and provided breakfast for each of the lodgers. By January 1922 he was well ensconced and had bought fabric so that his sister Caroline could make curtains for him. He had also acquired a ticket to the Reading Room of the British Museum.9 He was quite comfortable living on the money his father had given him for his three years at LSE: he admitted to himself (‘Property I Autobiographical Preface’, RP) that ‘I like good clothes and enjoy motoring when I can get it but I do not 9

LCR to RRR, 28 September 1921, 14 and 31 January 1922. His LSE Student’s Dossier provides the address; a diary entry the view; and the description of the accommodation comes from ‘Property, I Autobiographical Preface’, RP, and LCR to IEG, 24 October 1923.

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crave for it’ and would have liked to buy more books but could manage quite well with the British Museum Library near at hand. Looking further ahead (from June 1922) he thought he would be ‘quite happy so far as material comfort goes if by teaching and writing articles and books now and then I can make up my income to about £500 p.a. I should like to keep a horse and a good cupboard of still wines but I shall not grieve unduly without them.’ At weekends he often went home to Hollycroft – and there, as his sister Nancy remembered, he enjoyed the central heating and the bath tub. In the summer of 1921 there occurred the socalled ‘great betrayal’ of the farmers by the Lloyd George government which, having promised the farmers guaranteed minimum prices for wheat and oats in the Agriculture Act 1920, walked away from its promise at the moment it was to take effect and introduced a bill to repeal the Act. The government hoped to buy off the farmers by offering deficiency payments for the current harvest of wheat and oats which would be somewhat lower than those which would have been paid under the Act, as well as by abolishing the Agricultural Wages Board with its power to set a national minimum agricultural wage (Whetham 1974, 45–9). As president of the NFU Lionel’s father was approached by the Minister of Agriculture, now Sir Arthur Griffith-Boscawen, as early as May 1921, to try to find a basis for an agreement. At a secret meeting in June, Robbins bluntly told him: ‘Although you have admitted that having regard to the changed circumstances in which the Government find themselves today, the Government find themselves in a hopelessly weak position, our position with the Government is pretty strong. . . . You remember I said I hoped I should find you in a very generous mood when we met. The whole thing depends on what you are prepared to offer. . . . We are hoping you will pay 19/- in the £.’10 A special NFU Council meeting on 22 June congratulated Robbins ‘for the most able way he had looked after their interests’ (NFU AD1/3). As Griffith-Boscawen (1925, 236) remarked, ‘The fact is that many farmers were more anxious to be free from control than they were to have the subsidy.’ The results – grants of £4 per acre for oats and £3 per acre for wheat plus £1 m for education and research – were announced at the 20 July Council meeting, when Robbins reported on the continuing difficult negotiations over the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board, which the 10

Minutes of a Conference with the National Farmers’ Union held in the Minister’s Room at 10, Whitehall Place, S.W. on Tuesday, 7th June, 1921, at 3 p.m., MAF53/12, TNA. PenningRowsell (1997) pointed out that ‘if anyone, it was the farm worker who was betrayed by a secret deal between the government and the National Farmers Union which paid farmers a bounty in exchange for their acceptance of the policy reversal. Farm workers received nothing in compensation for the demise of the Wages Board.’

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farmers wanted but the farmworkers did not. The strain told on him: at the Council meeting on 24 August it was reported that he was seriously ill (NFU AD1/3). It was some months before he was fully recovered. A short convalescence at Folkestone in September 1921 was not enough and he was eventually persuaded to take a holiday in the south of France in January and February 1922 (LCR to RRR, 27 and 28 September 1921; AGM 1 February 1922, NFU AD1/4). While his father and stepmother were away Lionel went down at weekends to Hollycroft where the younger children were being looked after by one of their aunts. He wrote his parents in January 1922 that he ‘spen[t] all day and a good part of the evening at the School nowadays . . . Apart from work which daily becomes more fascinating nothing much of any importance has happened [there].’ On 4 February he told them: ‘I have been working very hard at Economic theory lately: the amount of work to be done sometimes seems overwhelming but I suppose I make some progress. Laski’s classes provide the most entertaining diversion but for the most part I find myself in substantial agreement with him so that they are not so stimulating as they might be if I really detested his principles. Clive is away every weekend nowadays so I see nothing of him and Reggie’s work absorbs every moment between waking and sleeping – even on Sundays when he distributes Catholic literature.’ On 6 March he reported to his father that he was ‘extremely fit but very busy with a new essay on Ultramontanism which has to be finished by next Thursday’ and on the 14th that ‘After an Homeric struggle against time I finished my paper . . . and read it before the History class . . . It was quite well received and as a piece of writing I think it is probably the best thing I have done.’ The centrepiece of economics teaching for the Final of the BSc(Econ) in the early 1920s was the two-year course on the Principles of Economics given by the Professor of Political Economy, Edwin Cannan. Cannan had been teaching at the School since its foundation, although he lived in Oxford where he had been a student at Balliol, and had been professor since 1907. To Robbins in his first year ‘old Cannan’ was ‘a short, bearded man in exceedingly shabby clothes [seen] threading his way through the refectory to his seat at high table’. At the beginning of his second year, on 4 October 1921, he attended one of Cannan’s lectures for the first time (Robbins 1935f, 393–4). For some reason or other he was wearing his doctor’s cap: . . . The cap was perched at a jaunty angle on his head and his mood was in harmony with the cap. The lecture dealt with the Physiocratic theory of distribution. Cantillon, Mercier de la Rivi`ere, Dupont de Nemours, Quesnay, all pronounced in a highly anglicised

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manner . . . rapidly appeared on the stage without any preliminary comment. Passages were read aloud, much too rapidly for assimilation and annotation. . . . Followed a lengthy and not always audible discussion of the derivation and uses of the word distribution. All sorts of people had used it in different senses. It was not quite clear at the time which sense the lecturer favoured. And so on. I was in complete despair and so were the rest of us who were beginning. But the third-year people who had already had a year of it appeared to be highly edified. So . . . we kept on. It was not easy.

One problem was that Cannan mumbled into his beard – but this could be overcome by sitting in the front two rows with the third year students as Robbins soon learned to do. Another was that Cannan always ‘went straight to the point whether simple or difficult. There was no preliminary statement of what he proposed to do. No summary of what he had done. He expected you to find that out for yourself.’ And it was a two-year course, the first devoted to Production and Value, the second to Distribution: if you came in in a Distribution year, as Robbins did, you were implicitly assumed to be acquainted with the previous year’s lectures on Production and Value. Lionel got round this problem in the Easter vacation when he borrowed Frederic Benham’s notes, ‘collated them with my own, copied out the passages from the classics I had missed and wrote the whole thing out up to date in longhand. Then daylight began to appear.’ Robbins’s notebooks survive: they are indeed neatly written, in the handwriting he adopted near the end of 1921, and they are interspersed with notes on his reading of recommended books and articles.11 Cannan’s lectures were very different in their scope and intention from the standard textbooks of his day, such as Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics. He was concerned mainly with critical examination of the theories of the English classical economists, especially Adam Smith but also Ricardo, Malthus and J.S. Mill, and discussed the origins of the concepts of economic theory in their work at length before outlining modern theory in a nontechnical way (no diagrams or other mathematics). Hence the focus was ‘not an elaboration of the working of the price system as we would expect from a survey course in economic theory . . . [but] instead a re-examination of Adam Smith’s central theme – “the origin and causes of the wealth of nations”’ though with more concern than Smith had for the question of the distribution of wealth (Bernard Corry, ‘Introduction’, Cannan 1964, xvi). 11

The notes are almost never dated; but the change of handwriting, when he dropped the ε’s adopted while working for Greenwood, can be dated from his notes of another course of lectures he attended that year (Wolf on the History of Philosophy) which show the change in handwriting occurred between 17 November and 15 December 1921.

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However, since his references to Marshall were almost as frequent as those to Smith and Mill his students had to come to terms with the Principles if only to understand Cannan’s criticisms. Lionel inherited Cannan’s interest in the history of economic thought but fortunately not his lecturing style. Offering his son Richard advice on lecturing many years later he told him to do everything Cannan had not done: to plan each lecture in advance, to be clear at the outset on the main points to be covered, to recapitulate the last lecture before beginning the next and so on (LCR to Richard Robbins, nd but 1946 or 1947). Harold Laski, who supervised the special subject in the History of Political Ideas, was born in Manchester in 1893. Educated at Manchester Grammar School and New College Oxford, he had been on the faculty at Harvard for six years before he came to LSE in 1920. He had made his name as a political theorist with three books (1917, 1919, 1920) and was about to publish his fourth (1921). He was a man of the left, although not as far to the left of the Labour Party as he became in the 1930s. A pluralist in political philosophy, he had been sympathetic to guild socialist ideas. When Robbins met him for supervision, in the autumn of 1921, Laski gave him a list of about a hundred standard works on political thought, a large number of which provided Robbins’s main reading in the next two years. The reading was more important than Laski’s lectures, judging from the contents of Robbins’s notebooks. Other, later students have remembered Laski’s lectures as ‘always memorable for starting with phrases such as “Well, I just saw the PM yesterday”’ (Nadine Marshall reported by Berg 1996, 155). Robbins attended the lectures on the History of Political Ideas required for all BSc(Econ) Final students, which in 1921/2 Laski offered in the Lent and Summer terms. In only fifteen lectures the course was to cover, according to the LSE Calendar, Greek and Roman political ideas, the political ideas of the early Church, mediaeval political ideas, the Reformation, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, the French Revolution and the nineteenth century. There was also a class in the subject in the same terms. A few of Robbins’s essays for Laski survive in draft. One of the first was on ‘The Press and public opinion’ – a paper full of pretentious remarks apparently designed to provoke class discussion – where he criticized the press for deliberately confusing opinion and facts. Another written later in the Michaelmas term 1921 on ‘The Greek theory of slavery’ was more scholarly and less gratuitously provocative.12 12

Both papers are in one of his Political Science notebooks which is labelled ‘Student Essays’. The earlier is in the ‘Greenwood’ hand, as is a mention of the slavery essay in his diary, but the latter is in his later hand.

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The required history courses were Knowles’s second and third year courses in economic history and L.G. Robinson’s course in European political history. In her second year course, The Growth of English Commerce and Colonisation with special reference to the period after 1846, Knowles developed her favourite themes such as the expansion of the British empire through trade and emigration. In her third year course, The Economic Position of the Great Powers, she discussed the economic development of France, Germany, Russia and the United States (printed syllabuses in RP). Robinson, on The Political Position of the Great Powers, discussed the same countries over roughly the same period. Robinson was new to lecturing in 1921 – ‘he was nervous – even clumsy – and obviously ill at ease’ – and he did not become a good lecturer. He was, however, an excellent tutor, who when offering encouragement or criticism ‘knew just what to say and when to say it’. Robbins remembered him as the first teacher to give him encouragement and the first to give him really helpful criticism (1958d, 26–7). The occasion was his first essay in political history, the one on ‘Ultramontanism’ that he mentioned to his father, on which Robinson wrote: ‘An exceedingly good paper, remarkable alike for its wide sweep & grasp & for its freedom from excessive detail. My only possible quarrel is with your style, which tends at time[s] to become involved & unpleasant to read, through the telescoping of too many ideas into one sentence.’ Lionel conceded this last was ‘Quite true!’ Robinson was more critical of a second essay on the same topic, but he admitted that this ‘does not alter the impression of wide reading & thought’ and gave him high marks for both papers: 90 and 85 per cent.13 The mediaeval historian Eileen Power also arrived at LSE in 1921. As an undergraduate at Girton she had taken the Cambridge history tripos in 1910, studied at the Sorbonne for one year and LSE for two, and been a fellow and tutor at Girton. She was an excellent lecturer (Berg 1996). Lionel attended, by choice, her lectures on Mediaeval Economic History 13

Ultramontanism and Ultramontanism in the XIXth Century – Later Developments, Youthful Miscellanea, RP. The attraction of the topic may be seen in one of LCR’s reading notes: ‘Ultramontanism. It is among these ideas that we have to look for the representation in their most direct logical uncompromising and unmistakable form of those theological ways of regarding life and prescribing right conduct whose more or less rapidly accelerated destruction is the first condition of the further elevation of humanity, as well as in power of understanding as in morals and spirituality. Morley. De Maistre.’ Robinson, later Dean of Graduate Studies, is the Robinson of the ‘Robinson Room’ at LSE known to generations of students since the 1960s.

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and on the History of the Modern World in 1921/2 and on the History of the Modern East the following year when he also heard her colleague R.H. Tawney on Economic History from 1485 (LSE Student’s Dossier; World History to 1815, History of the Modern East and Economic History since 1485 notebooks, RP). In 1921/2 he also registered for two short courses on historical geography given by the noted geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, but he did not attend many of the lectures. Lionel’s additional courses in 1921/2 included Wolf on general psychology and on the history of philosophy, attending the latter from the beginning up to Locke, Hume and Kant.14 When it came to Public Administration, Robbins chose to attend, in his second year, Lees-Smith on Central Government which was a continuation of the first year course on the British Constitution. One of the more interesting portions of the course was on proposals for devolution of government, where guild socialism was discussed at length (‘Central Government – Mr Lees Smith’, ‘Main proposals for the reform of the constitution’, ‘Devolution’, ‘Functional Devolution’, and ‘Referendum etc’, RP; ‘Central Govt. & Public Adminn ’, Plant 152). The recommended course in public administration for Honours students not specializing in the subject was taught jointly by Lees-Smith, Beveridge and Wallas. Robbins also went to Wallas’s year-long advanced course on local government. Wallas was one of the three teachers who most impressed Robbins as an undergraduate – the others being Dalton and Cannan. He had been Professor of Political Science since 1914. An early member of the Fabian Society, he had resigned in 1904 over its support for protection. He had served for many years before the war on the London School Board and the London County Council and its Education Committee. He was ‘nothing if not empirical, pragmatic, utilitarian’ and, the son of an Evangelical clergyman, ‘had not painfully rejected one theology only to put another in its place and never invested socialism with the omnipotent and providential overtones of a religion’ (Clarke 1978, 30 and 37). Robbins thought Wallas’s Human Nature in Politics (1908) had ‘more influence on my way of thinking – (not my thought) than any book not excluding Cannan’s Wealth’ and also remembered it as ‘very entertaining reading’ (LCR to IEG, 6 May 1924). 14

Ms notes ‘History of Philosophy. Dr Wolf ’, RP. The syllabus in the LSE Calendar for the history of philosophy included ‘Hegel, Schopenhauer and subsequent tendencies’: Wolf may not have reached that topic in his lectures or LCR may have decided he was sufficiently acquainted with Schopenhauer et al, having been introduced to them by Eddie Rose at school.

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According to Basil Bunting (Williams 1968, 7) Wallas was an ‘inspired’ lecturer. ‘He could make any subject interesting. The result was that if they had to get across something which nobody on earth could be expected to take any interest in, they gave it to Graham Wallas to teach. And he would begin with a class of five and by the end of the first term he would have a hundred fighting to get into the room. I remember a series of lectures on the history of the internal organization of the War Office which began and ended that way!’ Robbins explained (1971a, 87–8): His delivery was easy and informal, utterly free from any tricks of rhetoric or declamation. Yet from the moment he began to speak, he held his audience fixed as, I suppose, the greatest preachers held their congregations in the ages of faith; . . . His main platform in my day was a sessional course on the History of Local Government . . . As he unfolded the evolution of the main institutions, their roots in ancient custom, their susceptibility to sinister interest, the hopes and fears of reformers, the thrilling process of historical experimentation and invention, you felt that the whole political drama of man in society was being played before your eyes.

As well as having had practical experience of local government, he was an authority on Bentham and the Philosophical Radicals: ‘by showing the part they played in the reform of particular institutions he was able to present a never-to-be-forgotten picture of the effectiveness of ideas in action.’ In 1922 the School introduced an end-of-year examination for the second year students. Lionel organized a petition from ‘most of the second year students’ against it. The examination was held but the results, which did not count towards the degree, were not published (Professorial Council 22 March 1922; Robbins 1980b, 41). As he told his father at the time, Lionel passed with the equivalent of First Class Honours. The Summer Term 1922 issue of the LSE student magazine, Clare Market Review, was edited by the Executive Committee of the Students’ Union, the previous editor having resigned suddenly. Its usual opening editorial ‘Poleconia’ appeared over the initials LCR, arguing for the abolition of compulsory lectures. On this issue the academic staff were divided: at about this time another student heard Dalton arguing for the compulsory system because ‘the lecturer was put more on his mettle; he had to justify himself to his class. In the voluntary system there was no spur; the lecturer might find his numbers falling, but that need not worry him, because he might then hope that he would have no class to lecture to at all’ (Hargreaves 1973, 52). Robbins (1922) argued for the voluntary system: For our own part . . . whatever is done we should like to see the word “Compulsory” abolished. It would only be a revolution on paper, after all, but it

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would be a revolution which would considerably add to our self-respect. For nobody – even lecturers – really believes that you can compel a student to take a lecture. If he does not like it he merely enters the room in which the lecture is taking place, but does other work, or writes poems, surreptiously. All the removal of the obligation would entail would be that he no longer went through the hypocritical process of being present in body. He would be freer to concentrate upon “the other work” and – possibly – the poems would be better written. The lecturer, too, would have the satisfaction of feeling that he was addressing himself to students who came to his lectures because they thought them worth while attending.

Robbins mentioned neither the student magazine nor the union in his autobiography. In fact in his last eighteen months as an undergraduate he was actively involved in both. By the beginning of his second year Arnold Plant was junior treasurer of the union and David Goodfellow on the executive committee; by the end of that year Plant was senior treasurer and Robbins was on the executive committee along with other friends including Georg Tugendhat. Plant became President of the Students’ Union in 1922/3, and in that year at least Robbins spoke at Union meetings: ‘Even then he had a most impressive voice and presence, combined with great verbal facility’, according to a newly arrived Canadian student, Lauchlin Currie (Currie 1986, 21; Sandilands 1990, 14). He was a frequent contributor to Clare Market Review in 1922/3 and assistant editor for a term in 1923/4. Tugendhat had arrived in London from Vienna in April 1921, ‘the School’s first ex-enemy alien post-graduate student’ (Tugendhat 1961, 11). A little less than a year older than Robbins, he had studied at the University of Vienna after war service with the Austrian army; while he was a research student in economics at LSE he became the London correspondent for the Viennese newspaper Neue Frei Presse. As secretary to a committee of which Beveridge was chairman he helped to organize the first annual Vienna International Summer School, which was ‘to give students and lecturers from the countries of Europe the chance to meet on mutual ground and to disseminate and discuss the achievements in history, philosophy, art, music, literature, political economy and law in the various countries’ in September 1922. Robbins advertized it in his editorial in Clare Market Review: ‘We heartily commend to every “good European” . . . this opportunity of visiting one of their intellectual capitals’. Robbins went to Vienna with Kahane and Tugendhat, meeting up there with another research student, Gaganvihari Mehta. Mehta, a graduate of Bombay University interested in sociology and politics rather than economics, had come to LSE to study under Laski. He and Robbins had met in a vegetarian restaurant in the spring. Mehta returned to India early in 1923

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because of ill health, but he and Lionel corresponded for years while Mehta worked as an assistant editor of the Bombay Chronicle in 1923–5 and then for the Scindia Steam Navigation Company. After Indian independence he went into public service, initially as president of the Tariff Board; he served as India’s Ambassador to the United States in 1952–8. The two men met quite frequently in London after 1947.15 At the Summer School the lectures, ‘mainly in the field of Economics, Law and Politics, and History, with special (but not sole) reference to the problems of Central Europe’, were given by faculty of the University of Vienna, some in English, some in German, and by a few English lecturers including Beveridge and Gregory. The proceedings included a reception at the Foreign Office where the students could visit the rooms where the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the ultimatum to Serbia in 1914 had been signed. Sixty-two students from England attended (Vienna International Summer School, September 7th–21st 1922, Report of the British Advisory Committee, Beveridge X2). For Lionel the Summer School was only part of a ‘memorable continental tour . . . [which] not only cemented three lifelong friendships but also inaugurated for me, through Tugendhat’s delightful family and their circle, a love-affair with Vienna, its setting and its culture’ which lasted until 1938 (1971a, 91). Kahane, Robbins and Tugendhat left London at the end of July, crossing overnight to The Hague, where they visited the Mauritshuis ‘to see Rembrandts – the very finest in the world – and Vermeers – three very good – and to ignore a multiplicity of dogs, rabbits, grapes, pigs and cut flowers which also adorn the walls.’ In the afternoon they took a train to Scheveningen – ‘a kind of Dutch Brighton only more so’ – where they swam, and the next day they went on to Amsterdam for the day. Lionel was not ‘so completely carried off [his] feet’ by the Rembrandts in the Rijksmuseum as he had been by those in the Mauritshuis but he ‘found a beautiful Rubens, several more Vermeers . . . and some excellent Van Gogh in the modern section’, although in general ‘Dutch art does not really attract me very much’ (LCR to RRR, 1 and 15 August 1922). The three young men took a week to travel across Germany by train, stopping at Dusseldorf, Cologne, Frankfurt and Heidelberg. In Dusseldorf they spent the day ‘in a vain hunt for some C´ezannes which I had heard were to be in some public collection there. Altogether we visited five galleries chock full of the very worst modern German paintings’ and saw a good deal of the town as a result. In Heidelberg Lionel was ‘not really very interested 15

Information from Mehta (1967); Robbins (1975b); Mehta to LCR, 11 February 1947, and R.S. Bhatt to LCR, 18 May 1974, Dead Friends, and Mehta’s letters to LCR 1922–6, Letters from Economists 1946– [sic], RP.

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in this “castled hill and forest glade” type of landscape’ but ‘as a quiet resting place Heidelberg was quite delightful’. Crossing Lake Constance by boat, they stayed a couple of days in Bregenz after unexpectedly finding Tugendhat’s parents waiting for them on the quay. They eventually arrived in Salzburg on 11 August after an eighteen-hour journey in an overcrowded carriage, ‘dirty hungry and absolutely exhausted’ (LCR to RRR, 15 August 1922). Robbins and Kahane (Tugendhat went on to Vienna ahead of them) spent ten days in Salzburg. During the day they made excursions, to Hellbrunn (the former summer residence of the Salzburg prince-archbishops) and into the Salzkammergut, while in the evening they enjoyed the third Salzburg Festival which opened on 13 August. The p`ıece de resistance of the festival that year was four Mozart operas, The Marriage of Figaro, The Abduction from the Seraglio, Don Giovanni and Cosi Fan Tutte, conducted by Richard Strauss. Jacques and Lionel heard these from front-row seats thanks to the depreciation of the Austrian schilling (Robbins 1971a, 264). Lionel told his father that ‘The Mozarts were very enjoyable – I sometimes think the most heinous offence for which you will have to answer in the next world will be that you have never seen one: they are fresh and pure like the smile on the face of a child or the dew on a spray of roses – Strauss the German composer conducted and the music was excellent.’ He and Kahane also saw the ‘Great World Theatre’ of Hugo von Hoffmanstal performed in the old collegiate church of the university but he found this imitation morality play ‘vulgar and sophisticated [sic] and . . . only interesting as a spectacle of how far a decadent art may sink when it is entirely imitative’. When Lionel wrote to his father on 29 August, after a week in Vienna, he had found a room in an apartment building round a quiet treed courtyard off the Weidner Hauptstrasse. He was studying German at least six hours a day: ‘In the morning I study German grammar and read the newspapers with the aid of a dictionary. In the afternoon I go for a walk with one of the younger lecturers at the University: he teaches me German and I try to teach him English, we manage somehow . . . Then in the evening I either pay calls or come back here to work.’ The rest of his long letter was devoted to the phenomenon of hyperinflation and its effect on the exchange rate – the currency had depreciated by nearly 50 per cent in the fortnight since Lionel had arrived in Austria – and explaining it in terms of the quantity theory of money and speculation in the exchange market. He concluded by commenting on the current proposal for an international loan to Austria: ‘Here they want a loan of £15 mill. which they say would enable them to balance their budget for three years, after which time normal conditions

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having returned they say they would carry on themselves. . . . One would feel safer however if the budget were in the hands of Englishmen – even of the Coalition variety.’ In October 1922 the Lloyd George coalition government finally broke up. The Conservative and Unionist MP Bonar Law became Prime Minister and called a general election which was held in November. The Conservatives were returned with a sizeable majority and the number of Labour MPs more than doubled (from 59 in 1918 to 142 including Lees-Smith of the LSE staff). When the election – the first in which Lionel was old enough to vote – was announced Lionel lunched with his father, curious to hear his views. He himself thought ‘the Labour people are going to be disappointed. . . . I suppose you are not standing? If Law had had the glimmerings of common sense he would have offered you the Ministry of Agriculture. However the Unionist Party always was a family concern – preferable on the whole I think to a L.G. tea party.’16 Fully recovered from his illness of a year earlier, Dick Robbins was frequently in town for meetings of NFU committees, especially during the election period. He was asked to represent the NFU at international conferences as well as at meetings at home with agricultural workers’ unions and to state the farmers’ views on the developing agricultural crisis to the British government. Lionel began to use his newly acquired economics skills to help his father prepare speeches for such occasions – and to support him in his preference for free trade as against the protection from overseas competition favoured by many of his NFU colleagues.17 In his last year as an undergraduate Robbins concentrated on economics and political theory. He told his stepmother on 7 February 1923 that he was ‘working every minute I am not eating or sleeping – save late Saturday evening and Sundays which I usually contrive to leave freer’ to see friends. With Cannan’s permission he joined Cannan’s class in economic theory, which was a seminar in which students specializing in economics presented papers. He continued to learn a good deal of monetary theory and monetary history from Gregory’s courses on the Principles of Currency and Banking, on the History of Currency and Banking and on the Stock Exchange and 16

17

LCR to RRR, 28 October 1922. LCR probably voted Labour himself, since he later remarked that he had voted for all three main parties (LCR to Robin Purdue, 27 July 1961, General Correspondence June 1961–February 1962, RP). LCR to RRR, 20 February 1923; ‘Note on the suggestion that recent changes in the position of Great Britain with regard to foreign trade are of “economic” relevance to a just view of agricultural policy: Being a letter written to a member of the Farmers’ Union who had asked for an opinion on certain arguments used by members of that body’, 1923, Controversies 1929–32 [sic], RP.

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the Financing of Industry (ms notes in History of Currency and History of Banking, RP). But when it came to the required course in statistics, the first half of Professor Arthur Bowley’s full-year course on General Statistics, Lionel ‘always read something else’ during the lectures and avoided statistical questions in the examination papers (LCR to IEG, 9 January 1924). As a specialist in the History of Political Ideas Robbins had to attend Laski’s History of Political Ideas (Advanced) in the Michaelmas and Lent terms of 1922/3, in which ‘special attention will be devoted (a) to the Conciliar Movement; (b) to the Counter-Reformation; (c) to the Seventeenth Century in England; (d) to recent movements in political thought.’ He also heard Laski lecture on An Introduction to the Theory of the State, Church and State in England since 1833 and State Government in the United States. He heard Sidney Webb on English Local Goverment, Graham Wallas on the British Empire, and Herman Finer on The Relief of Parliament – the problem of devolution, as well as taking Finer’s long course on Comparative Government and his class in Public Administration (Attendance Record Sheet 1922–1923, LSE Student’s Dossier). In the Summer term he listened to a newly appointed assistant lecturer in sociology, Morris Ginsberg, lecturing on ethics, when Ginsberg concentrated on the British moralists of the eighteenth century (ms ‘Ethics. Ginsberg’, RP; Robbins 1971c). After a year of studying under Laski, Lionel was disillusioned. Laski’s biographers have quoted the remarks in Robbins’s autobiography which come from a note in his ‘diary’ (Robbins 1971a, 81; Kramnick and Sheerman 1993, 252–3). The original, written in late 1922, is fuller than the published version: Talked to Laski about Socialism today. Most disappointing. I am convinced he knows little or nothing about Economics. From what he said today he might almost be put among the sentimentalists. I think the Wells business must have unbalanced his judgment. The curious thing is that with all his theoretical prepossessions he is in one sense one of the most individualistic men I have ever met. I don’t mean he has more individuality than the average: funnily enough I don’t think he has: he is still as imitative as a precocious child: but I should imagine that very few educated men would be less capable of systematic team work or leadership than he. He will always be a lonely figure surrounded by friends. An Enfant terrible amidst admiring onlookers. There is a curiously unsatisfactory ring about his phraseology – so synthetic and so superlative. It seems to indicate behind his amazingly acute analytic apparatus an almost juvenile personality – a lack of emotional balance that is nearly painful. People accuse him of swank – I don’t believe it. The real thing about his pose is that

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it is a defence. Sometimes of course he may feel pleased that the defence is going so well.18

Lionel was also finding economics more intellectually challenging than Laski’s subject. After he graduated he commented to Iris Gardiner on 24 June 1924 that ‘the History of Political Ideas is quite an interesting subject if you don’t go into it too fully. I got sick of it because after a point it seemed so futile to go on studying it.’ He admitted that he was ‘much more original and in fact better equipped all round on this than on economics proper – only economics seems more fruitful in practical results and capable of yielding greater intellectual satisfaction. Besides there was that jealous little pig Laski – ’. In his autobiography Robbins recounted Laski’s reaction to a paper in which he challenged a claim by Arthur Greenwood that nationalization of industry would not succeed unless it was widespread. Greenwood (1923) had written: ‘There can be no real chance for the motive of public service in industry unless it [nationalization] becomes predominant. . . . Today the industrial system consists of a central edifice bearing the name “private enterprise” overshadowing the smaller fabrics of Socialism and Cooperation which flank it. The latter cannot fully justify themselves until they occupy the central edifice and private enterprise retires to the humbler building.’ Lionel argued not only that there was no empirical evidence to support the claim but that there was if anything a presumption in favour of the alternative hypothesis. ‘Comparing the incentives to the motive of public service under conditions under which this motive is and is not predominant, . . . it is at least arguable that the feeling of communal interest of this kind is never so strong as when it is stimulated by the prospect of demonstrating how infinitely superior the principles of one’s own group are to the principles of all others.’ He cited the examples of the early Christian church, British wartime organization, and the aftermaths of the November Revolution in Russia and of the French Revolution, concluding pessimistically: ‘Surely if the spectacle of a god crucified for the sake of the world has not availed to make the usual run of men either good or public spirited it is not unduly perverse to view with suspended judgment the contention that the idea of the state as the source of human benefits or the feeling of oneness with the 18

Even the surviving diary entry is incomplete for part (between the two paragraphs) has been torn out. The novelist H.G. Wells was a friend of Laski’s and Laski had campaigned for him when he stood as a Labour candidate in the University of London seat at the November 1922 general election; Wells named a character Laski in his novel Men like Gods in the same year (Kramnick and Sheerman 1993, 178–9).

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rest of a heterogeneous community will do any better.’ When he read the paper to Laski, ‘his displeasure became increasingly obvious, and when I had finished he said coldly, “Well, that is an able statement of a very reactionary position” and at once changed the subject’ – to Lionel’s silent indignation (‘Redemptionism and the Future of Political Parties’, Student Essays, RP; Robbins 1971a, 94–5). Dalton was very different and continued to impress Lionel with his intellectual honesty and openness. Dalton was lecturing on the Theory of Public Finance in the Lent term 1923. In March he published a small book explaining and advocating a capital levy, which the Labour Party had adopted as a main plank of its platform for the general election the previous November (Dalton 1923). A week later he turned up to give the last lecture of the course. ‘As he mounted the rostrum he said with a sly chuckle, “You may have observed that I have recently put on paper my version of the arguments in favour of a capital levy. I think, therefore, that I ought to tell you what are said to be the arguments against.” This he then proceeded to do – to such effect that one member of his audience at any rate has always remained persuaded that, with low interest rates and a probably highly progressive rate of levy, the whole project is not worth the candle.’19 Before term began, Lionel had visited Reg Lawson at Ditchling Common. The printer and sculptor Eric Gill had moved there in 1913 shortly after converting to Roman Catholicism in order to establish a rural and Catholic community of artists and craftsmen. The group of families grew their own food, shared workshops and formed themselves into a guild; Gill and fellow members of the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic kept the monastic hours as lay members of the Dominican order (McCarthy 1989, 116–20, 134, 144). Reg arrived there in July 1922, following two other young men sent by Father J-B, David Jones the poet and painter and Denis Tegetmeier, who later became Gill’s son-in-law. The three lived first in the loft over the dairy and then in a cottage which soon became ‘The Sorrowful Mysteries’ (ibid., 150–2). Reg enjoyed the farm work and learned the joys and the irritations of communal living (Lawson to LCR, 15 September and 13 November 1922, Personal Letters from Iris & Clive etc, RP; Ginger 1991, 62–81). When Lionel spent the weekend with him on 6–7 January 1923, he went over to Hopkins Crank, the Gills’ house, on the Saturday evening and met Eric Gill (Gill Diary, 6 and 7 January 1923, TAM 70, TGA). He and Gill both loved to talk; 19

‘Lord Dalton’, Biographical Papers, RP LCR’s notes of the lecture, in a notebook on ‘Distribution and State Action: Theory of Public Finance’, show that Dalton was indeed remarkably fair to the arguments on both sides.

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with a background of guild socialism in common they talked all evening and the whole of the following afternoon. Lionel was beginning to sort out his own attitudes to socialism. In the last section of his nationalization paper for Laski he speculated: Thus it becomes a matter of considerable interest to know how many supporters the redemptionist theory of socialism . . . actually has. If they are many . . . then it seems possible that the ultimate struggle will be not between the haves and the have-nots but between the want-somes and the want-alls – between [those] who are willing to solve difficulties one by one and those who because they cannot have all insist on having nothing. For the old conservatives if they are tenacious of their rights, as they call them, have no intellects capable of leading them any distance and in the long run they and the less principled haves will always jump at a Disraeli who will vindicate their capacity or their generosity before the world at large. But whereas those who have goods will almost always compromise in extremities those who have faith will compromise in no case whatever. Hence – since it is unlikely that the doctrinaires will ever be able to command the complete confidence of a majority of the people – it seems perfectly possible that in the next decade or so we shall see what social changes do occur, occur through the instrumentality of the parties which have always hitherto been associated with stupidity and reaction while the parties which should have been the heirs of such a movement, exhaust their energies in a sort of politicoreligious revivalism which a more cautious formulation of their aims would have avoided.

In the last of his surviving student essays on political subjects Robbins attacked collectivism. His ‘Apology for Isolated Man’ was ‘not an essay in the methodology of economics. No more is it a defence of celibacy or any other form of anti social conduct. . . . The thesis which I wish to put before you is this: that there are at present certain tendencies discernible in contemporary thought: tendencies, which for the moment I will subsume under the omnibus title collectivist thinking: which if not checked by the reassertion of intellectual individualism bid fair to prove inimical to the vitality of modern culture.’ He contended: ‘The various movements and schools and cults which we see around us may count for very little as far as the things that matter are really concerned, but they occupy a disproportionately large part of the intellectual horizon.’ If you took the plays of George Bernard Shaw, for instance, ‘you will be surprised how easily the various characters fall under general headings. . . . [But] do not think that I think this is a deficiency of the drama: I merely point it out as symptomatic of the period.’

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He outlined the ‘natural history’ of these movements: Usually you will find the origin is very simple. The creator is not infrequently himself in need of an inspiration. He has read much; he has written much; he has done much; he has run through the available stock of human wisdom and found it vanity. Somehow, somewhere there is something missing. Then suddenly comes illumination. The indescribable confusion which previously encompassed him becomes clarified. He sees it all. It is all the result of a most childish misapprehension. Henceforward he will show people how to eliminate it. The next step is to get published. . . . If the discovery is literary or political, manifestos and short strident pamphlets are much better [than books]. And if one can create a little indignation in the papers, this is also of assistance. . . . Then if the author is successful the thing gets taken up. Devotees are attracted. Expositions are written. It turns out that the idea has even further ready application than was at first suspected. It becomes as it were the keynote of a school of criticism. It is included in the things you assume when you address a cultivated audience. In esoteric circles it is considered bad form to question it. In short it has become the fashion.

He gave several examples in the arts: ‘Futurism was as full blown a stunt as was ever run by a yellow newspaper. One of its chief tenets was the destruction of all the museums in Europe. Post-impressionism . . . was not a stunt at all: it was an omnibus label given by Mr Roger Fry to all the painters who had come under the influence of. . . . the two great painters of the last century Renoir and C´ezanne.’ He also mentioned Vorticism: that ‘of course, was a stunt, but I would forgive any stunt in the world which could engender such magnificent journalism as the two numbers of Mr [Wyndham] Lewis’ Blast [1914].’ When it came to politics, ‘No one who has studied that queer mixture of practical politics and irrational enthusiasm which goes by the name of socialism can doubt for an instance [sic] that in its ideological appeal it is merely the old myth of the Messiah in another form – the proletariat being the chosen people capitalism original sin and the bloody revolution That Great Day when everything shall be made new.’ Lionel had no quarrel with collective action in politics, agreeing with Edmund Burke that party government was the only way of securing good government, and also seeing as useful the activities of groups set up for particular purposes, the Divorce Law Reform Society for instance. And ‘So long as Socialism remains a body of particular proposals for particular purposes I personally have a good deal of sympathy with it although I think its economics are a bit rusty. It is when it aspires to be something more – when it claims to be not a programme of action but a complete Weltanschauung, when its enthusiasts tell me about

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the future Socialist art and Socialist education and socialistic philosophy and so on, that I confess I find its clich´es flat and fulsome.’ Echoing the closing remarks of his nationalization paper, he added ‘I cannot help thinking that if the time ever comes for socialist proposals to be translated into legislation it will be a good thing for everybody if they are sponsored by some party which does not cherish false and superstitious hopes of the results to follow from their adoption.’ Here and in notes he later filed together as ‘Early Scraps on Social and Econ. Outlook’ he made it clear that he rejected revolutionary socialism as a new form of Messianic mythology. He also rejected socialism as an alternative system to capitalism on economic grounds. ‘Objections to Socialism now’ were ‘(1) That it is doubtful whether it could be organized. (2) That it would stereotype uneconomic areas and units. (3) That it could not succeed in bringing any amelioration to the lot of the commonality without imposing barriers against the movement of population which would be economically and socially undesirable. (4) That it is extremely unlikely that it would increase economic welfare . . . (5) That it has yet to be proved that it could supply demand as well as the present machinery.’ This did not mean he was opposed to redistributive policies, nor that he had ceased to support the Labour Party in preference to the Liberals or Conservatives. He listed the ‘evils of contemporary society’ as threefold – the unequal distribution of wealth, the recurrent danger of wars, the inadequacy of political machinery – and then added a fourth, overpopulation. Hence the ‘ideal to be aimed at’ was composed of ‘(a) Distribution according to need, (b) Peace, (c) The rule of the best based on popular consent, (d) At least a stationary population’ and the ‘Essential requirements of any reforms are (a) That in readjusting distribution they shall not injure production (b) That they shall not encourage the increase of population (c) That they shall not decrease the possibility of free scientific discovery.’ Before he abandoned political thought for the more scientific discipline of economics, he had also arrived at the political philosophy which he was to retain for the rest of his life, a ‘provisional utilitarianism’. Sorting through some of his early papers in 1936, he found and kept a couple of pages he had written in 1923 on ‘Utilitarianism’, commenting that ‘I still think this way & I am inclined to think this is the most penetrating thing I have ever written.’ The greatest good of the greatest number – yes but the greatest number of what – of Muggletonians, of Londoners, of Englishmen, of Europeans, of Eurasians, of men generally, of the whole human species, of the entire animal creation. When the

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problem is regarded in this way it is seen to be far from simple. Once the ‘measuring rod of pleasure’ is abolished – if it weren’t the animals would have the best of it – you are entirely without an objective standard. Not only do you not know what a higher good is for the individual you do not know further whether if this could be determined, all individuals would have the same higher goods. Suppose: the highest good of polynesians were copulation without control, it might in course of time prove distinctly inimical to the inhabitants of the world whose higher goods were of a different order. And if who is to choose between them? The socalled biological criterion is a glib solution but on closer examination it proves as valueless as any other, for once the crude survival of the fittest is realized to be merely the fittest to survive in a purely material sense, the term fittest becomes just as incapable of definition as good and happiness and the rest of them. And if you decide that the good is to be ‘your good’ then you will obviously have to get so many people to agree with you that other people’s good does not clash with your own. Otherwise your good may never get the benefit of this analytic discovery – but it [is] perhaps better to discuss these things in camera? This is not of course quite as bad as it sounds because as a matter of fact (not of necessity note – that’s where I disagree with advocates of the rational good) we do happen to be possessed of goods which are inseparably mixed with others’ goods. The fundamental private question therefore is with how many? Unless they are capable of indefinite expansion (which is to be doubted for purely material reasons) the line must be drawn somewhere. The aim of political induction should be to find which is the most convenient limit. Where contemporary thought goes wrong in my opinion is that it assumes that this most convenient limit is not only theoretically discoverable but practically attainable. It may be: nothing at present should prevent us from acting as though it is. But there is nothing in human history to suggest that it must be, and no good purpose seems to be served by assuming such is the case. On the contrary not infrequently the austere comfort that can be derived from the contemplation of necessity in tragedy is lost by regarding it all as a stupid mistake. Modern literature by fastening upon every remediable social evil has increased the confusion.

As a third year undergraduate Robbins also wrote at some length on the objects of political science. With hindsight it is amusing to read his comparison of economics and political science: If anyone were to ask us the objects of economic science we should have no difficulty in replying that it seeks to explain the reasons why communities as a whole are as well off as they are and why certain individuals within those communities enjoy degrees of welfare differing from other individuals. That is we should explain that it investigates the production and distribution of wealth. If however we were asked to provide an account of the objects of Political Science we should be hard put to it I imagine to provide an analogous answer.

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The problem with political science was that it ‘not only attempts to explain how certain things are what they are: it also attempts to discover whether certain things are what they ought to be’ and that because of ‘their inveterate habit of mixing up questions of what is with questions of what ought to be people have confused these two departments of the science, and involved themselves in unutterable confusion’ (‘The objects of “political science”’ and ‘The objects of political science II’, Politics, RP). Lionel kept in his notebooks some of the essays he wrote for Cannan. Three can be certainly dated to 1922/3: ‘The Theory of Land Taxation and its place in the Structure of Contemporary Economic doctrine’, ‘The Place of Land in Economic Theory’, and ‘The Causes of Unemployment’. The first two both refer to H.D. Henderson, Supply and Demand (1922), which Lionel defended against a fellow student’s dismissive review in Clare Market Review (Michaelmas Term 1922, 2). The second essay shows his reading of Philip Wicksteed, The Common Sense of Political Economy (1910), of which he later tried to tell Wicksteed himself (see Chapter 6): ‘There are certain chapters in it from which I feel I have learnt as much as from any other chapters in the whole of economic literature. I shall never forget the thrill with which as a student I first read the masterly chapter on the universal applicability of the rent analysis.’ Wicksteed had shown that the Ricardian claim that the rent of land does not enter into the cost of production and hence the price of agricultural commodities could just as well be applied to the wages of labour or payments to any factor of production. As Lionel summarized the point in his essay, ‘To argue that money costs of production govern value is simply to reason in a circle with the poet:The price of pig is something big Because its corn you’ll understand is high priced too, because it grew upon the high priced farming land. If you’d know why That land is high Consider this. Its price is big Because it pays thereon to raise The costly corn the high priced pig.

Lionel also mentioned the Swedish economist Gustav Cassel, who had made the same argument in his early work and in his Theory of Social Economy (1923).

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Lionel thought his essay on unemployment was ‘one of my best scientific efforts’ as an undergraduate (LCR to IEG, 1 April 1924). Even here he initially revealed his earlier preoccupations. He began by dismissing, with sarcasm, ‘erroneous notions’ of the sort likely to be heard on buses: the claim sometimes made by guild and other socialists that capitalists needed to maintain a ‘reserve of labour’, the popular belief that ‘it is all due to Foreign Competition’ and the ‘pernicious nonsense’ of Major Douglas. Of the first he was sceptical; of the second he countered that ‘if we all did everything for ourselves there would be singularly little danger of unemployment so little in fact that it would be extremely doubtful whether we could employ ourselves long enough to obtain sustenance.’ As for meeting a disciple of Major Douglas, ‘it would probably be hard to argue with him but if we gently enquired whether he had ever heard of the fallacy of composition we could alight for Clare Market with an easy conscience.’ When he turned to sober economic analysis he began by enumerating the causes of unemployment in a single industry: changes in demand for the product at given prices (due in their turn to changes in tastes etc); changes in price (of the product) due to changes in supply resulting from ‘overinvestment’ (following from overestimation of demand or of profits by firms in the industry), foreign competition, inventions, or changes in the supply of raw materials. All these would cause dislocation in the industry and hence discharges of workmen and hence unemployment, unless wages were sufficiently ‘plastic’ (Robbins used Pigou’s term) to be immediately adjusted, which they were not, or labour was perfectly mobile, which it was not. Even if labour were perfectly mobile, there were still the ‘phenomena of the depression half of the Trade Cycle’ which ‘seem[ed] responsible for the greater part of the volume of unemployment in modern society’. He tried to use the ‘difficult analysis’ of D.H. Robertson’s A Study of Industrial Fluctuation (1915) to outline the course of a typical cycle. Robbins was writing his essay while the prolonged slump which had begun in 1920 still showed few signs of abating. The ‘magnitude of the disaster which has at present overtaken the country’ was too large to be explained by trade cycle theory. He blamed the inflationary policy of the immediate postwar period: ‘If a government . . . as ours did up to 1920 sees fit to debauch the normal currency of the country with floods of meretricious paper there seem no limits – short of people’s willingness to accept the rubbish – to which a totally fictitious state of prosperity may be stimulated. And the longer this goes on the severer must eventually be the disaster so that bad as our experience has been over here it seems likely to be small compared to what will happen on the continent when the present

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inflation has reached its limit.’ Furthermore, the collapse of foreign markets for British exports had been made worse by exchange rate fluctuations. ‘It is at least arguable,’ he concluded, ‘that if there had been less nonsense talked about the definition of money and the regulation of currency matters in general by people like [the German monetary economist Georg Friedrich] Knapp who ought to have known better there might have been a little less medieval regulation of exchanges and a little more determination to balance budgets without inflation in many continental capitals. One is therefore regretfully compelled to docket the work of currency “experts” as among the possible causes of our present discomfitures.’ The arts were still as important to Lionel as economics – as he revealed in his ‘Apology . . .’ essay. When he reviewed Laski’s edition of the correspondence of Edmund Burke for Clare Market Review (1923a), he compared the letters to those of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov and Burke’s speeches to the sermons of John Donne. He was still thinking about writing a war play, or perhaps a novel, recording his current plans in his ‘diary’: For my War Play – if it ever comes off. There must be two groups of characters – not too sharply defined and of equal interest – but all the interest and glamour must be focussed on one for a long time. This part to culminate in the scene I have thought such a lot about – the Farmhouse etc – life at its most tremulously intense and intoxicating shattered by an entirely fortuitous mishap. Then the other group will come into prominence and its previous actions acquire importance in retrospect – The difficulty is to know whether to make it into a play or a novel. . . .

There are a good many examples of dramatic composition in his early papers, though none seem to be the unfinished play. His friend George Davidge did complete a novel based on his war experiences, which Eddie Rose at least thought well of. Meanwhile Lionel continued to spend evenings with his friends, especially Nathan and Susan Isaacs, now happily married, disputing matters philosophical while playing cards (Rose to LCR, 5 March and nd but April or May 1929, Isaacs to LCR, 1 November 1922 and 3 March 1923, Personal Letters from Iris & Clive etc, RP). In his autobiography Robbins gave the impression of a reserved and studious undergraduate who avoided social gatherings. While his undergraduate ‘diary’ belies this, one of its late entries, which he partly reproduced as evidence of his ‘congenital shyness, coupled with the self-distrust born of my political fiasco’, relates his experience at a reception given by Graham Wallas at the end of 1922 (1971a, 90).

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I walked round the square outside before going in and dawdled about by the railings so long that the Policeman on duty there began to look quite suspiciously at me. Once inside however, once in actual contact with the people I was completely at my ease and recoiling to take stock of the situation from time to time found myself prattling away to various people as if I had known them all my life. It is always the same with me nowadays – I hesitate before things I really can do perfectly well. I have lain low so long that my capacity has outgrown my confidence.

In the diary he crossed through a couple more sentences in which he had concluded more optimistically: ‘on the whole I don’t think I do badly with women nowadays. And how much more interesting they are than the average man.’ In February 1923 his friend Frederic Benham was offered a lectureship at the University of Sydney. Lionel was a sufficiently affluent undergraduate that Benham asked him to lend him £100 to help him get to Australia, which Lionel was keen to do (LCR to RRR, 24 February 1923). Benham had also been offered an LSE Research Studentship for 1923–5 which he turned down. A few weeks later Lionel wrote in his diary: Gregory called me into his room today and told me that he and Laski wanted me to put in for the L.S.E. Scholarship. Apparently there is one going in July and they are anxious for a L.S.E. man to get it. I hummed and hawed a bit and said how diffident I felt of taking any positive step of this sort before having tested myself in Finals – he was insistent however and I said I would think it over. All this was very gratifying and as it fitted in exactly with what I have been planning for months I suppose I ought to have been enormously elated. I wasn’t. Instead it seemed as though suddenly the aim of three years had become worthless just when its achievement was within my grasp. Two more years of this, and then – When I look back upon my life since I left home, apart from one or two evenings at Clive’s, the only really happy moments seem to have been spent in the Army – when I thought myself so miserable – galloping full tilt round the driving drill on the common at Woolwich, riding into Bailleul with Beresford, early morning on the hills at Exeter, daybreak among the fishing fleet at Havre – all moments which I lived for themselves untormented by this itch for reputation or knowledge. Contented, I have often been since then but happy – well sometimes in anticipation – usually of things which have not come off. I suppose I shall go on.

Lionel did not get the studentship, for which there were twenty-five applicants. Basil Kingsley Martin, a Cambridge graduate whom Laski had encouraged to come to LSE, was awarded a special studentship for one year to complete his book on ‘Public Opinion and the Development of the British Empire 1837–1900’. Martin became an assistant lecturer in politics

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and stayed at the School until 1927 when he left to work for the Manchester Guardian – becoming editor of the New Statesman & Nation in 1931 (Professorial Council 26 September 1923; Martin 1953, 48–9; Kramnick and Sheerman 1993, 253–4). His politics were closer to Laski’s than Robbins’s were and he and Lionel never became friends.

FIVE

Iris Gardiner

The final examinations for the BSc(Econ) in 1923 commenced on Monday 22 October. Lionel Robbins spent the summer revising, dividing his time between his lodgings in Guilford Street and his parents’ home in Sipson. He found himself thinking a good deal about Iris Gardiner. One Sunday in the spring when he visited the Gardiner home with Clive, a ‘whole crowd of family’ had been there. Clive’s younger sister Iris, who was a couple of years older than Lionel, started talking to him; as she recalled, he was ‘rather shy (always was really) . . . I must have felt sorry for him, sitting on the side of the tennis court, not realising I was sowing a seed . . . ’After that Lionel saw her fairly often at Clive and Lilian’s house in London as well as at Whiteleaf. In 1923 Iris Gardiner was a school dental officer employed by the Medical Department of the County Borough of Brighton Education Committee. She had trained at the National Dental Hospital in London during the war and worked for a year as a dental assistant in Bath before taking the position in Brighton in 1919. She was vivacious, good-looking and graceful – Reggie Lawson always remembered her dancing (in the style of Isadora Duncan) to the accompaniment of a friend’s flute – and rather elegant. She was also a very modern young woman, who smoked and owned her own car. Lionel listed her recreations in a letter to her on 21 January 1924 as ‘Motoring golf tennis and singing’ and ballroom dancing; her children many years later remembered her as ‘very sporty’, good at golf, and riding a motorbike rather fast.1 Lionel had been aware of her beauty – and had much admired the portrait that Clive had painted of her in 1917 – but on ‘that afternoon in the Easter vac’ in 1923 he thought he recognized a kindred spirit, someone 1

Information from Iris Robbins, 19 September 1991; Lawson to Iris Robbins, 11 April 1979, RP; conversation with Anne Johnson and Richard Robbins, 17 July 2001. The main source for this chapter is the almost daily correspondence between LCR and IEG from the autumn of 1923 to the summer of 1924.

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who also had known loneliness and depression and who as he put it on 9 November 1923 knew and felt ‘how frail and insecure joy is on this bewildering planet’. It was some months before he learned the attraction was mutual. At the end of the summer Lionel went to Brighton for a fortnight, joining his sister Caroline who was staying there during the vacation. Caroline was now an undergraduate reading history at Royal Holloway College London. On 23 September Lionel wrote to his father: ‘The air down here is delightful and is doing us both lots of good. . . . Work progresses rather more slowly than I hoped but on the whole I am not worrying. I know I shan’t know as much as I hoped to but I don’t think much good is done by crying about that at this stage.’ He visited Lawson at Ditchling and went to supper with the Gills again (Gill Diary, 27 September 1923, TAM 70, TGA). He spent his last day in Brighton with Reggie and Clive Gardiner and Iris and Caroline, when they all went swimming and enjoyed themselves thoroughly. In the evening the three men returned to London and dined at the Caf´e Royal, ‘still arguing vociferously’. Iris herself went to a dance in Brighton. The next day (30 September) Lionel wrote to her, having suggested going to the theatre on Saturday afternoons when she was coming up to London: ‘For one thing you had actually admitted to a desire to see one or two things now running in London. And then, from my point of view, it [does] seem a pity after seeing so much of you for the last fortnight to relapse into the old haphazard ways of running up against you sometimes at Clive’s (more often than not just missing you by five or ten minutes) and then on odd visits to Whiteleaf.’ He mentioned plays by Flecker, MacEvoy, Chesterton and Barrie. Iris chose G.K. Chesterton’s Magic, which they saw the following Saturday; in the meantime she wished him well on 1 October for a job interview, but she doubted he would succeed because he looked so young. In July Robbins had applied for a fellowship in economics at New College Oxford. Beveridge, A.G. Gardiner, Gregory and Wallas had provided testimonials, the last a particularly generous one (LSE Student’s Dossier; LCR to Wallas, 30 July 1923, Wallas 1/68). Beveridge, a Balliol man, also wrote to a friend at All Souls who he thought was still a fellow of New College, on 23 July, ‘to say that I do not really testimonially think extremely highly of Robbins, but I think he would be a perfectly suitable member of any Oxford Common Room, and an addition to it.’ Although he had not seen Robbins’s academic work ‘everybody who has done so (Cannan, Laski and others) are unanimous that he is one of the best students we have ever had’, and Beveridge had come to know him personally in a seminar

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on university education he had held in 1922/3, when Lionel had ‘played a very valuable part’. Beveridge thought New College would ‘probably do a good deal better . . . in taking Robbins than sticking to Oxford’ for a young economist. Lionel, feeling rather concerned about his youthful appearance, went up for an interview on 2 October. ‘The college looked delightful . . . XIVth Century walls and a most enchanting garden.’ ‘The actual interview was dull. . . . It was so obviously just as it should be. A “What the devil did you have the infernal impertinence to apply for this valuable job for?” would have been much more stimulating. Besides you never show up really well . . . unless you are just a little pent up before hand and like a fool I had talked myself as cool as a cucumber in the anteroom. I confess I thought the other applicants a poor lot – save for one who had a frayed linen collar, dirty nails and a rather high pitched treble and who for all these reasons is probably out of the running’. None of the candidates interviewed got the fellowship which went to Captain Harold Salvesen, who had just graduated from University College Oxford after service in the Indian Army. Robbins was not downcast, for he had not expected to succeed, and Salvesen was ‘not one of the lacklustre young men’ (LCR to IEG, 2 and 12 October). Lionel would have liked Iris to accompany him to Clive’s after the first visit to the theatre. He and Clive were intending to celebrate Eddie Rose’s LRCM. It was to be quite a large gathering – Iris’s younger brother Gilbert, who was at LSE in 1923/4, was coming and had invited Arnold Plant and his girlfriend – but Eddie did not turn up as Clive had forgotten to write to him until the last minute. ‘However Clive and Gilbert were in excellent form and kept the ball rolling splendidly.’ Lionel also enjoyed the conversation of the eccentric Miss George. The next day he went to tea with Graham Wallas and found him rather subdued in his retirement (LCR to IEG, 4, 5 and 7 October). As well as taking Iris to the theatre Lionel wished to share his delight in poetry. For her birthday (8 October) he sent an anthology of seventeenthcentury English verse and Arthur Waley’s translations of Chinese poems (1918). In his letters he mentioned some of his favourite poems, most notably Donne’s ‘Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, which he regretted was not in the anthology he had sent. He also remarked that he had been given a copy of the Chinese poems by a fellow undergraduate, C.C. Chien, with a Chinese inscription reading (so Chien told him) ‘To dear Robbins who likes this sort of thing’ (LCR to IEG, 8, 9, 14 and 15 October 1923). He took to writing poetry again himself – but he did not always send Iris the results of his efforts.

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By the middle of October Lionel had almost finished revising. He bought a new fountain pen and a copy of Thomas Hardy’s latest book of poems (1922) with the predictable result that on 19 October ‘instead of doing the little revision I had intended I spent nearly all day reading the latter’ while he was at Sipson visiting his parents. As ever he was loyal to old friends, dining with Miss Horton and Miss Monk on the Friday before the examinations. He went with Iris to the theatre on the Saturday afternoon and saw her again on Sunday at Whiteleaf when they walked in the woods: she made, he told her on 22 October, the ‘two days he had been dreading two days of sheer unthinking happiness’. In that frame of mind he sat his first examination, the economic theory paper, was able to ignore toothache, and to report the next day to Iris that ‘I should think I did quite well’. On Monday afternoon in the second economics paper, which consisted of questions on banking, economic history and statistics, he was tired and ‘although I don’t think I did anything particularly piffling . . . I think what I did was fairly thin’. He did not think it was a failure but it was ‘not half as good as I should have liked’. He dined with Georg Tugendhat at their usual Monday dining club at Gennaro’s restaurant but left early and had a ‘rotten night’ (LCR to IEG, 23 October 1923). On Tuesday a letter from Iris cheered him and he had a very good day, in spite of the heavy rain which came through the roof of the examination room at the Imperial Institute in Kensington. The essay paper in economics occupied the morning, the compulsory paper in public adminstration the afternoon. The latter ‘proved to contain just the right numbers of “talky-talky” questions so I was able more or less to cloak my ignorance of facts and kick my heels a bit’, while one of the topics for an essay was ‘Guild Socialism’, on which he had no difficulty in writing at great length: ‘I should say it was quite a readable essay but rather discursive . . . it simply bristled with dogma.’ According to his notes on the back of the question paper he covered ‘The vogue of gild socialism’, its origins, its proposals and the ‘Difficulties of the economist’. Thereafter things went even better. One of Laski’s papers, the compulsory political science paper on Wednesday morning, was ‘delightful. I don’t think I have ever written better in my life.’ The history paper in the afternoon was ‘the same sort of fair to medium I had the previous day’ (LCR to IEG, 24 October). After the two papers in his special subject on Thursday he wrote to Iris again: ‘So we come to the end of a perfect day. Did you ever hear the gunners singing that [song] at the end of an absolutely exhausting expedition?’ The two papers had been ‘congenial and with the exception of the last question this afternoon which I rushed and didn’t quite finish I think I answered them quite satisfactorily’. Afterwards he walked back to

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LSE for dinner through Hyde Park. ‘It was raining at intervals as though the archangel were swirling a mop round out of one of the heavenly sculleries. But it was very pleasant.’ When he got to the School he dined with Rajaram Narayan Vaidya, an MSc student who had specialized in banking and currency for his BSc(Econ) the year before, and Elizabeth Allen, the vice-president of the Students’ Union. ‘Unfortunately Vyadya was feeling sententious – he had recently heard from an acquaintance of mine who has rather gone to the devil in Paris . . . and Miss Allen serious.’ The next day Lionel survived the language paper. On Saturday he celebrated by dining at Gennaro’s with Iris. Vaidya had news of Basil Bunting, who had left London and LSE suddenly on 20 April and gone to Paris. Bunting had written to Lionel almost immediately, to tell him where he was and that he had left unpaid debts to both Jacques Kahane and Vaidya: he asked Lionel if he would take over the debt and pay the £2 to each of their friends as they were both ‘very hard up’. Lionel did and Bunting repaid him when he returned to London three years later (Bunting to LCR, 22 April and 1 May 1923 and 6 October 1926, Letters from Economists 1946-, RP). In Paris Bunting ‘well, had the usual sort of adventures that young men have’ (Williams 1968, 7). In September 1923, as a result of a drinking bout with two friends who were about to return to London, he had landed up in prison, from which Ezra Pound managed to extricate him. Pound found him a job as a sort of secretary and subeditor for Ford Madox Ford on the Transatlantic Review, which he enjoyed for a few months until he followed Pound to Rapallo.2 Lionel had made no definite plans for his occupation after graduation. After grandfather Harris died in October 1921 Lionel and his sister Caroline each received 1/22 of his estate, and with this small legacy he expected to get by for a while with some teaching and writing. Through Laski he had been offered some lecturing on economics once a week to a group of ‘society ladies’ beginning in the new year; Tugendhat asked him to review economics books and also suggested he write a monthly article on English drama for the Neue Frei Presse. The first Monday after the examinations he went to the Law Courts (which are close to the School) to ‘sample the legal atmosphere’ and heard an amusing case about an accident involving a London taxi and a tram repair wagon. He followed this by listening to a public lecture at LSE by the great French historian of nineteenth-century England, Elie Halevy. He found the contrast ‘most interesting . . . But how much more difficult to decide which is one’s preference’. It was particularly difficult in reaction 2

Ford (1979, 318–39) has provided the best account of Bunting’s adventures.

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after the examinations: ‘in the library this morning I had a feeling I never wanted to open another book on economics [so] that it’s almost impossible to be sure of one’s own judgment just at the moment’ (LCR to IEG, 25 and 29 October 1923). The next day Lionel was ‘leading the life of a lazy man . . . writing my letters at leisure after breakfast, strolling down to the Museum when I please and choosing my book to suit my fancy and lingering over it just so long as it interests me’. One such book was A.G. Gardiner’s recent biography of Sir William Harcourt. He busied himself with the affairs of the Clare Market Review, of which Gilbert Gardiner had been appointed assistant editor and business manager. He and Gilbert and Arnold Plant spent a good deal of time discussing the future of the magazine which had become rather dull. Robbins reviewed Herman Finer’s Representative Government and a Parliament of Industry and contributed some ‘Modest proposals for the reform of the London examination system’ (1923b,c). Writing in the typical facetious undergraduate manner, he proposed the abolition of a fixed minimum number of questions to be answered (‘The only justification for this absurd custom is that it provides a good speed test. It does’), a later start for the afternoon examinations (‘to allow time for digestion and (if desired) a short nap’), the use of dictionaries in the language paper (‘Is it really expected that we read the standard texts without a dictionary? And are we to suppose that our papers are corrected without such assistance?’) and a supplementary oral examination. Plant (1924), writing from the Kildonian Castle en route to a job at the University of Cape Town, commented in the next issue: ‘I rejoice in the fact that there is no viva. Had there been one, he [Lionel] might have been tempted to stimulate his spryness with some of those Phosferine tablets which he carried to cure his neuralgia, and other candidates would have retaliated with a rival pick-me-up. . . . “Vivas” are recommended because they give a second chance, but I am by no means certain that the other capacities which a viva may occasionally reveal . . . are the qualities which should be rewarded specially in University examinations.’ In January Gilbert was promoted to editor and Lionel became assistant editor until Gilbert resigned in April when he was offered a job with Benn’s the publishers (LSE Student’s Union Executive Committee 22 January and 29 April 1924, COLL MISC 649 3/1, BLPES). In the autumn Gilbert went up to St John’s College Cambridge to read English. At the beginning of November Iris came up from Brighton to spend a couple of days with her sister and brother-in-law at Toynbee Hall. Lionel met her on the first evening and they had a quiet meal together; he would have liked to meet her earlier but he had arranged for his father to meet

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Theodore Gregory to talk about food prices. They went to a play again – this time James Barrie’s What every woman knows – before Iris went on to her parents’ house on Saturday. Lionel went to Clive’s where Eddie arrived ‘in the most excellent spirits and sat and played duets with Clive nearly all the evening’. A couple of days later, after an exchange of confidences in their letters – Lionel told Iris about his mother’s death and that of his younger sister Winifred – he asked if he could visit her in Brighton on the Thursday. On a walk over the cliffs at Ovingdean just east of Brighton on a wild and windy night, he discovered that his by now passionate love for Iris was reciprocated and they decided to marry. After they had dinner at a hotel and walked back over the cliffs to Roedean where Iris was staying Lionel caught the train back to London. The next morning he wrote out his favourite Donne poem and sent it to Iris with a rather fine love letter (LCR to IEG, 3, 6, 7 and 9 November 1923). After seeing Iris again on Saturday in London, Lionel went to Clive’s in the evening as usual. The party was enlivened by Lilian’s misguided efforts at matchmaking, pairing John Polimeni with a fellow Roman Catholic Sybil Drummond, who was, commented Lionel, ‘not quite John’s sort – if he has one’. As he told the story to Iris on 12 November, Lilian ‘completely vitiated her strategy. It happened in this way. John had been down to see Reggie at Ditchling and in talking of his experiences he had occasion to mention the anomaly of bachelordom in a married community. Nothing goes like sex – even in the most refined circles – and seizing upon this Lilian initiated an attack on the Catholic view of celibacy. Nothing could really have been less felicitous (as Jane Austen might have said) for the upshot was, as might have been expected, that both John and Miss Drummond found themselves fighting side by side to vindicate the high calling of remaining unmarried. . . . Gradually the argument broadened and embraced all ethics and theology’ by which time Lilian was shouting, John responding at the top of his voice, Clive standing up wagging his finger, and when Miss George intervened ‘the tumult was undiminished.’ On Sunday Lionel went to Sipson for three days, where he wrote an article on British agriculture to appear over his father’s name in the Neue Frei Presse. When he heard from Iris that she had told her sister Gwen of their engagement he wrote to Clive (LCR to IEG, 13 November 1923). Clive and Lilian were delighted; Clive told Iris that it was ‘excellent – I cd not have arranged things better myself!’ On his next visit to Whiteleaf Lionel found the secret was out but, as he later told Caroline (31 October 1932), he asked A.G. Gardiner for his daughter’s hand as a matter of courtesy at least. He broke the news to his parents in a letter to his stepmother on 20 November, reassuring her that ‘it is neither the

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actress nor the blue stocking . . . but a very sweet English girl, a daughter of the family I had already come to look upon as my second home.’ As he subsequently told Iris (27 and 30 November), Caroline later reported that ‘the pleasure expressed at home behind my back was as great as that expressed before me’; his parents’ cook, on the other hand, remarked: ‘Dear me now I shouldn’t have said that Master Lionel was the marrying sort no nor Miss Ivy [Caroline] either.’ Lawson and Polimeni, who had known Iris for years, were both very pleased with the news – whereas Eddie seems to have found it easier to congratulate Lionel on his examination results than on his engagement (Personal letters from Iris & Clive etc, RP). When Lionel met Reg in London on his (Lawson’s) way back to Ditchling from a visit to Oxford, he found him in ‘a very tranquil state of mind’ (LCR to IEG, 10 December 1923). As a single man he had been something of a misfit in Eric Gill’s community. When Gill made plans to move from Ditchling Reggie persuaded Father J-B to allow him to enter a French Benedictine community, Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight, and he moved there in January 1924 (Ginger 1991, 81–92). If Iris and Lionel were to marry soon, he could no longer postpone a decision on a career. The next seven months – as described in his letters to Iris – were dominated by his search for employment and an income sufficient for them to live on: they agreed on £450–500 a year. He did not want Iris to have to work for a living, if only because they hoped they would soon have children; Iris herself was happy to give up her job, although she was quite prepared to work outside the home after marriage if that would enable them to marry sooner (LCR to IEG, 5 December, IEG to LCR, 4 December 1923). They met every weekend, in London or Whiteleaf or Brighton, sometimes staying at the home of some friends of Iris’s in Roedean, where Iris herself often stayed during the week. In London (where Iris stayed with Stella and Jimmie Mallon at Toynbee Hall) they would go to the theatre or to art galleries, walk in the parks or go dancing, or visit Clive and Lilian. Lionel, who stayed a night or two at Hollycroft almost every week, took Iris there for the first time one Saturday (8 December) when she saw the fields of Sipson Farm ‘at their worst – that is at their most desolate. They are not always so bad as that’ (he reassured her on 13 December). She met the Pater – as she had decided to refer to him – on her next visit for lunch on Boxing Day. The results of the BSc(Econ) Finals came out in the last week of November. Robbins was one of six (out of sixty-five examinees) to obtain First Class Honours, along with his friend Arnold Plant. They appeared in the midst of an election campaign, the Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin

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having precipitated a general election over the issue of protection. Lionel joined Gwen, Gilbert and Stella in helping Mallon who was standing as the Labour candidate for Watford, Hertfordshire, as he had in the previous election; in both elections Mallon came second to the sitting Conservative MP, with around 8000 votes and over 30 per cent of the poll (LCR to IEG, 19 and 20 November; Craig 1969). Iris, a convinced Liberal, attended several political meetings at which Liberals were speaking in Brighton during the election campaign. Once the examination results were out, Robbins started to sound out his former teachers on the prospects of a job. Having heard reports of malicious comments in the Senior Common Room, Robbins did not trust Laski. He approached Finer who tried to reassure him that ‘Laski’s motive – whatever it was – not likely to influence his attitude in future’. Robbins saw Laski on 28 November, when Laski told him there might be a job at LSE the next year and that in the meantime he thought he could get Robbins work on the Manchester Guardian and promised to write to the editor. Nothing came of this. Laski also suggested Robbins talk to Beveridge. Robbins then went to see Gregory, ‘a man whom I could thoroughly trust’ (LCR to IEG, 26 and 28 November 1923). Gregory offered to talk to Cannan, and Robbins himself talked to Cannan on 4 December and to Beveridge a week later. On a second visit to Beveridge, on Monday 17 December, Beveridge was ‘very decent and sympathetic and frank’, telling Robbins he might be able to offer him an assistantship in October 1924 but could not promise anything until the new year. One possibility was that of a vacancy in economics at the School if Dalton, who was standing at East Cardiff, won a seat in the general election, but he did not (LCR to IEG, 29 November, 4, 12 and 17 December 1923). Lionel had not settled on an academic career. He hoped to find some academic work while reading for the Bar, supplementing his income with journalism. On 1 May 1924 he claimed, ‘In the long run I would certainly rather be a lawyer. I confess I should like to teach for a year or two. But that is because there is nothing like it for clearing up one’s own ideas.’ He told Iris that he was ‘haunted by that jibe of Shaw’s . . . He who can does. He who cannot teaches. I have an enormous respect for the scientist proper but I don’t fancy I should ever be content with pure investigation even if I had the ability and I always have the feeling that some day one may get tired of talking about other people’s business – which is a rather cynical way of describing teaching and writing about politics – and want to retire into one’s own affairs.’ On 9 January 1924 he was ‘most seriously exercised in my mind about this business of a job’. To Iris he set out the ‘relevant facts’. What was wanted was ‘(1) Money (2) Congenial Work’. The ideal was

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either ‘a job that will yield £450–600 p.a. until I can practice at the bar’ or ‘a similar university job that will lead on to £1000 in say ten years or so’, but the prospects were rather different. Journalism would probably not pay enough. There was a possible job at LSE lecturing on shipping but this was ‘none too congenial’ and the prospects for advancement were not great. As for other universities, ‘Perhaps Oxford perhaps provinces . . . (New College a plum not to be hoped for again.) Perhaps more [money] in colonies or America but [could] not read for Bar too.’ An alternative was to abandon the idea of a legal career and go into stockbroking as he had contemplated in 1920. The work did not appeal but it would have its advantages: ‘Marriage while we are young. Life without weary care of making both ends meet. Independence of the Laskis of this world, etc.’ As in 1920 Lionel went to see Jack Lawson who was sympathetic. Although he thought Robbins would find the law much more interesting, he thought he would do well in the City and promised to help him if he decided to try it. Iris dissuaded him. His father agreed with her and offered to pay Lionel’s Bar fees. With the aid of the helpful family solicitor, Mr Ellis, and a barrister friend of his, Lionel entered the Middle Temple on 29 January and took his first three dinners that week (LCR to IEG, 9, 15 and 29 January 1924). Of his first dinner he reported to Iris on 30 January that an LSE friend from Ceylon, Tantirige Dharmaratna, with whom he often went to the theatre, ‘had shown me round beforehand so I knew my way about. The food was fair the drink (free) good and the company indifferent.’ He was uncomplimentary about his fellow diners: ‘worms pur et simple of the Daily Mail variety – Make Germany pay etc.’ By the end of January Lionel had some work for The Economist. Beveridge had written to the editor, Walter Layton, on 19 December: If now or later you are on the look-out for a really first rate young man for economic journalism, I would like to bring to your notice L. Robbins. He has just taken his degree here and took a first as a matter of course. But beyond that he is really one of the best people we have ever had here. Cannan who as you probably know is not a lenient marker gave him well over 80% for every paper. . . . If we had a vacancy here we should take him without any hesitation, and we shall very likely want to make a vacancy for him later.

Layton agreed to see Robbins. As Lionel told Beveridge the next day, at the interview on 3 January Layton gave him a book to review and ‘a small job involving about six hours work a week in connection with his intelligence department’ (LCR Student’s Dossier). The work involved reading German newspapers for industrial information, under the supervision of Hargreaves

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Parkinson, whom Lionel like many others found easy to work with but dull, a steady plodder. He discovered he could ‘just muster enough German to struggle through’ and found himself spending weekday evenings doing just that (LCR to IEG, 9 January 1924; Edwards 1993, 683). He began to read William Geldart’s Elements of Civil Law. At LSE he signed up for a course in statistics – Bowley on ‘Current statistical questions’ – which he thought would be useful for economic journalism and a course on ‘Theories of Economic Fluctuation’ from Marjorie Tappan ‘which will keep my wits sharp on general questions of theory’ (LCR to IEG, 17 January 1924). He was also reading Keynes’s Tract on Monetary Reform – volunteering to tell Iris what it was all about for ‘it’s really just as simple as free trade and quite as interesting’ – and went to the discussion of it led by Cannan at the Enquirers Club at Toynbee Hall on 15 February. On 22 January he wrote Iris a long and rather excited letter. Firstly – I met Tugendhat this morning and he told me of a job that is going on the Outlook. Apparently the Outlook (which is a mildly liberal weekly . . .) want a man to write a series of articles upon social questions – housing local government etc. and they have written to the Manchester Guardian Financial Editor – a man of the name of Hobson whom I know slightly – who contributes their city column to ask for recommendations. Hobson has handed the matter to Forge . . . and he wants to discuss the matter with me immediately. I have arranged to dine with him in the city. Secondly – . . . Plant arrived. He was in a high state of glee and said he had just come from Laski who having congratulated him on his appointment [at Cape Town] turned to him and asked ‘And now Plant tell me, what am I to do with Robbins?’ We were still laughing about this when Laski himself arrived and shaking me by the hand asked me to call and see him tomorrow at noon. So I said I would. Thirdly – it appears that the job I spoke to you of yesterday [for ‘a director of commercial & technical education in a large firm’] is advertized by Lewis and Lewis – the firm Jimmy [Mallon] was talking of at Xmas: The staff director in question is his friend Marquis. Fourthly – This is the most important. I went to see Beveridge this afternoon to tell him about my decision with regard to the Bar and to learn whether any further developments had taken place in his Budget arrangements. He was in great good humour and received me very warmly. Apparently the Webb plan of giving Cabinet Ministers [in the new Labour government] bourgeois secretaries has fallen through for the moment owing to some technical difficulty concerned with the Civil Service regulations. He went on to say that he had recently come into £5000 p.a. for School purposes and that he proposed to devote some of this to prosecuting researches into some comparatively unworked economic problems – unemployment, population and

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so on. If I felt that I should be willing to devote my life to scientific work of this sort he thought he would be able to find a place for me immediately – or almost immediately. Did I feel attracted to that sort of thing. I asked him if such work necessarily precluded Legal studies being conducted concurrently. He at once said no . . . I told him I should like to turn the matter over in my mind for a day or two and as he had to deliver a lecture in a quarter of an hour’s time and wanted to consult his notes he agreed to this. He did not mention salary but I should not think it would be very considerable – at any rate to start with. Well Idie I shall not make any decision until the week-end. But I should very much like to know if you have any views on the subject.

Robbins knew Oscar Hobson and Frederick Waldo Forge from the Monday dining circle at Gennaro’s restaurant that Tugendhat had introduced him to. Forge, an LSE graduate, was the assistant financial editor on the Manchester Guardian and shared rooms in London with Tugendhat. After they dined together on 22 January he sent Robbins’s name on to The Outlook. Mallon sent word to Lionel that he thought he could help him with the job with Lewis’s and offered to write to Marquis (LCR to IEG, 23 and 24 January 1924). Frederick Marquis (later better known as Lord Woolton) knew Mallon from the Ancoats university settlement in Manchester; when he joined Lewis’s, a large department store in Liverpool, one of his innovations was to employ university graduates as management trainees (Woolton 1959, 9–10, 63–4, 77). Lionel soon received an invitation to an interview. Laski ‘was cordial as usual but had nothing to suggest’, though he did offer to talk to Beveridge; more usefully Lionel talked to Dalton (LCR to IEG, 24 and 29 January 1924): ‘After a long disquisition [he] recommended a composite job – partly research for Beveridge partly coaching – partly lecturing – This would suit me down to the ground.’ The next day (30 January) Robbins accepted Beveridge’s offer of a research assistantship, which involved helping to revise Beveridge’s classic Unemployment (1909), for the remainder of the academic year at a salary of £250 a year. Beveridge’s interest in unemployment went back to his time as a subwarden of Toynbee Hall in 1903–5 and it had been ‘in the empirical and theoretical study of unemployment that he hoped to make his professional reputation as an economist’ (Harris 1997, 38, 166). Robbins started working for Beveridge on Monday, 4 February, forgoing a golf lesson over the weekend in order to read the book. At his interview with the director of Lewis’s the next day he was offered a job more lowly than the one he had applied for – he refused it on the spot (LCR to IEG, 1 and 5 February 1924).

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It is difficult to identify which books Robbins reviewed for The Economist: only one review in the newspaper in the first few months of 1924 fits with remarks in his letters to Iris. He may have contributed to a survey of recent economic literature on 2 February which included two of the books he told Iris he was reading. He wrote his first review for The Economist and a draft of his first article for The Outlook in the Temple Library on 31 January ‘looking out over the Embankment with its beautiful filagree of plane trees and the gray Thames sparkling and dancing in the sun in the distance’. Having been asked for an article on housing or population, Lionel had chosen the former. Iris proved to be a valuable critic and he rewrote the first draft of the article before handing it in. ‘The New Government and Housing’ appeared in the issue of 9 February, and he was asked to submit more articles (LCR to IEG, 1, 4, 7, 13 February). In the December general election the Conservative government had lost its majority and the Labour Party had for the first time more seats than the Liberals. After the Liberals and Labour voted down the Baldwin Government in January 1924, the first Labour government in Britain, under James Ramsay MacDonald, took office. In its short life its most effective measure was the Housing Act introduced by the Minister of Health, John Wheatley, to tackle the postwar housing problem. In his article Robbins (1924a) pointed out that the problem was one of the availability of affordable housing, which could be tackled by subsidies or by cheapening the cost of building, and that the most important factor contributing to the high prices of houses was the high cost of labour. Given the Labour Party’s links with the trade unions this was the party’s great opportunity: if it could solve the housing problem it would ‘amply vindicate its claim to a capacity to govern’. When Wheatley introduced his bill, which increased the government’s subsidy for houses built to let at controlled rents, he linked it with a scheme to increase the building labour force, having negotiated a gentlemen’s agreement with the unions to increase the number of apprentices admitted and reduce the period of their apprenticeship. Half a million council houses were built under the Act before it was abolished in 1933 (Bowley 1945, 40–7). Lionel’s article was the first of several in which he commented on the government’s promises and proposals. In his second he turned to agricultural policy – with relish. He had recently helped his father, now again vice-president of the National Farmers’ Union, with a manifesto issued by the NFU on 9 February (Council 20 February 1924, NFU AD1/6), as he had with a statement in preparation for a deputation to the former Prime Minister Baldwin the previous October. (On the latter occasion, he told Iris on 11 October, his father had said, ‘Don’t flatter yourself that Im going to take your advice, my boy, but all the same I should be grateful if you would

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just cast your eye over this revised statement and tell me if there’s much in it that one of your hypercritical economists could take exception to.’) As Lionel put it in his article (1924b), the ‘“agricultural problem” . . . was much simpler than was desirable’ from the point of view of politicians on both sides of the House of Commons. ‘From the first signs of the depression it was obvious to all except those who didn’t want to see that only protection of some sort or another would prevent the diminution of cereal farming.’ But because protection, and hence dearer food, would be unpopular to the rest of the electorate, ‘The party leaders . . . with one accord announced themselves to be earnestly in search of “a constructive policy for agriculture.”’ Baldwin might have provided subsidies for agriculture along with tariffs for manufacturing industry if his government had been reelected, but the electorate had rejected protection in general in December 1923. The Labour Party, on the other hand, was particularly concerned with the position of agricultural labourers, which was indeed ‘deplorable’. The MacDonald government was therefore proposing to revive the Agricultural Wages Board abolished in 1921. Lionel was sceptical that this would improve the situation of agricultural workers, for if the Wages Board raised the general level of their wages while the farmers could ‘barely pay their way’ at current world prices the result would be less employment. Here for once his views were in accord with those of the NFU, although their favourite solution was to raise prices by protection. His preferred solution was for the government to tackle the long-term problem by encouraging the movement of labour out of the industry – for instance by extending unemployment insurance to agricultural workers – and by trying to make UK agriculture more productive by sponsoring research into, for example, cattle diseases. The government’s attempt to give the Agricultural Wages Board the power to set a national minimum wage for agricultural workers failed: under the Agricultural Wages (Regulation) Act 1924 the board could only confirm local minimum rates proposed by the county wage committees (Whetham 1978, 157). When the Act became law, Lionel’s father became an employers’ representative on the Wages Board again (Labour Committee and Council 15 August 1924, NFU AD1/6). Iris was even more critical of the first draft of this article than of the first, and Lionel found it difficult to rewrite, but he was quite pleased with the result in print – and even more with praise from Forge and Hobson. His third article ‘Mr Wheatley’s opportunity’ (1924c), came more easily, although ‘you can’t be very spicy about “rates” and “doles” and Poor Law Guardians’ (LCR to IEG, 18, 19, 20 and 26 February 1924). (He was writing about Wheatley’s attempt to remove some ineffective restrictions on

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expenditure by the Poor Law Guardians in Poplar.) His fourth, ‘Unemployment and Labour quietism’ (1924d), was his best and ‘apparently . . . made quite a good impression’ at The Outlook (LCR to IEG, 12 March). Reflecting his work for Beveridge he wrote on unemployment, the official figures of which were declining, and the signs of trade revival. He hoped the Labour government would not succumb to the temptation to do nothing about unemployment. ‘The time to avert unemployment is when unemployment is diminishing. When it is increasing again it will be too late. At present the Labour Government are still so conscious of their good intentions that they do not seem to realise that they run the danger of doing nothing at all.’ He argued for a thorough overhaul of the unemployment insurance system, citing Beveridge’s views. But he also noted that unemployment insurance was only a palliative and that the ‘disease’ of unemployment would not be cured until economists had discovered the causes of cyclical fluctuations in economic activity. His first efforts at teaching economics, to a group of friends and relations of Lady Sybil Smith, had not been successful. The group, who ranged from Lady Sybil’s youngest daughter aged sixteen to her mother aged seventy, was smaller than he had expected and ‘altho’ I can’t say I felt nervous I felt continually ill at ease at the effort of adapting my notes to a more intimate kind of lecture’. After being unable to give the second lecture because he was unwell, he thought the third went well, but Lady Smith then cancelled the lectures, at first because her daughter was ill (LCR to IEG, 14, 21, 28 February, 5 March 1924). He had, however, his part-time work for The Economist as well as his work for Beveridge. On 17 March he estimated his income was now £340 a year, not counting anything from The Outlook or interest from his grandfather’s estate (which he estimated would yield £50– 60 a year). Assuming Beveridge would increase his salary after six months, he thought he could earn another £50 a year by teaching or writing and he and Iris could marry by the autumn. At first the research work for Beveridge was quite mechanical and rather boring (as he reported to Iris): compiling statistical tables, learning how to use a calculating machine and reading dull books on unemployment insurance. But by the end of March he was getting the knack of the calculations and he was interviewing officials at the Ministry of Labour as well as gathering data there. On 25–27 March he attended a League of Nations Union conference on ‘Unemployment in its National and International Aspects’ held at LSE, where he heard Keynes, Henderson, Cannan and Gregory argue over the role of monetary factors in the trade cycle. He wrote a report on the conference for the Manchester Guardian Commercial (clipping in RP).

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On the first day, when ‘Mr. Henderson . . . made a most seductive plea for a “managed” currency claiming that such a scheme could eliminate, if not all at least the most violent fluctuations of the trade cycle’, Keynes supported him but Cannan, ‘while admitting the enormous part which currency inflation had played in the postwar situation, was unconvinced that financial factors were the main cause of the normal trade cycle. . . . Subsequent discussion did nothing to reconcile these views.’ There was also ‘energetic discussion’ on another day of the relation between wages and unemployment, which prompted Lionel to reread his undergraduate essay on unemployment (see Chapter 4). He was ‘enjoying one of my fits of enthusiasm’ for economics, partly as a result of looking at Wesley Mitchell’s Business Cycles (1913). As he admitted to Iris, ‘There’s no denying it I do enjoy the theoretical side of my subject. It does give one a pleasant sense of power to be able to perceive, however faintly, some sort of order in the apparent chaos of social phenomena. The difficulty is that these glimpses tend to make one imagine that one knows more than one really does. When I hear you discussing teeth with Lilian I feel a complete charlatan. Economic science never gets near such precision. If it does it becomes uninteresting.’ He also explained why he was writing such prosaic letters: Picture me now. Under my left elbow is a table headed – Building Trade. Increase or decrease per cent in numbers employed by firms making returns – just in front a huge pile of returns [to the Ministry of Labour] and Government Papers. On my right Wesley Mitchell page 24 ‘Pecuniary versus Industrial Factors in Business Prosperity’. The arithmometers [the calculating machines] are not actually in use it is true but there is a faint survival of their clicking in the atmosphere. . . . Outside St Clements [printing] press with its perpetual drone. Now could Dante himself write poetry in such conditions?3

The evening of the same day (1 April) he was too tired to write to Iris at all, having been to a dinner to celebrate the third anniversary of Georg Tugendhat’s arrival in England. As well as managing to see a good deal of Tugendhat and of Jacques Kahane, now working with the London merchants Louis Dreyfus & Co, he continued to see Nathan and Susan Isaacs frequently, when he and Nathan would still talk well into the night. After one such evening he told Iris on 9 April: ‘I like [him] more the more I see of him. Apparently he hates business and thinks of retiring in about two years time and settling in the country with Susie his wife and living on about 3

The table survives in Beveridge III19; LCR’s notes on Mitchell are in Cyclical Fluctuation – Theories, RP.

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£150 p.a.’ In the event, however, the Isaacs spotted an advertisement in the New Statesman for a director for a new experimental school and in October 1924 they moved to Cambridge where Susan set up and ran the Malting House School for its first three years. Her most famous work – and Nathan’s – stems from this experiment in allowing young children freedom for their intellectual and emotional development, supported by firmness rather than punishment (Smith 1985). When Beveridge went on holiday in the middle of April, Robbins took the opportunity to indulge in ‘an orgy of reading’ on the trade cycle, hoping to read all the standard works by the time Beveridge returned, as he told Iris on 10 April. He began with A.C. Pigou’s Economics of Welfare (1920), moved on to the works of D.H. Robertson (1915), F. Lavington (1922), J.A. Hobson (1922), Foster and Catchings (1923) and Aftalion (1913), finished Mitchell on Business Cycles and compiled a lengthy bibliography of works on cycles for Beveridge (ms notes Cyclical Fluctuations-Theories, RP; Beveridge III15). As he told Iris, he found the theory ‘intensely interesting . . . Nobody really knows the causes of these ebbs and flows of economic activity which cause such disturbances in such diverse quarters and it is very fascinating to analyse the suggestions which have been put forward so far and see if they stand the objections you are able to make against them. And it is an enquiry of real importance because nearly all the troubles of our times arise from them so that if one could really discover ways of predicting them one would be doing real good to innumerable people.’ He thought Pigou’s view on the causes of cycles, which he put briefly to Iris as ‘Crop Variations, Inventions and irrational fluctuations of business confidence excited by fluctuations in the amount of new machinery people order’, were ‘quite sound’. However, ‘he does not give any statistical proof worth speaking of so the explanation is not altogether satisfactory.’ Robbins was particularly interested in the question of currency regulation, and whether the appropriate monetary policy could eliminate or at least reduce the amplitude of economic cycles. He listened intently to the arguments of Keynes, Cannan, Ralph Hawtrey and Sir Charles Addis in the discussion on monetary reform at the annual general meeting of the Royal Economic Society at the School on 14 April. A fortnight later he wrote a memorandum for Beveridge on the current controversy – ‘by far the most interesting thing I have done for him so far, and I scarcely have had time think about anything [else]’ (LCR to IEG, 30 April 1924). He had previously been inclined to think that the differences between Keynes, the main advocate of a managed currency, and Cannan were political rather than economic. Now he suspected there might be underlying economic-theoretical

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differences on the role of monetary factors in the trade cycle, related to their divergent views on the functions of banking. As he explained to Beveridge, after first pointing out that a ‘monetary cause’ should be defined as a change in the supply of money, Cannan defined money as cash (legal tender) only, whereas Keynes included bank deposits as well. Hence, ‘If Mr Keynes[’s] view is correct then the part played by the banks in varying the supply of money may well be so great that it would be otiose to look further for causes of general fluctuations. If, on the other hand, Professor Cannan’s view is correct then, although it will not be denied that the banks play some part in the process, it may be that the main part is played by some influence operating from the side of demand – in other words by some “real” rather than by some “monetary” influence’ (Note on the influence on theories of trade fluctuation of divergent views of the nature of the banking system, Articles & Notes, RP). Unfortunately the surviving copy of the memorandum ends at this point. But in another incomplete memorandum written either at this time or slightly later, Robbins was clearly critical of Cannan’s definition and Cannan’s contention that banks cannot lend more than they borrow (‘Uncompleted memorandum on bank deposits’, Economics Misc Theory, RP). On the other hand, he still shared Cannan’s doubts about the political desirability of a managed currency (Robbins 1924k). Beveridge and Robbins shared an interest in the problem of a declining population. ‘I’m glad to say,’ Lionel reported to Iris on 7 April after one of his conversations with Beveridge on the subject, ‘that he’s now convinced that the only thing to do is to make knowledge of Birth Control absolutely general and then encourage the right kind of people to have more children. At one time I feared he was going to come down on the side of the “antis”.’ In the Summer term Lionel attended Beveridge’s lectures on Problems of Population and Unemployment and found them to be ‘quite non technical and contain[ing] a remarkable amount of interesting information’. He was particularly impressed by demographic projections of a decline in the UK population from the 1940s (Bowley 1924) and tried to write an article on them for The Outlook. On a more personal level, he read Marie Stopes’s famous book, Married Love (1918) and its sequel, Wise Parenthood, which Iris had recommended to him (LCR to IEG, 2, 3 and 24 June 1924). Lionel found Beveridge himself a strange character: ‘a queer mixture of the generous and the effeminate – a standing example of the danger of remaining a bachelor.’ He already found Mrs Mair, Beveridge’s cousin by marriage who was then the School’s Secretary and later his wife, tiresome – butting in as she did in his discussions with Beveridge – and on occasion found it ‘very irksome to be civil to her’ (LCR to IEG, 12 December 1923, 4 February and

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3 March 1924). As Beveridge’s biographer has recorded (Harris 1997, 23, 29), the ‘problem of Mrs Mair’ – whom she describes as ‘Bossy, self-centred, histrionic, bounding with energies that she knew not what to do with, and capable of exaggerated extremes of both generosity and malice’ – ‘dominated Beveridge’s public and private life throughout the inter-war years, and was only to be ultimately “solved” by their belated marriage in 1942.’ At this time, however, the existence of Jessy Mair did not affect Lionel’s friendly relations with Beveridge himself. Meanwhile at The Outlook the editor had resigned at the beginning of April, and the leader writer (‘Ocellus’), had taken his place. Some of Robbins’s articles appeared as leaders; he contributed a few of the ‘Notes of the Week’; and on 14 April he was invited to attend the weekly editorial lunches (LCR to IEG, 8, 9 and 14 April 1924). His leader of 12 April, ‘A cure for strikes’ (1924e), he thought ‘From an economic point of view . . . by far the most satisfactory thing I have done but the subject is a little technical and it may not appear interesting to a lay reader.’ He argued that the current rash of strikes – the most recent by London tram workers – reflected not the novelty of a Labour government but the beginning of trade revival which encouraged workers to seek higher wages. It was desirable to find a better way to settle wage negotiations than by strikes. His proposed ‘cure’ was to prevent workers from pitching their claims too high and employers from being intransigent by requiring greater publicity of company profits. He followed this with another anonymous article, ‘The right to strike’, in the next issue. This was, he told Iris on 14 April, to be ‘chiefly concerned with the report of the Tram Strike inquiry and I shall urge that although it would be impolitic to deny workers in essential industries the right to strike at all yet it is desirable that the right should be so limited that the public suffer a minimum inconvenience. I shall recommend a Canadian Act which makes a court of investigation before a strike necessary and prohibits the resort to strikes (or locking out) until after the Court of Inquiry has reported.’4 As he put it in the article (1924f), the right to strike was ‘a grandiose and question begging term’ but it enshrines a valuable defence of liberty: ‘But while it is neither expedient nor desirable that society should say to any group of privately employed workmen “thou shalt not strike at all”, it is, we believe, both expedient and desirable that it should say “thou shalt strike only under special conditions.”’ His proposal would allow both calmer consideration of the issues in the dispute and preparation of emergency measures to deal 4

The 1907 Industrial Disputes Investigation Act, which was much criticized in Canada, was in force until 1925 when it was declared ultra vires (Bothwell, Drummond and English 1987, 98).

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with disruption if a strike did occur. ‘A strike or a lock-out is a money dispute between profit makers and wage earners in a particular industry, and its settlement should depend upon market conditions. There can be no possible reason why it should depend upon the amount of inconvenience and danger to which it happens to be possible to subject the public. . . . The right to strike, like the right to lift up one’s voice in public, depends upon one’s not inflicting intolerable inconvenience on one’s neighbours.’ The new editor asked Lionel to write on issues such as the Labour government’s proposals for reforming the system of old age pensions. On this and unemployment insurance matters Lionel invoked Beveridge, who had recently published a pamphlet, Insurance for all and everybody. He found this much less interesting than arguing with Beveridge over the causes of the trade cycle. Although he wrote other leaders on such subjects, he preferred to write about more economic issues – for instance, the problems of the coal mining industry (where he suggested the government take over and run one of the English coalfields as an experiment to see if state ownership could be more productive than private enterprise) – and even more to wrestle with more theoretical matters relating to the causes of unemployment in his work for Beveridge.5 At the end of April 1924, when Robbins was wondering whether he should apply for a lectureship in economics at the University College of Wales at Bangor, Beveridge asked him if he would like to be nominated for a Rockefeller Travelling Fellowship to the USA for a year. Lionel’s first reaction was negative: he was unwilling to postpone marriage for a year. When he asked Beveridge about the Bangor job, Beveridge told him he almost certainly would not get it as it was earmarked for another man already holding the job temporarily (LCR to IEG, 28 and 29 April 1924). A few days later Beveridge told him that he had talked to the vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation and learned that the amount of the fellowship could be raised if the fellow was married; he also mentioned a lectureship at the University of Liverpool. Robbins asked if he could put in for both and Beveridge agreed. Beveridge immediately arranged for Lionel to meet J.R.M. Butler, who advised the Rockefeller Foundation on candidates for the fellowships. They met the same day at the United University Club and went for a walk in St James’s Park. Robbins sent a formal letter of application to Butler that evening (LCR to IEG, 5 and 13 May 1924; Robbins 1971a, 101–2). In his application Robbins said he would like to work on unemployment 5

In May he contributed ‘The extension of pensions’, ‘An experiment in nationalisation’ and ‘Rabbits and remedies’ (1924g, h, i).

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and business fluctuations and take advantage of the fellowship to learn about recent US attempts to control or mitigate such fluctuations (notes in Cross Sections, RP). For once he took Mrs Mair’s advice, as he told Iris on 21 May: he had to state his religion and Beveridge suggested ‘agnostic’. Fearing that ‘might offend American susceptibility . . . we appealed to Mrs Mair who suggested “Protestant attached to no particular denomination”’, which Lionel liked. He claimed it was ‘the first sensible thing that woman has ever said in my hearing’. Beveridge also wrote to Alexander Carr-Saunders, Charles Booth Professor of Social Science at the University of Liverpool, who had asked him on 12 May to recommend economists for one of two jobs at Liverpool, a position in ‘either social economics or sociology’ (the other job was in statistics). Carr-Saunders could only think of J.W.F. Rowe, then an assistant at LSE, but ‘Ashley [W.J. Ashley, then Professor of Commerce at Birmingham] mentioned to me the name of Robbins whom he said you would know and of whom he has a high opinion’. Beveridge confirmed this the next day and told Carr-Saunders that Robbins ‘would like to be considered (though he has one or two alternatives up his sleeve)’ (Beveridge IIb23). Lionel was still planning to read for the Bar, attending the necessary dinners for the Law Term in the week of 19 May, but he was finding economics more and more exciting. He was reading Irving Fisher’s The Nature of Capital and Income (1906) with great interest and he devoted a whole letter to Iris on 22 May to analyzing the recent fluctuations of the French franc and explaining the purchasing power parity theory of exchange rates. He went to an interview at the University of Liverpool on 28 May, reading Bagehot’s Lombard Street on the train and lunching with Carr-Saunders, the dean of arts and two other candidates before the interview, which ‘seemed to go off quite well’. Robbins very much liked Carr-Saunders who gave him dinner, took him out to Barrie’s The Professor’s Love Story at the local repertory theatre and put him up for the night. He was very uncertain as to whether he would get the job but as well as thinking that Carr-Saunders was someone he would enjoy working with he had learned that ‘Liverpool isn’t so bad a place to live in as I imagined’ (LCR to IEG, 28 and 29 May 1924). Robbins did not get the job. Carr-Saunders told Beveridge on 7 July (Beveridge IIb23) that the committee had appointed a lecturer in social statistics and a lecturer in social institutions, but added ‘I hope that a year hence we may have enough money to add to the staff and I should in that case like to see someone with Robbins’ qualifications and interests appointed.’ By the time Beveridge heard from Carr-Saunders, Lionel had been awarded a Rockefeller Travelling Fellowship and another possibility had arisen.

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At the beginning of June Lionel spent an evening with Eddie for the first time in several months, though he had seen George Davidge more recently. Lionel was still ‘very fond of Eddie and seeing him again after so long and talking out the evening as we used to do was very enjoyable’ (LCR to IEG, 2 May and 2 June 1924). Eddie too was ‘delighted . . . to play the old game over again, to gambit & be checkmated in some footling aesthetic argument’ and to find that of all his friends Lionel had changed the least (Rose to LCR, nd, Personal Letters from Iris & Clive etc, RP). On 5 June, however, as he waited impatiently for news from Liverpool and New York, Lionel was ‘tired and depressed’, although Dalton on 2 June had been ‘very encouraging about the future’, telling him that he hoped very much that Robbins would come back to the School after a year’s absence. Dalton advised Robbins to start writing academic articles and perhaps a book. By 24 June there was still no news from America. Out of the blue came a letter from H.W.B. Joseph of New College Oxford: would Robbins like to come up and teach economics for a year while Harold Salvesen was away? (Salvesen had been awarded a Rockefeller Travelling Fellowship to go to Harvard.) There would be about fifteen hours’ teaching a week during Full Term and the salary proposed was £300. When Robbins found this letter in his pigeonhole at the School he also found Cannan ‘searching about the building to tell me about it. . . . he knows Joseph very well and probably suggested me’ (LCR to IEG, 24 June). The offer was very tempting – but so was a year in America. Lionel consulted everybody: on 25 June Iris thought he would prefer to go to the States but he thought she would prefer Oxford if he did not have to be up there all week; Dalton (and Cannan) leaned towards Oxford, but there was Beveridge to be considered given that he had nominated Robbins for the Rockefeller Fellowship. Lionel wrote to Joseph to enquire if the estimated fifteen hours could be concentrated in a couple of days each week. He tried to see Beveridge on 1 July and again on 2 July but he had gone to the Lawn Tennis Championships at Wimbledon. On 3 July Beveridge ‘agreed with everybody else that Oxford would be better’ and Robbins wrote to Joseph asking to see him in Oxford the next week (LCR to IEG, 1, 2 and 3 July). At New College on 11 July ‘Joseph was very pleasant – doesn’t mind a bit my not living in – prefers it in fact as they are very hard up for rooms – but there will be a spare bedroom where I can put up when I have to stay up. . . . So I accepted there and then and it is all settled.’ The next three weeks passed in a flurry of activity as Lionel made arrangements for his marriage. He wanted the wedding to take place before his father’s holiday in the second half of August. As a result, he wrote Arnold

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Plant in South Africa (Plant 448), ‘I hardly know whether I am standing on my head or my heels for the multiplicity of tedious arrangements that have somehow to be made in the intervals of winding up my work for Beveridge.’ He managed to write something each week for The Outlook and arranged to write four more leaders during August and September on ‘easy’ subjects.6 The editor stood champagne in his honour at the last weekly lunch on 28 July. Lionel also went to Oxford again on 24 July to consult Salvesen about the work he would be doing come October. Lionel Robbins and Iris Gardiner were married on Saturday 2 August 1924, according to the rites of the Church of England, in St Dunstan’s, Monks Risborough, the fourteenth-century parish church for Whiteleaf. Only the immediate members of their families attended: their parents, Clive, Stella and Jimmie Mallon.7 Their honeymoon was to be a walking tour in the Italian and Austrian Alps, chosen with plentiful advice from the Isaacs and Tugendhat (LCR to IEG, 3, 15 and 18 July 1924). They stopped first at Bourg St Maurice in eastern France en route to Courmayeur and Aosta in Italy and decided to stay there for ten days and not to bother to go into Austria after Courmayeur and Aosta. They were away for three weeks, during which time Lionel managed to write two Outlook leaders as well as to write to his father and to his sister Caroline on her twenty-first birthday. He wrote a third leader after their return to England. When they returned to London they spent three weeks buying secondhand furniture including ‘a rather beautiful Persian rug’ for their first home, a small apartment at Toynbee Hall, in Booth House which had recently been converted from a student residence to married quarters (LCR to RRR, 20 September 1924; Pimlott 1935, xiii–ix). When Mother and the Pater visited them there on 26 September they found them, as Lionel’s father commented the next day, ‘obviously happy & at peace with the world’. 6 7

Judging by his letters to Iris, LCR’s leaders in July included two on the labour dispute in the building industry and two on monetary policy (1924j, k, l, m). Information from marriage certificate, LCR to IEG, 14 July 1924, and Nancy Robbins.

SIX

New College Oxford

New College Oxford was founded in 1379 by William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, who also founded the most academic of English public schools, Winchester College, in 1382. ‘They were founded, as the statutes of New College say, to counter “the fewness of clergy, arising from pestilence, wars and other miseries”, and so their object was to convert “poor and indigent scholars” into “men of great learning, fruitful to the church, the king and the realm” – that is secular clergy to be suited for administrative posts.’ The brightest and the best of the Wykehamists usually went up to New College. The core of the college – hall, chapel, library and sets ranged around the Great Quad – was built in 1380–1404. Its garden, with an artificial mound made in 1594, is surrounded on two sides by the old city walls (Sherwood and Pevsner 1974, 166–74). Lionel Robbins told his father on 16 October 1924 that it must be ‘the most beautiful of all the colleges [for] I cannot conceive anything surpassing the beauty of the garden’. The Oxford Michaelmas term began on Sunday 12 October 1924. Lionel arrived at New College the previous Thursday in order to spend the weekend in college before meeting his students. ‘It was a damp, windy autumn evening, the quad was gloomy and empty and my spirits were at their most diffident and apprehensive.’ He was met by Alic Smith, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy: ‘in a dozen paces, as he gripped my bag and welcomed me, he made me feel a full member of the college.’ They became lasting friends. Smith was not an outstanding philosopher and had been a civil servant before he became a fellow of New College, but Lionel greatly admired him as ‘a practical idealist, decisive, open-minded, forward-looking, and immensely influential in the councils of the college’. He was devoted to the arts as well as to the college, of which he was later Warden (Bowra 1966, 107–8; Robbins 1971a, 115–16). The senior tutor, H.W.B. Joseph, whom Lionel had met in July, was a much more distinguished philosopher but also 126

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a dedicated teacher. In 1924 the Warden was the Reverend William Archibald Spooner, famous for his lapses of speech known as ‘Spoonerisms’. The historian H.A.L. Fisher, who had been President of the Board of Education in the Lloyd George coalition government, was elected Warden in January 1925. The teaching in economics at New College was mainly to undergraduates (all men of course) reading in their second and third years for the new Final Honour School of Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). Robbins also taught students from the Queen’s College reading for the same degree. The new degree, often known as ‘Modern Greats’ to distinguish it from the old Honour School of Literae Humaniores or ‘Greats’, had been approved by the University in November 1920. The subjects required in the final examinations (Schools in the Oxford jargon) were: moral and political philosophy; British political and constitutional history 1760–1914; British social and economic history from 1760; the history of philosophy since Descartes; political economy; political and economic organization; prescribed books in two of metaphysics and moral philosophy, political philosophy, and political economy; a further subject in philosophy, politics or political economy; and a translation paper (Chester 1986, 30–8). Robbins’s main responsibility was to give tutorials in economics for the political economy paper; he also taught elementary economics to New College undergraduates in their first year. Standing in for Harold Salvesen for a year, he was not a fellow of the college but an honorary member of the Senior Common Room and could dine at High Table. Salvesen had been one of the first students to take the new degree and was one of several fellows elected by the colleges to teach the subjects for PPE. The others included R.F. Harrod at Christ Church in 1922, E.L. Hargreaves at Oriel and G.D.H. Cole at University College in 1925 and the Australian Robert Hall at Trinity College in 1926. Besides Harrod, Hargreaves and the absent Salvesen there were few economists in Oxford in 1924/5. They included Frederick Ogilvie, a fellow of Trinity College who became Professor of Political Economy at Edinburgh in 1926, and the Drummond Professor of Political Economy, D.H. Macgregor, who had succeeded F.Y. Edgeworth in 1922 (Young and Lee 1993, 216–18). Beveridge had written to Macgregor on 14 July 1924 (Beveridge IIb23) hoping he would contact Robbins: ‘You will find him very able, exceedingly useful, and anything you can do to encourage him will be much appreciated.’ Cannan, who lived in Oxford, promptly invited Robbins to tea. Replying to the invitation on 26 October (Cannan 1028), Lionel told him: ‘So far I have enjoyed myself immensely. The work is pretty strenuous for I am only up part of the week and the

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men are very backward – most of my students who are taking Schools next summer have not yet read any modern theory worth talking about – they study their wretched “set-books” as gospel rather than history and have got into the most unspeakable muddle in consequence – but I have been so much better in health since my marriage that I am not finding it at all too much for me.’ Lionel had agreed with Joseph to spend only part of each week in college, concentrating his tutorial hours into two groups of 11/2 days each: Wednesdays and Thursday mornings and Fridays and Saturday mornings. He intended at first to stay overnight in Oxford only on Wednesdays and Fridays but soon stayed up on Thursdays as well. As he told his father on 16 October, this left him ‘Saturday afternoon until Wednesday morning clear to pursue other plans and [to] be with Iris’. The ‘other plans’ included making up his income with work for The Economist and writing his weekly piece for The Outlook. He also arranged with the Professor of Forestry to give some lectures on introductory economics to the students of the School of Forestry, which Salvesen had given the year before (Hilary Term 1924 Schedule of Lectures authorized by Boards of Faculties, Oxford University Gazette, January 18, 1924). At New College one of his first pupils was the son of the Secretary to the Cabinet, Sir Maurice Hankey, and, as he also told his father, if he had been up a year earlier he would have taught ‘Ramsay [MacDonald]’s offspring’ (Malcolm MacDonald) who was up at Queen’s. In 1924/5 there were five New College men reading PPE for Schools in 1925, three in 1926 along with six from the Queen’s College. One of the former, E.M. Hugh-Jones, joined the group of PPE graduates elected to Oxford fellowships (at Keble in 1926); although he was, in his own words (HughJones to Lady Robbins, 20 May 1984), ‘not among his [Robbins’s] brightest pupils, he got me through PPE in one year’. (He later became professor of economics at Keele University.) The second year undergraduates besides Robin Hankey, who joined the diplomatic service on graduation, included P.N. Thapar, who joined the Indian Civil Service, and David Eccles, later a Conservative MP and a Cabinet minister in the 1950s. Eccles, whose parents practised a severe Presbyterianism, ‘developed a habit of speaking out and disregarding convention’ and had refused to be baptized or confirmed while he was at Winchester (ODNB). Another pupil whom Robbins particularly enjoyed tutoring was one of the first year students, the future academic economist and Labour politician, Hugh Gaitskell, fresh from Winchester. Gaitskell’s biographer interviewed Robbins and reported (Williams 1982, 18): ‘In his first term he went for elementary economics to Lionel Robbins, who called it “a subject deadly for both teacher and taught”. He would sit on

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Robbins’s sofa reddening with suppressed mirth at the mild impertinences of his [unidentified] Australian fellow-pupil until his decorous Wykehamist reticence broke down in peals of helpless laughter. Later his economics tutor was the young, eccentric and stimulating Harold Salvesen’ with whom he also became friendly. Hugh Gaitskell’s ‘stable companion, obvious rival and great friend’ at New College was the Hon Frank Pakenham who was to become the seventh Earl of Longford. At the end of his first year he decided to switch from History to PPE (Pakenham 1953, 40). ‘I was sent along to see Mr . . . Robbins. . . . Lionel later looked after me in a number of ways, but I suppose that . . . I must have appeared as a brutal, licentious, and above all flippant Old Etonian, flitting patronisingly from one great subject to another. At any rate, he gave me a long list of books to read in the Long Vac, of which I can now only recall Mrs. Knowles’ Industrial and Commercial Revolution in Great Britain in the 19th Century, Professor Cannan’s Wealth and Professor Henderson’s Supply and Demand. Partly I suppose to keep the conversation going . . . I commented brightly: “They sound rather dull.” “Don’t you like dull books?” said Lionel Robbins. “I’m afraid I don’t”, I said, still hoping for approval. “I should have thought that they would rather have appealed to you,” he said suavely, which put me and kept me in my place for many months to come.’ Pakenham went on to obtain an even better First than Gaitskell in Schools in 1927 (H.W.B. Joseph to Gaitskell, Gaitskell A40, UCL). Although Gaitskell and Pakenham both played hard, they were serious young men – and in that typical of New College undergraduates in the 1920s. In the official history of New College it is noted (Buxton and Williams eds. 1979, 109) that New College men did not ‘fall into any of the fashionable extremes. None of the leading Oxford aesthetes of the twenties was at New College, nor were any of the political agitators or poets of the thirties. The typical New College product of the period went into public or academic life in a steady responsible kind of a way.’ Goronwy Rees who came up in 1928 from a Welsh grammar school put this in a less complimentary way (ibid., 121): at that time the college, even more than the university as a whole, was the preserve of the English ruling class, a kind of pheasantry in which the products of the English public schools were reared like game birds. . . . This was particularly true of New College because of the very large proportion of Wykehamists among its undergraduate members, for whom the college represented . . . the completion of an intensive course designed, as the Founder himself would have wished, to enlist able and gifted recruits in the service of . . . what today would be called the Establishment. Wykehamists, because there were so many of them, gave New College a certain prim,

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slightly self-satisfied, almost ecclesiastical air, though even then modulated to meet the demands of a secular society; . . . there was something inexpressibly English and middle class about it all.

Robbins taught three of the half dozen New College students of the 1920s who became Cabinet ministers; others of his pupils were to become academic colleagues in the 1930s. Tutorials were, and are, the main method of instruction of Oxford undergraduates. The few lectures in economics offered for PPE students in 1924/5 included Macgregor on public finance, problems of economic regulation, economic analysis and statistics, and foreign trade; Ogilvie on economic theory and economic organization; Harrod on monetary theory and monetary history; and Hargreaves on ‘Some problems of distribution’. Only Macgregor’s economic analysis lectures and Harrod’s on monetary theory extended over more than one eight-week term.1 Robbins’s lectures to the forestry students, which he gave on Thursdays at 9 a.m., followed the main lines of Dalton’s introductory lectures he had heard four years earlier: beginning with such matters as scope and method (where he emphasized to the forestry students that economics was a science), the meaning of wealth and the misleading distinction between productive and unproductive labour; moving on to the theory of production (including a long discussion on population); and then tackling value theory (demand and supply) and its applications to the supply of factors of production, money and the distribution of income (Short Course on Elements, RP).2 Lionel’s teaching at New College also reflected, as Pakenham’s recollection of recommended reading shows, his own instruction at LSE. He (like Salvesen) was remembered as an excellent tutor: clear in communicating, lively, intellectually stimulating and encouraging (Lee 1993 ed., 35–6). The fellows of the College were well satisfied with his replacement for Salvesen, at the end of Trinity term recording their ‘high appreciation’ of his work. He was made an extraordinary member of the Senior Common Room for seven years (Stated General Meeting 25 June 1925, New College Archives). When Salvesen resigned his fellowship two years later, the college elected Robbins to an Official Fellowship in Economics in his stead. The tutorial work and lectures in Oxford left Lionel little time for reading or writing. He continued to write for The Outlook and for at least his first 1 2

Committee for Economics and Political Science, Arrangements for Lectures etc, Oxford University Gazette, October 9, 1924, January 15 and April 23, 1925. Whereas Dalton in a year-long course could spend a term on the last two topics, LCR offered one lecture on money and two on distribution; his notes can be dated by the topical references in his lecture on money. The notes are not, therefore, for the introductory lectures he gave in Oxford in 1927 as I assumed in my 2004a.

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term to review for The Economist. Not surprisingly he saw little of friends in London such as Tugendhat and Kahane during term. In his absence Iris spent evenings at the Lodge with the Mallons or went out to the theatre or lectures. Lionel’s contributions to The Outlook reveal his changed political views. He criticized the Labour government, whose election manifesto had claimed to have ‘a scientific remedy for unemployment’, for failing to conduct any empirical investigations into the underlying causes or possible cures of the problems it intended to tackle, and warned that by failing to vindicate its claim to be scientific it ‘has also done much to prejudice itself in the eyes of a not inconsiderable body of voters’ (‘An unscientific government’, 1924n). He foresaw that whatever party was in power after the next election ‘we are bound to get a lot of Socialism’ in the form of publicly owned enterprises (‘Where are we going to?’, 1924o). He was concerned not so much that publicly owned enterprises would be less efficient than private – they might or might not: ‘the thing is a matter of statistics, and although some bad mistakes may be made, the truth will out in the end’ – but that there was a potential threat to individual liberty in the general movement towards collectivism. He concluded that the task of the non-socialist parties was to find the ‘countervailing safeguards’ and suggested they should seek to find non-collectivist ways to increase the diffusion of private property by, for instance, reforming the laws of inheritance. ‘The Guild Socialists thought they could safeguard the soul of man under Socialism by a complex system of small committees, but £100 in the bank is worth a vote on a hundred committees.’ He also speculated on the long-term survival of the Labour Party given its heterogeneous membership ranging from the Miners’ Federation to the Fabians (‘A ramshackle party’, 1924p): ‘Ex-Liberals, ex-Conservatives, Trade Unionists, Socialist Intellectuals, Militant Communists, Pacifists, Single Taxers, Currency Cranks and Agricultural Reformers all elbow one another in the utmost confusion, each assuring the world of their unanimity and his neighbour of their ultimate disagreement. Truly a marvellous party.’ When MacDonald’s minority government fell in October, precipitating the third general election in three years, Lionel decided to vote for the Liberal Party, if only by default. ‘I am not a Socialist’, he declared in a signed article in The Outlook (‘The case for Liberalism’, 1924r). ‘I have no objection to Socialism as a means: it is as an end in itself that I find it objectionable. If I thought that it would permanently increase the sum total of human happiness I would socialise all industry tomorrow. I would not do so merely to justify some dogmatic conception of social justice which it seems to me is what the Socialists want to do, and, as it happens, I do not think that general nationalisation would increase the sum total of human happiness. For this reason I am unable

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to vote for the Labour Party.’ At the same time he shared the socialists’ criticism of existing economic conditions and wanted reform, although of a different kind from theirs, ‘based not upon some hare-brained conception of social justice, but upon the broad principles of economics and utility’, which he thought the Liberal Party most likely to adopt. He could not join the ‘reactionaries’ of the Conservative Party, even if it was headed by the ‘sincere and honest’ Baldwin. Hence he would vote for the Liberals even though he did not expect them to regain power in the foreseeable future. The general election of 29 October returned the Conservatives with a majority. Labour had lost forty-two seats, the Liberals twice as many. Winston Churchill became Chancellor of the Exchequer and, as Chancellor, announced Britain’s return to the gold standard at the prewar parity of US$4.86 to the pound in his first budget speech on 28 April 1925. His predecessor, Philip Snowden, had set up a committee the previous summer, ostensibly to consider the amalgamation of the Treasury’s currency note issue with the Bank of England note issue. This inevitably raised the question of the timing of a return to gold since the Cunliffe Committee in 1918 had recommended amalgamation of the note issues after the return to gold (Moggridge 1972, 37–47). While the committee was meeting in private, some of the witnesses in favour of an early return to gold made their views known more publicly. Commenting on one of them, Lionel pointed out in The Outlook (1924m): ‘The real choice is between inaction and deflation. The gold standard will not be restored until the dollar-sterling exchange stands at gold parity. And this is not going to happen unless prices in America rise or prices in this country fall. Either we can go on doing nothing, as at present, in the hope that sooner or later the Americans will inflate, or we can reduce our own price level by curtailing the supply of money and discouraging enterprise, and so reach the same result by deliberate action.’ He was all in favour of inaction. He was always critical of the decision to return at the prewar parity, telling his students in lectures a year later that he thought it would have been better to have returned earlier at a lower parity (Economics: Currency Banking & Trade Lectures, RP). Lionel continued to criticize the Labour Party and its supporters, especially their economic ideas such as a minimum wage, and to comment on labour questions more generally, in his leaders in The Outlook in 1925 and 1926. Although it is impossible to identify everything he wrote, he kept some of his unsigned pieces, and he contributed reviews under his own name. When he wrote a very critical review of a book advocating the nationalization of land by the head of the Oxford Institute of Agricultural Economics, C.S. Orwin (1925a), he sent it to his father on 29 August 1925, asking him

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to strike out his name if it would cause him any personal or official difficulties: ‘Sorry to bother you but as you will see I have touched on some delicate problems and I shouldn’t like you to be embarrassed by my critical adventures.’ He had also been anxious to learn his father’s reaction to an earlier article, ‘Religion and economics’ (1924q), which he had originally written as a leader. As he told his father on 29 September (1924), if he had written it as an article in the first place he would not have been so pontifical. As it was, having noted that economics had come to take the place of religion in certain respects – ‘The workman who fifty years ago would have been a lay preacher or a Church worker is to-day a student of the Workers’ Educational Association. Then he would have studied theology, to-day he studies economics’ – and claimed that redemptionist religions were increasingly unpopular, at least in the West, he argued that ‘with the wider view of Religion, which most thoughtful people have all times accepted, the view which regards Religion as being concerned with duty to our neighbour and our attitude towards the universe – a matter of works rather than a matter of faith, the science which deals with material welfare is very intimately connected.’ Because ‘You cannot build the City of God [on earth] on false economic foundations’, it was necessary to use economics to find out how realistically to improve man’s lot. He concluded grandly: ‘The Religion of the immediate future then must be a large extent an economic religion. It must abandon its preoccupation with the remote traffic of metaphysics and descend into the market place. It must leave the high places and the sacrifices and come once more among men. Hand in hand with the economist it must work for the betterment of the material lot of the people until having secured for them the conditions of a good life it can once more dictate to them how to live it.’3 A chance conversation between A.G. Gardiner and Sir Ernest Benn, the publisher, in December 1924 led to Lionel’s writing his first (small) book (1926a). Iris wrote him from London that Benn, a lifelong free trader and individualist, ‘wanted to bring out some pamphlets on economics but he said the difficulty was to find good men to write them. Father suggested you and Benn was very enthusiastic and wants you to phone him up.’ After his discussion with Benn Lionel envisaged it as a pamphlet on the economics of wages, covering such questions as ‘What are wages?’, ‘Why general wages rise and fall’, ‘Why wages in particular industries rise and fall’, ‘The utility of wage fluctuations’ and ‘The regulation of wages’, and intended to dispel the 3

His father commented on 27 September: ‘The article . . . is very interesting in the main: I find myself in agreement with it.’

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‘much nonsense [that] is talked about the subject’ (Outline of pamphlet to be entitled the economics of wages, “Wages”, RP). At New College after the Christmas vacation he thought he would be able to start on it ‘next week’; three months later he had written one chapter, and he completed it in the summer vacation (LCR to RRR, nd but January 1924, IER to LCR, late April or early May 1925, and LCR to RRR, 1 and 26 August 1925) – by which time he was back at LSE. Beveridge and Dalton had not forgotten their promise to find a position for Robbins at LSE. The 1924/5 academic year was not far advanced when Dalton lunched with Lionel in Oxford (Robbins 1971a, 103): ‘“I am here”, he said, with the mock pomposity which he affected so splendidly, “to negotiate your return to the School”; and he offered me a lectureship which, needless to say, I accepted on the spot.’ Beveridge wrote formally on 3 March offering Robbins an assistant lectureship in economics from 1 August, at a salary of £375 for the first year rising to £400 in the second. There would be an extra £25 for taking over from Dalton as tutor to students working for the Diploma for Journalism. As for lecturing, it would include the first year course on currency and banking. Robbins formally accepted the offer on 5 March (LCR Personal File A, LSE). During the Easter vacation Iris and Lionel rented a cottage near Whiteleaf for three weeks. Lionel worked in the mornings and evenings and took the afternoons off for golf and walking (LCR to RRR, 6 April 1925). When Iris returned to Toynbee Hall at the beginning of Trinity term (26 April) she began househunting with the assistance of her sister Stella. She was pregnant and the flat in Booth House was too small for a family with a child. Early in May she found an unfurnished maisonnette with four or five rooms to rent at 1 Phillimore Gardens, Kensington. It looked out over Holland Park and it was conveniently near Clive and Lilian in Marloes Road. Iris and Lionel moved in at the end of June. The baby was due in October. Iris and Lionel spent a quiet month-long holiday in August at a vicarage in Dixton near Monmouth on the Welsh border. There Lionel finished his book on wages, which was published the following January by Jarrolds in their ‘Library of Capitalism’ series to which Benn had contributed. According to the description on the back cover of the book, these ‘handy volumes written by well-known authorities, discussing and explaining in popular language the workings of the economic machinery upon which Society is founded’, were ‘designed for the use of students of social problems, Politicians, Secretaries of Social and Industrial Organizations, the Clergy, School Teachers, and leaders of thought generally’. Lionel’s contribution was a sober and simple analysis of the nature of wages – which are just a particular form of income from work – and

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their determination, essentially by supply and demand and allowing for the non-pecuniary aspects of work and its reward. At the end of his review of Orwin’s book on land nationalization Robbins had alluded to the ‘great Austrian economist, Dr von Mises’, whose ‘great work “Die Gemeinwirtschaft” [1922] . . . [was] revolutionising continental thought on socialism’ by its attack on the feasibility of socialist planning. In the note on further reading appended to his own book (1926a, 93) he announced that his own translation of the second part of Mises’s book was forthcoming ‘in the near future under the title the “Economics of Socialism.”’ He had read Mises’s book in 1923 (reading notes in Method etc Early flounderings 1923–, RP) and a year later offered to translate the second part, as Mises wrote his publisher Gustav Fischer on 7 October 1924. Mises, who already knew Gregory and Beveridge, probably met and talked to Robbins about the translation when he visited London in November 1924 and again in 1926; Mises sent him a complimentary copy of the book in December 1924 (H¨ulsmann 2007, 482, 480n, 567). He worked on the translation in the summer of 1925 and again in the 1925/6 Christmas vacation and sent Mises five chapters in January. In the 1924/5 Christmas vacation Lionel had visited Reggie at Quarr Abbey. According to Lawson’s biographer, who talked to both men about the episode, the weekend Lionel spent in the abbey guesthouse was not a success (Ginger 1991, 89–90): ‘The young economist who had encouraged Reggie to throw a stone through an embassy window at a “Hands off Russia” rally in 1919 had liked what he had seen of Ditchling and engaged in long conversations with Eric Gill, but he could see no point in Quarr. Perhaps to justify his new commitment, Reggie talked for the first time about his sexual inclinations. The confession had been accepted with a non-committal grunt, but its delayed impact could be felt when the visitor complained that the abbey’s conical brick turrets were phallic.’ They got into an argument over, of all things, the divinity of Christ. Reggie, ‘faced with something less than sympathy and tolerance, found himself dull-witted, unable to produce even one of the texts known to him since childhood to refute Lionel’s assertion that Jesus had never claimed to be divine.’ He nonetheless hoped Lionel would visit Quarr again (Lawson to LCR, 23 and 30 March 1925, Personal letters from Iris & Clive etc, RP). In fact they did not meet again for thirtyfive years. Reggie succeeded in his ambition to join the Dominican Order as a lay-brother; on taking his solemn vows in 1937 at Hawkesyard Priory, which he entered in 1930, he became Brother David. In his first year as an assistant lecturer at LSE Robbins was treated gently: his lectures on the Elements of Currency and Banking and International

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Exchange were to begin in the Lent term and continue in the Summer term when he would also take revision classes for Dalton’s Elements of Economics. He worked closely with Dalton, with whom he shared an office and ‘in spite of our political differences get on famously’. But, as he also told Arnold Plant on 7 February 1926 (Plant 448), his first term was a nightmare. There were the tutorials for the journalism students, the preparation of lectures for the Lent term and other writing. ‘I got very behindhand during the last weeks before Anne’s arrival [on 16 October] and then while Iris was in the nursing home [for the better part of four weeks] I lost another three hours daily going to see her. So that when eventually things did get straight it was all I could do to keep pace with my day to day duties.’ He was overjoyed by the birth of his daughter, telling Iris a few days later: ‘I’m so happy I still keep feeling the tears welling up just as they do when you see a particularly beautiful picture or hear a particularly lovely Bach.’ The Lent term was easier despite sleepless nights: ‘I still have to live more or less from hand to mouth in the way of lectures but I made a great effort during the Xmas vac and more than half finished the revision of my translation. . . . There is a devil of a lot of irritating routine work to be done in the way of seeing students and marking essays but I manage to get a good deal more time for reading than was possible at New College.’ He was contributing an essay on population theories to a festschrift for Cannan which Gregory and Dalton were editing and hoping to start a book on the economic causes of war for his doctorate. He was also reviewing for the LSE journal Economica, then jointly edited by Beveridge, Dalton and Laski: Gregory on US banking (where he could not resist a dig at Keynes for his advocacy of a managed currency) (Robbins 1925b), two books on Australian and Indian taxation – ‘neither . . . of first-rate importance, but both . . . useful contributions to knowledge’ (Robbins 1926c) – and Gustav Cassel’s Fundamental Thoughts in Economics which he clearly enjoyed reading (Robbins 1926d). Cassel’s book was based on lectures he had given at LSE in June 1923, which Lionel probably heard. Lionel’s review of Maurice Dobb, Capitalist Enterprise and Social Progress, was published as a review article (1926b). He described it to Plant in February as ‘as savage a review . . . as I am capable of’ and it was not entirely polite – but it was not as savage as his draft review of Borderlands of Economics by Radhakarnal Mukerjee, which Laski thought was unkind and which was not published (Frederick Brown (Assistant Editor) to LCR, 4 August 1926, Early Scraps on Social & Econ Outlook, RP). He attacked Dobb for his wide-ranging use of the term ‘monopoly’ to support his main thesis of the practical importance of monopolistic forms of business organization

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to capitalist economic development. As well as describing Part II of Dobb’s book as ‘one of the most extraordinary re-hashes of history ever presented in an economic treatise’ and objecting to his ‘smuggl[ing] Marx in by the back door of “monopoly”’, he resorted to Lewis Carroll: ‘When I use a word,’ said a celebrated pundit, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘ . . . The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty-Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’ Does Mr. Dobb want to be ‘Master,’ or does he want to be a scientific economist?

Dobb’s reply (1926) was spirited (though no more convincing than Robbins’s criticism): he did not think ‘this verbal question warrant[ed] the attention of several pages’, and as for the historical criticism: ‘After asserting that history can prove nothing, it seems hardly fair to chide me for proving nothing by my [historical] example[s].’ When Wages appeared Lionel sent copies to his former LSE teachers Cannan and Knowles and to Beveridge, to Alic Smith and H.W.B. Joseph at New College, to his maternal grandmother and to his brother-in-law Jimmie Mallon, and to Constance Horton and Jessie Monk (Monk to LCR, 15 February 1926, Personal letters from Iris & Clive etc; letters from the other recipients in “Wages”, RP). Smith read it in the course of a day ‘in the intervals of 6 hours of pupils [which] is in itself a great tribute’ and then lent it to G.H. Hardy and Harold Salvesen. Mallon wrote that it had cheered up an overnight train journey but he also complained of ‘a certain austerity of attitude’ and unreality: ‘Underlying your book there is an “Economic man”. The creature I admit exists but he is not the lucid intelligent animal you deem him. He is a vain, empty headed, petty, addlepated idiot capable of any misunderstanding of his own interest.’ Lionel ‘plead[ed] guilty to the charge of austerity to you [J.J.M.] at any rate’ but defended himself too: ‘But, tell me, what other assumption [than rationality] can one make?’ at least in considering ‘not what is but what might be.’ The book was well reviewed in the press, as a very clear non-technical account of current theories of wage determination, and not only by his friend Arnold Plant in the Cape Argus and the anonymous reviewer in The Outlook (clippings in “Wages”, RP). A year later he was approached about writing a Cambridge Economic Handbook on Wages (B. Christian to Keynes, 4 February 1927, Keynes CEB, King’s College Cambridge), which was eventually written by Dobb (1930).

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In 1926 the University of Liverpool was considering appointment to a chair of economics. When Carr-Saunders asked Beveridge for his opinion on several people including Robbins, Beveridge turned to Dalton. Dalton compared Maurice Dobb and Gerald Shove, both lecturers at Cambridge, J.W.F. Rowe and Robbins. He thought Robbins ‘the ablest & most promising but also the least developed’: he was not ready for a chair, but he had ‘much more style, personality & command of language’ than the others – ‘if I was looking to probable future achievement, I should put Robbins top.’ Cannan went further: ‘If you are prepared to throw over the usual absurd prejudice against youth have L.C. Robbins, aged 28. We (LSE) brought him up and he was one year here [Oxford] taking Salvesen’s place at New College while Salvesen was sent away to America to try to acquire some economics. He was very highly thought of by everyone here but we enticed him back to the School before he was got hold of by any other institution & he is holding an assistant lectureship at £400 a year and purposely not made a drudge, the idea being that his is one of the finest minds we have yet had the luck to come across, and must not be spoilt. . . . As time is now short I can send you his effort on wages which came out two or three weeks ago & you can judge for yourself’.4 Robbins prepared his lectures with great care, writing them out beforehand fully, usually in complete sentences, in looseleaf notebooks of the same sort in which he had taken notes as an undergraduate. In this he was following the advice of Graham Wallas given on a walk round Lincoln’s Inn Fields (Robbins 1971a, 104). Notes for most of Robbins’s interwar lectures survive in whole or part. According to the notebook labelled ‘Economics Currency Banking & Trade Lectures’ he planned to begin his course of fourteen lectures on 15 February 1926 with the following remarks: That part of Economics which deals with Money is often regarded as particularly difficult and there can be no doubt that if we are to go by results of examinations it does appear to present, at any rate to first year students a problem of quite peculiar difficulty. . . . Year after year quite promising students come to grief on this particular subject. Year after year the difficulties of money lead students to resolve to have nothing to do with the subject.

He located the source of the difficulty not in the abstractness of the theory but ‘because it is not abstract enough. As taught in the average text book the subject is still so confused with mere technical details that the broad 4

Carr-Saunders to Beveridge, 4 February, Beveridge to Dalton, 26 April, Dalton to Beveridge, 27 April 1926, Beveridge IIb25; Cannan to Professor Dewsnup, 14 February 1926, Cannan 1029.

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underlying principles and their place in the general structure of economic theory never come to light.’ In his view ‘The theory of money . . . is an integral part of general economic theory and can only be fully understood in the light of that theory. . . . At any rate that is my view of the matter and therefore I do not propose to offer any apology for however large the dose of theory I feel called upon to administer.’ His lectures were not in fact highly theoretical, but the (rather Marshallian) theoretical perspective enabled him to outline the practical material, on the British monetary system and on the foreign exchanges, as illustrations of theoretical principles. His most frequent references were to Cannan (1914), Mises (1924) and Robertson (1922). His examples of inconveniences of barter betray both his upbringing on a farm and his reading of Mises. He stuck closely to current monetary arrangements: It was conceivable that you might have a system in which [the money] supply was regulated so as to maintain the value of units of currency constant in terms of commodities in general – in which supply was regulated by reference to an index number or index numbers. The merits of such a system have been greatly discussed recently – notably by Professor Irving Fisher and Mr. J.M. Keynes. But whatever view you may take of the possibility or the desirability of such a system, we need not include it in our discussion today. It does not exist yet and it is not likely to exist in the very near future.

In the lectures on international trade and finance he made clear his preferences for free trade and for fixed exchange rates, saving his criticism of Britain’s return to gold in April 1925 for his last lecture on 22 June 1926. In the spring of 1926 the Cambridge Faculty of Economics was considering appointing an additional lecturer in economics. Robbins’s name was mentioned and he was asked to come up and talk things over with two or three members of the Faculty Board in Professor Pigou’s rooms at King’s College. After this meeting and after Pigou and Robertson sought out opinion, the secretary of the Faculty Board informed him that they were going to make ‘a strong recommendation’ to the University Appointments Committee.5 When Pigou contacted Beveridge, Beveridge replied shortly on 27 May (LCR Personal File A): ‘I think the simplest answer to your question about Robbins is to say that you will be very well advised to get hold of him 5

L. Alston to LCR, 30 April and 28 May 1926, Personal Professional, RP. Robertson enquired of Harrod on 26 May (Besomi ed 2003, 62): ‘we have been conducting a flirtation with Robbins of the London School. Did you see anything of him during his temporary appointment at Oxford? . . . We haven’t much to go on at present in the way of information, – naturally he hasn’t been able to publish much so far. If he is a really good man we should like to secure him, – it would be good for us to have some fresh blood: but is he?’ Harrod, whose reply has not survived, probably had not met LCR (see note 11).

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if you can, but that I shall take all necessary steps to discourage any change.’ The day that Lionel received the official offer of a University Lectureship at Cambridge, carrying an annual salary of £350, Beveridge informed him that he was recommending his promotion to lecturer in August, with a salary of £450, after only one year of his probationary period as an assistant lecturer – a recommendation confirmed by the LSE governors in July (Secretary Appointments Committee to LCR and Beveridge to LCR, 14 June 1926, Personal Professional, RP; Mrs Mair to LCR, 16 July 1926, LCR Personal File A). Lionel turned down the Cambridge offer because the lectureship did not come with a college fellowship (Robbins 1971a, 109). At Oxford Professor Macgregor was ‘trying to hurry a new readership . . . to get him there’ – so Henry Clay, the professor of economics at Manchester, told Ted Scott, the son of the editor of the Manchester Guardian C.P. Scott. Clay was recommending Robbins for the Guardian: the older Scott had told Clay they were looking for a career journalist and could not find anyone suitable in Oxford. (Harrod had been approached and declined: Besomi ed 2003, 73.) Clay pointed out that Robbins had written for The Outlook and The Economist and was known to Oscar Hobson. Ted Scott contacted Hobson, who called Robbins to sound him out. But Lionel and Iris were about to go away on holiday: Hobson ‘put the position as well as I could to him over the telephone so as to allow him the opportunity to think the matter over while he is away’. Hobson had given Scott his own opinion: ‘I know Robbins quite well & think very highly of him. I believe he has the qualities of a journalist. . . . Politically I should say he was more or less an orthodox Liberal (whatever that means nowadays). . . . I don’t know much about his social interests; he is attractive to meet & a good talker and plays a poorish game of golf.’6 Hobson mentioned Robbins had written for the Manchester Guardian Commercial, most recently on 10 June, ‘Is the general level of wages too high?’ (clipping marked ‘L.C.R.’, Speeches & Lectures & Articles on Public Affairs pre 1946, RP) This was a report of a lecture Pigou gave to the Copartnership Congress on 3 June. Lionel had been impressed: ‘Professor Pigou has the reputation of being among the “purest” of “pure” economists. Yet for the space of an hour, during which time not one of his hearers even looked at the clock, he said nothing which was not of the most intimately practical relevance to the present position of industry. Simple, direct and transparently sincere, it was one of those rare pronouncements on 6

Clay to E.T. Scott, 14 June, Scott to Hobson, 26 July, Hobson to Scott, 27 July and 29 June 1926, Manchester Guardian Archive A/R34/1–7.

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controversial subjects which are incapable of arousing hostility. It was a lecture which should have been broadcast.’ Pigou had explained the simple principles underlying wage determination (rather as Robbins had done in his own little book) and went on to point out that there was more hope of raising wages by increasing aggregate production than by redistributing existing incomes. He also pointed out that ‘If the level of unemployment is high [as it was in Britain in 1926] . . . there is a strong presumption that the general level of wages is too high.’ Pigou, and Robbins, drew the awkward implication that the trades union leaders had to choose between high wages and high unemployment or lower wages and less unemployment. Robbins, perhaps more than Pigou, was inclined to argue for the latter which held out the greater chance of higher production and hence higher incomes in the longer run. Given Hobson’s recommendation Ted Scott hoped that he or his father might be able to see Robbins in London after he returned from his holiday and suggest he spend two to four weeks working on the paper before the end of the long vacation. This did not happen. It was 27 November before Robbins met Ted Scott in London when the suggestion of a trial period in Manchester was made for the Christmas vacation. Lionel thought it over for a couple of days and decided, reluctantly, that he could not afford the time. He told Oscar Hobson what had happened, adding: ‘I dare say I’m an utter ass – the opportunity is a marvellous one – but as things are at the moment at the School I simply cannot abandon everything. Later on I may very much regret this but one can’t suspend decision for ever.’ After Christmas C.P. Scott tried once more to meet Lionel to see if he was interested, but there is no record that they met.7 The summer holiday had been a month’s wanderings in Dauphin´e and Provence. It was ‘quite the best holiday I’ve ever had,’ Lionel told Cannan on 11 September, ‘ . . . Except for [Stendahl’s] Chartreuse de Parme . . . which I nibbled at at odd moments, I didn’t touch a book all the time’ (Cannan 1029). He and Iris, leaving Anne with his parents at Hollycroft, had travelled first to Grenoble, where they made several excursions into the mountains before Clive and Gilbert Gardiner joined them. The four moved on to the mediaeval hilltop town of Les Baux. As Lionel told his father on 11 August, ‘It is in the middle of the most admirable sketching for Clive and for Iris, Gilbert and me it is a wonderful centre for walks, either over the tops of the hills at midday or through the valleys and the plains with their olive 7

E.T. Scott to J.B[one], 11 August, LCR to Scott, 30 November, LCR to Hobson, 2 December 1926, C.P. Scott to LCR, 19 February, and Scott to Bone, 24 February 1927, Manchester Guardian A/R34/8–12.

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orchards and fields of stunted vines, when the heat is less.’ On leaving Les Baux, and before a last few days in Paris, they went to Aix, from where Clive and Lionel tramped out to Jas de Bouffan, C´ezanne’s house. As Iris commented to Lionel’s sister Caroline on 11 August, ‘They feel they can’t be so near the holy spot without visiting it.’ Lionel also told Cannan: I had never been so far South before and it was a new experience. Most of the painters whose work I like most . . . did much of their best work down there and it was a rare pleasure rediscovering their raw material. How could they help painting well in such a landscape. But what squalor and misery among the inhabitants! . . . They were just getting in their miserable handfulls of scraggy wheat from the hillsides while we were there and it was as if we were back in Biblical times. Coming of a family of capitalist farmers I suppose I notice this sort of thing particularly. Just at first it has a sort of charm but after a very little I found it intolerably oppressive.

He preferred the more modern towns to those untouched by industrialism. When Robbins returned to the School in September Cannan had retired. Robbins had commented to Plant in his February letter that ‘as there is no love lost between him and Beveridge it is unlikely that he will be asked to stay on’ and he was not, even though no successor had been appointed. At that time ‘everything is “wrapt in mystery” and no one, even Dalton the champion wire puller of Great Britain, knows in the least what is to happen.’ In fact Beveridge had told the Emergency Committee of the LSE governors on 2 February that the ‘only likely candidate’ seemed to be R.G. Hawtrey, who had just published The Economic Problem (1926), but ‘failing him two very distinguished Americans were possibilities’. The School had received a large grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund; this would permit a fulltime Chair of Political Economy (Cannan had been parttime) with a high salary, which was thought to rule out several younger English economists including Henry Clay, H.D. Henderson and D.H. Robertson. In April Beveridge offered the Chair to Allyn Young of Harvard, but it took several months to resolve the problem of Young’s pension (which was serious because his dependents comprised his nearly blind wife, their son, her sister and the two orphaned sons of his brother-in-law). When he finally accepted in January 1927, he agreed to come for three years only on leave from Harvard. At his request the appointment was not announced until April 1927 (Emergency Committee 23 March and 21 June 1926, 27 January 1927; Blitch 1995, 147–52). The Chair of Political Science had been vacant since Graham Wallas retired in 1923. Lionel anticipated, correctly, that Laski would get it. In

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the summer also Theodore Gregory was promoted to the Cassel Chair of Banking and Currency. Another move that summer was that of Caroline Robbins. She had held the Christie Fellowship in History at Royal Holloway College since 1924 and gained her PhD in 1926. She now went as Riggs Fellow in History to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor for a year and then to teach at the college for women at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio, for another year. She intended to make her career in the States: as she liked to put it (to, for instance, A.L. Rowse in 1956 [Ollard ed 2003, 210] and the author in 1991) ‘Lionel was cleverer than I, so I didn’t think there was room for two Robbins’ in English academic life. She was back in England for six months in 1928 but from February 1929 she taught at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, first as instructor, then assistant, associate and full professor and the Marjorie Walter Goodhart Professor of History (1960–71). At LSE in 1926/7 Robbins took over Dalton’s lectures on the Elements of Economics to the first year students in the Michaelmas and Lent terms as well as repeating his currency and banking lectures in the Lent and Summer terms. Between them they covered Cannan’s two-year-long Principles course for the second and third year students reading for the BSc(Econ) final examination: Dalton lectured on the Principles of Economics in the Michaelmas and Lent terms and Robbins gave a course of twenty lectures in the Lent and Summer terms on Comparative Economic Theory which dealt ‘historically and comparatively’ with the same material (LSE Calendar). The two men were still sharing an office, in which they were joined by J.R. Hicks. Hicks had gone up to Balliol College Oxford in 1922 to read mathematics and switched after a year to PPE, taking Schools in 1925 and spending a postgraduate year in Oxford before being appointed an assistant in economics at LSE. Hicks took the revision classes for the Elements course with Lionel in the Lent and Summer terms. Lionel also gave twelve lectures on the Economic Problems of War in the Michaelmas and Lent terms. Lionel’s Elements lectures, delivered on Tuesday and Friday mornings at 11 and 10 (and on Mondays and Wednesdays at 6 for the evening students), followed Dalton’s syllabus: ‘Scope of economics and methods of economic enquiry. Criteria of economic welfare. Production of wealth and organisation of production. Causes of differences in productiveness of different communities. Theory of population. Dependence of economic organisation on various social institutions. Economic provision for the future. Theory of value and its application to wages, rate of interest and rent. Distribution of income between economic categories and between persons. Relation between income and economic welfare.’ The main textbooks, also

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taken from Dalton, were Cannan’s Wealth and Money, Henderson’s Supply and Demand, Robertson’s Control of Industry and Taussig’s Principles of Economics.8 Just as Dalton had done in 1920 Lionel began with the definition of economics. According to his notes (Long Course on Elements I, RP) he devoted ‘two or three hours’ to this topic, concluding at the end of the first hour: If therefore at this stage you want a precise definition of the subject matter of economics you are perhaps justified in saying that it is the study of the general causes on which the material wellbeing or satisfaction of mankind depends. I do not pretend it is an ideal definition. . . . But as a first approximation to the truth it is probably as good as any other and for our purposes this morning that is all that I want it to be.

In the margin beside the last sentence he later wrote: ‘No No’. Lionel’s lectures on the economic (and financial) problems of war, for which he recommended his students to read Mises’s Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft (1919) and Pigou’s The Political Economy of War (1921), began a fortnight later than his Elements lectures. Although he gave this course only once, he credited it with a major impact on his thought (1971a, 146): Shortly after I joined the [LSE] staff as a teacher, I was put to lecture to a special course for Army officers on the Economics of War and readiness for war; and I had not been long engaged on my preparation for this task before it was borne in upon me that, although what I was going to say leant heavily on economic analysis as I had been taught it, it yet fell completely outside Cannan’s definition [of economics] – indeed he went specially out of his way to deny that war and its accompaniments fell within its scope. This puzzled me very much; and my perplexities increased when I reflected on the number of activities in which I was especially interested, concerts, theatrical performances, not to mention the design of decorative as distinct from utility architecture and the like, which had nothing to do with material welfare but which yet certainly had an economic aspect. What then was the common factor to which our technique was applicable? Gradually it dawned on me that the idea of material welfare was an ignis fatuus in this connection: that the underlying fact which made so many different activities and relationships susceptible to economic analysis was the scarcity of the means with which they were concerned and not the materiality of the objectives.

As he admitted, this idea was not original: it could be found in the works of the Austrian economists and in Wicksteed’s Common Sense of Political Economy which he had read as a third year undergraduate. When he 8

The Calendar entry includes Oswalt, Vortr¨age u¨ ber Wirtschaftsliche Grundbegriffe, and Landry, Manuel d’Economique, but, as LCR explained in his first lecture, since the students needed to acquire a working knowledge of French and German, ‘Much better kill two birds with one stone while you are about it and learn French [and German] & Economics at the same time.’

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discovered in the Lent term that a grandson of Wicksteed’s was in one of his first year classes, he wrote a fan letter to the (dying) Wicksteed (quoted in Chapter 4).9 He made a note of his difficulties in preparing his Elements lectures: (1) What meaning should be assigned to the term wealth? Should it have an objective or a subjective classification? A difference with Cannan. (2) Must Economics include Ethics? . . . (3) What is the best description of the subject matter of economics. (4) If this can be discovered how does it affect the traditional classification of subject. Production Distribution etc. (My Difficulties. Writing Elements Lectures Autumn 1926, Method etc Early flounderings 1923–, RP)

He was certain that the answer to the second question was negative, as he made clear in reviewing Hawtrey’s book. He devoted one of the early lectures of his Elements course to the first question, where he admitted he preferred the older, objective definition of a stock of goods and services to the subjective conception of wealth as the satisfactions to which the goods and services give rise favoured by Cannan and Henderson (Long Course on Elements I, RP). But having begun with Cannan’s definition of economics as his current answer to the third question, the remainder of the course followed the traditional approach in dealing with production, the organization of production (in which he included the price system) and distribution. In the last section he frequently made use of his Wages (Long Course on Elements II, RP). Robbins was still writing for The Outlook in 1926–7, though less than in previous years judging from the copies kept in his papers. His last known contributions are a leader and a review in April and May 1927 (Political Journalism, RP). In December 1926 his old friend Basil Bunting returned to London, where he tried to make a living by journalism. His biographers do not know how he landed a job as the music critic of The Outlook but Lionel probably had a hand in it. Bunting began writing for the magazine, mainly reviewing books, in February 1927 before becoming music critic in October. He recalled (Williams 1968, 11) that he ‘was one night in Kleinfeldt’s public house [the Fitzroy Tavern in Charlotte Street], when I was called to the telephone and it was Otto Theiss, the literary editor of the Outlook saying to me, “Bunting, do you know anything about music?” To which I answered, 9

I am very grateful to Richard Freeman for a copy of a typed copy of this letter and of a letter from H.R. Beeton to Foxwell, 11 November 1930, commenting that LCR’s letter ‘reached Wicksteed on the day of his death [18 March 1927] but which he never read’.

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“Not a damn thing!” Theiss then said, “You’d better find out quick, you’re our music critic now.”’ Bunting did know something about music and kept his job until the magazine folded in June 1928. Lionel also contributed to the LSE student magazine. As well as writing a tribute to Cannan (1926e) he gave his opinion to the ‘really modern symposium on the question of brightening L.S.E.’ in the Michaelmas term. His comments (1926f) recalled his undergraduate experience: I don’t believe we need brightening. . . . The one real complaint I have to make of the present generation of students is its apparent fear of over-investment of time in mere sitting about and ‘chewing the rag’. There does not seem to be enough willingness to take advantage of the opportunity to tire the sun with talking and send him down the sky. . . . I should like to see more people doing nothing but drinking coffee and discussing things in general in the refectory.

In September 1926 Cannan asked Robbins if he would read through the many articles on economic policy issues Cannan had written since 1914 in order to help reduce them to a manageable number for publication. Robbins did this over the Christmas vacation, suggesting reordering by topic rather than chronologically, but Cannan did not take his advice (LCR to Cannan, 11 September 1926 and nd, Cannan 1029; Cannan 1927). Dalton asked him to join him in compiling a ‘Select bibliography of economic theory . . . including contributions to periodicals . . . from, say, the time of Jevons, and including American and Continental writers as well as British’. When Harold Batson, graduating with a First Class BSc(Econ) in the summer of 1927, took over from their first research assistant, Robbins and Dalton thought the project could be completed by the end of the year (Rockefeller Research Fund Committee 8 December 1926 and 22 June 1927). (It was published in 1930 under Batson’s name with a preface by Robbins.) Lionel was also beginning to publish seriously as an academic economist. His second journal article was, like his first, a review article (1927a), of Hawtrey’s The Economic Problem. Hawtrey had attacked Pigou’s conception of economic welfare for confining it to that part of social welfare to which the measuring rod of money could be applied and argued that economics could not so easily be dissociated from ethics. Robbins counterattacked: he was quite clear that economic analysis should not be mixed up with ethical questions and thought that Hawtrey did not do justice to ‘the real cause of the economist’s desire to keep his science free from the intrusion of ethical criteria. . . . It is not because we believe that our science is exact that we wish to exclude ethics from our analysis, but because we wish to confine our investigations to a subject about which positive statement of any kind

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is conceivable.’ One is reminded of his undergraduate comments about the virtues of economics as compared to political science (see Chapter 4). Lionel made little progress with his translation of part of Mises’s Gemeinwirtschaft, as he admitted to Mises on 8 November 1926. He therefore found a collaborator in George Schwartz, an LSE graduate, lecturer in economics at Birkbeck College and secretary of the London and Cambridge Economic Service, and by the end of March 1927 they could send two more chapters of the translation. Mises was doubtful about publishing only part of his book, tactfully pointing out on 14 April the difficulties (Letters from Economists 1946– [sic], RP), but Lionel, and Schwartz, thought the part would be easier to get published in Britain. Mises provided them with many detailed comments and they continued working on their translation for some months, until Lionel moved back to Oxford. Although it was not published Jacques Kahane used some of it when he translated the second German edition of the whole book in the 1930s (Mises 1936). In March 1927 Harold Salvesen told New College that he wished to resign his fellowship and join the family shipping and whaling business. (‘Of far too ambitious and aggressive a temperament to be happy for long as an university lecturer’, he spent the 1928–9 whaling season in the Antarctic: Elliot 1998, 27.) The college immediately thought of Robbins. Warden Fisher sounded out Beveridge while Alic Smith wrote to Lionel to ask if he was willing to stand for election to a fellowship and a lectureship in economics (Smith to LCR, 15 and 23 March 1927, Personal Professional, RP; Tuition Committee 22 March and Stated General Meeting 23 March 1927, New College Archives). It was an easy decision to take. After talking it over with Beveridge, Lionel formally submitted his resignation of his LSE lectureship on 12 April (LCR Personal File A). Beveridge was proud of Robbins for being the first LSE graduate to become a fellow of an Oxford college (Director’s report on the work of the School July 1926–June 1927, LSE Calendar 1927–8). Beveridge had told Fisher on 23 March that ‘So far as Oxford is concerned I am sure he is just the type of person that is needed, namely, a thoroughly well-trained economist (not a historian or philosopher who has taken up economics as a subsidiary subject) with an interest extending beyond mere economic theory. From that point of view I should be very glad to see him at Oxford but only if I felt that as he grew up he would get sufficient backing up to help to bring about the proper development of economic studies at Oxford and that from the beginning he would get sufficient leisure from current teaching for his research. . . . If I didn’t feel that I should try very strongly to dissuade him from going and could, of course, try bribing him heavily to stay

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here.’ Fisher reassured him a couple of days later. But Beveridge also asked, on 2 May, that New College allow Robbins to give one course of lectures at LSE during the first year of the new Professor of Political Economy. Beveridge accepted Robbins’s resignation on 23 May, once New College had officially agreed to the lectures – which were the Comparative Economic Theory lectures Lionel had commenced in February (LCR Personal File A). Allyn Young agreed to take over the lectures on the Economic Problems of War. Lionel never wrote a dissertation on the subject but he lectured on it from time to time.10 Iris was happy to move to Oxford. She wrote to her father on 14 April (Gardiner 2/8): ‘London has very little to offer at the moment, though the trees in the gardens & in Holland Park are quite green now. . . . We went to Oxford one day last week & saw a most attractive house in Holywell which is a continuation of Long Wall where Morris’s garage is. The house dates from about 1650 & is rather confusing in its ramifications but I think it would be a very pleasant place to live in. It has its drawbacks of course one being that it has an enormous basement where I’m sure no maid would consent to live but we think we might convert one of the upstairs [rooms] into a kitchen. It has a pleasant garden just enough to keep me busy without having to have a gardener. It has no garage though which is a great nuisance as we had rather counted on having a small car.’ In fact when they moved to Oxford – in December 1927 – they rented a newly built house provided by the College, 2 Upland Park Road, in North Oxford (Radcliffe to LCR, 3 June 1927, Personal Professional, RP; LCR to RRR, 29 October and 21 December 1927). Their maid Florence moved with them but soon left, finding Oxford too quiet (IER to Mrs R.R. Robbins, 27 March 1928). Iris and Lionel’s second child, Richard, was born on 12 July 1927, the day Lionel was elected to his Official Fellowship at New College. Lionel’s father wrote to congratulate him on the safe arrival of the son and heir on 14 July: ‘May heaven’s richest blessings rest upon him & may he grow up to be as great a source of pride & happiness as you have to me.’ A month later Iris stayed with her parents at Whiteleaf with the children while Lionel accompanied Clive on another sketching trip to France. From Lionel’s point of view this was less successful than the previous summer’s – as is clear from his letters to Iris. Cahors, where they had intended to stay, was ‘delightful’ but the surrounding countryside unsuitable for sketching (Friday [12 August]); they set off on a long and tiring cross-country train trip to Millau in the western Cevennes (Sunday [14 August]). There, for nearly two weeks, he 10

For instance to the Royal Engineers at SME Chatham in February 1929 (Robbins 1929c), on which he commented to his father on 9 June: ‘You see “i wants ter make yer flesh creep”’.

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told Iris on 17 August, ‘Our program every day is simple. Breakfast at seven. Then out for the morning, Clive to paint, I to walk or read in the shade. Lunch at a quarter to twelve and after lunch coffee in the cafe in the square. After that letters and perhaps a mild nap until the heat becomes tolerable again at four. Then out again painting & reading until dinner at eight o’clock after which we end up the day with more coffee and sometimes a liqueur in the cafe in the square again.’ Much of Lionel’s reading was for his forthcoming lectures at Oxford. But although Clive’s work went well Lionel became increasingly homesick and perhaps also somewhat guilty for leaving Iris with the children. He began to consider not going on to an international conference on population at Geneva, at which he had been invited to speak briefly, and once he had read the conference papers sent on by Iris he decided not to go. Against reasons such as the ‘Possibility of increasing the good old reputation by a speech’ was the unlikelihood of making an impact in a five-minute comment and the probability of being able to give a longer paper at a meeting in England (LCR to IER, Saturday [20 August] and Sunday [21 August]). He and Clive went south to Perpignan before heading homewards via Narbonne, Toulouse and Limoges. Perpignan was to Lionel ‘different from anything I have ever seen [but] to see it for half an hour is to understand Picasso for ever. Those restrained earth greys and reds and browns which we thought so intellectual & original are the everyday colours of this strange world’ (LCR to RRR, 26 August 1927). Toulouse was ‘a very fine town – quite up to expectations with most interesting examples of romanesque and early gothic architecture’ (LCR to IER, Saturday [27 August]). Meanwhile Iris had to put up with extremely wet and cold weather and a fractious baby Richard. She also reported that her father was pleased to see Clive’s posters for the London Underground prominently displayed in central London but otherwise inclined to grumble that neither of his sons was getting on well in the world (IER to LCR, Saturday [20 August] and Monday [22 August]). Clive’s posters were some of the earliest of the twenty-seven he contributed between 1926 and 1951 (Green 1990, 57, 140). Lionel Robbins was formally admitted to his fellowship at New College at his first college meeting on Wednesday 12 October 1927 (Stated General Meeting, New College Archives). His fellowship and his lectureship each carried a salary of £300 a year, and, as he reported to his father (29 October), at his first College meeting the fellows voted to increase all salaries by £50 a year. His income was substantially higher than the £450 he had been receiving at LSE in 1926/7 – not counting the £100 he was to receive for his lectures at LSE. As for his duties, these were (Tuition Committee 25 June

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1927, New College): ‘to lecture not less than twice a week in two terms of the academical year, unless a fresh course of lectures be given in any term, in which case the requirement be to lecture not less than once a week in that term: to undertake the general supervision of the teaching of Economics in the College; to arrange the work of men reading for the final Honour School of P.P.E.; to be responsible for not more than 18 hours’ private teaching a week in Economics, and to be at liberty to make exchanges with teachers in other Colleges in Economics: & to take part in College Examinations.’ In March 1928 Robbins received his second degree at a Congregation of the University when he was made a MA by ‘Decree of the House’, that is by virtue of his fellowship (University News, The Times, 21 March 1928). He was made very welcome by the twenty-eight other fellows of his college, who were delighted to see him back (R.H. Lightfoot to LCR, 12 July 1927, Personal Professional, RP), and by other economists in Oxford. Salvesen was still in residence in Michaelmas term; Harrod invited Robbins to dine in Christ Church. Between the two of them Robbins also met, in his third week in Oxford, the great Canadian economist Jacob Viner, who was visiting England for the first time in September–December 1927. Salvesen had initiated an ‘economics club’ in New College, the Adam Smith Society. On Wednesday 26 October Theodore Gregory was speaking on ‘the classical economists and labor’ and Viner, who had been seeing a good deal of Gregory in London, said he would like to attend. In Viner’s account (to his wife on 27 October): ‘I came up with Gregory on Wednesday afternoon, had dinner in state with Salvesen . . . [whom he had met before in America] as my host. I sat between Robbins . . . and the great Cannan. Then to the lecture, which was excellent, with good to-and-fro discussions until after midnight.’ The next day Viner had ‘Lunch in Salvesen’s rooms with him and Robbins and Wilson, a young Australian at Oriel, who is working in the theory of int[ernational] trade and was anxious to meet me. . . . After lunch we sat and talked theory for hours – Salvesen and Robbins both very good, tho Salvesen is a peculiar.’ In the evening he dined in Christ Church as Harrod’s guest, ‘with Robbins also there, in state, good food, wine, cigars, beautiful rooms, good theory talk until midnight, when I went for a walk with Robbins, still debating theory, until 1.30 in a beautiful starlit night among the spires and towers of Oxford.’11 11

Oxford being what it was (and is), LCR was made more welcome than he had been as a temporary lecturer in 1924/5. Harrod in inviting Viner to dine wrote: ‘I have already asked Robbins who has just come to Oxford from the London School of Economics having been elected to a fellowship at New College. I believe that he is an interesting man.’ The

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Viner, six years older than Robbins, was already a well-known international economist and a full professor at the University of Chicago. Born in Montreal and educated at McGill University, he went on to Harvard for a PhD under Taussig (Bloomfield 1992). His dissertation was his famous study of Canada’s Balance of International Indebtedness, 1900–1913 (1924). Robbins (1970c, 1–2) was very impressed with the short alert figure with his candid and penetrating eyes, now brimming over with fun, now sober with deep reflection, his quick wit, his delight in argument and the general sense of intellectual vitality that informed even his casual remarks. I . . . was beginning to feel at home as a professional teacher of economics. But this was a new sort of economist for me: equal to the acutest I had known in speculative thought but with a range of erudition and practical information and a respect for the complexity of fact which I had not met before. The evening was not far advanced before we discovered many interests in common; and when we left our host at midnight, we continued our talk walking up and down the High Street until, having left my keys behind, I had to disgrace myself like a defaulting undergraduate, by rousing the porter from sleep to let me into my rooms at New College.

Viner stayed in Oxford over the following weekend, attending the Oxford Political Economy Club on Saturday night, and coming up again the next Wednesday to give a talk on American economics to Salvesen’s economics club (Jacob Viner to Frances Viner, 28 and 31 October 1927). He and Robbins began to correspond eighteen months later when Lionel received an offer of a temporary lectureship at the University of Michigan at Viner’s suggestion (LCR to Viner, 7 May 1929, Viner 22–14). They cemented their friendship when Viner visited London again in 1930. (The ‘young Australian’, Roland Wilson, a Rhodes Scholar from Tasmania who had been allowed to proceed to a DPhil after taking the Oxford Diploma in Economics, meanwhile moved to Chicago where he took a second doctorate under Viner: Cornish 2002, 12–15.) The lectures in economics at Oxford were more extensive than in 1924/5 but still uncoordinated and idiosyncratic. Into the ‘mixture of vacuum and chaos’ (Jones 1994, 33) Robbins contributed Elements of Economics (Michaelmas) and Introduction to the History of Economic Theory with special reference to the influence of Adam Smith and Ricardo (Hilary and Trinity) in 1927/8 and Comparative Economic Theory: Distribution (Michelmas), Unsettled Problems in Theoretical Economics (Hilary) and Ricardo (also Hilary) in 1928/9. invitation from Harrod is with the letters Viner wrote home to his wife, for which I am very grateful to Ellen Seiler, Viner’s daughter. Robbins (1971a, 132) gives the time of his parting from Viner as 3 a.m.

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He lectured twice a week in each term, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11 in Michaelmas, Wednesdays and Fridays at 9.05 in Hilary and Trinity, when he also went down to London on Tuesdays to give his Comparative Economic Theory lectures at LSE at noon and again at 6 p.m. for the evening students. In addition he had up to eighteen hours a week of tutorials. Nonetheless he was able to tell Beveridge on 1 February 1928: ‘I am very happy here: I have exceptionally keen pupils and enough time to push ahead with work of my own.’ Beveridge had told him on 31 January that he was among those being considered for the Chair of Political Economy at the University of Liverpool; he confirmed Beveridge’s suspicion that he would not be interested in moving (LCR Personal File A). Lionel’s New College pupils this year included Evan Durbin and Reginald Bassett, who were then in their first year of reading economics, John Witt who also took Schools in 1929, and Gilbert Walker who was a year ahead of them. In addition to teaching the ten New College men who were to take PPE in Schools in 1928 and the twelve in 1929, he gave tutorials to a few other students ‘farmed out’ from colleges without economics tutors. Durbin had come up in 1924, at the same time as Hugh Gaitskell who became his closest friend, to read Zoology. In 1927 he went on to read PPE for a second undergraduate degree, sharing digs outside college with Bassett and Henry Phelps Brown. He was already a (democratic) socialist and active member of the Labour Party and was to remain so all his life, entering Parliament in 1945 and serving as a junior government minister before he drowned off the Dorset coast in 1948. According to Marjorie Durbin, who married Evan in 1932, he did not realize while he was at Oxford how far Lionel had moved from his earlier socialism and was ‘horrified’ to discover that when he became a colleague at LSE in 1930/1. Be that as it may, Robbins ‘was an important influence on the young men he taught in the late 1920s’, especially on Durbin and his friends and contemporaries working for the Labour Party (E. Durbin 1985, 99). Bassett was a mature student, only a couple of years younger than Robbins, who came to New College via Ruskin College, the trade union college in Oxford. After he graduated he worked for fifteen years as a lecturer for the Extra-Mural Studies of the Delegacy of the University of Oxford. (A great admirer of Ramsay MacDonald, he is most remembered for his 1958 book in which he defended MacDonald’s action in forming a coalition government.) Phelps Brown was a student at Wadham College, who had been at Taunton School with Durbin and at Oxford had first read History. When he too decided to read PPE he went to Robbins for tutorials. He recalled (in conversation in 1993) Robbins as a tutor, when he was ‘kindly,

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smoked his pipe’: ‘He didn’t disagree with anything one said. No gospel, not doctrinaire . . . [treating] one as a fellow believer [in economics]. He liked to talk of books and economics in a reverential way’, showing a great regard for work in German, but not expecting his students to read German. Phelps Brown obtained a First in Schools along with Durbin in 1929, Bassett a good Second. They both later taught at LSE but not until after the Second World War. John Witt, the son of the art collector Sir Robert Witt, followed his father in becoming a solicitor and partner of Stephenson, Harwood & Tatham; he became a close friend of Lionel’s (and his solicitor). Walker gained a First in PPE in 1928, along with Eugene Forsey, Henry Hodson and Tom Simey of Balliol, who were sent to Robbins for economics tutorials in their final year 1927/8; for Hodson at least Robbins was ‘The chief influence on my understanding of economics’ (Lee ed 1993, 5). Forsey, a Rhodes scholar from Quebec who became famous as a man on the Canadian left, thought he had not taken full advantage of being taught by Lionel and was surprised to get his First; Lionel persuaded him to start a BLitt thesis on the economics of migration but Forsey gave up on it when Lionel left Oxford (Forsey 1990, 37–8). Two of those who gained Firsts in 1929, John Hilton at Corpus whose interest was philosophy not economics, and Roger Wilson at Queen’s, also well remembered Lionel’s teaching: Hilton for his being the first economist to be ‘talking about something important and worthwhile’ in his lectures and Wilson that Salvesen and his successor Robbins were ‘Much the liveliest tutors who took PPE undergraduates under their wing’ (Lee ed 1993, 22). Colin Clark, who also came under Robbins’s influence, never read economics at Oxford. Robbins (1971a, 119) remembered him as a chemistry scholar at Brasenose College, ‘somewhat disillusioned with his subject’, who would turn up at the Adam Smith Society ‘with large sheaves of statistical matter, worked up in his spare time, to illuminate and bring down to earth the theoretical discussions of his fellow members’. When he graduated he went to work as Allyn Young’s research assistant at LSE (Blitch 1995, 177–8). Robbins advised him to get to know Dalton, ‘quite the most powerful friend you could have at the School’ (19 September [1928], Colin Clark Papers, Fryer Library, University of Queensland). Clark, taking Lionel’s advice, found himself ‘not only with more interesting work, but with better wages, better conditions of labour & better prospects than I would have had as a scientist’ and ‘attributed this fortunate state of affairs entirely’ to Lionel’s help (Clark to LCR, 13 November 1928, Correspondence, RP). Robbins’s ‘Elements’ lectures appear to have been a condensed and slightly revised version of his longer course at LSE the previous year. Judging

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from his notes he spent less time on the problem of the scope of economics but talked at some length on the problem of the definition of wealth.12 In lecturing on the history of economic thought in Hilary and Trinity 1928 he used some of his notes for his Comparative Economic Theory lectures at LSE (Comparative Production, Comparative Economics; Comparative Value, History of Theory General & Critical, RP). Phelps Brown remembered attending them and taking detailed notes. Christopher Saunders (Lee ed 1993, 37–8), a pupil of Harrod’s at Christ Church who thought ‘Oxford economics teaching in the mid 1920’s was not sympathetic for the student who most wanted to know what was going on in the world, and why’, found Robbins ‘rather exceptionally had the gift of relating the development of economic theory to the practical issues of the times in which the thinkers of the past lived (e.g. Ricardo and the currency question and national debt)’. Lionel’s Comparative Economic Theory lectures were not intended to be primarily a course in the history of economic thought. He described them in the LSE Calendar as ‘deal[ing] mainly with the economic theories of earlier times, but . . . attempt[ing] to exhibit these theories, not as so much antiquarian data, but as the raw material out of which by a process of refinement and elimination the economic theories of to-day have developed’. The topics to be thus covered included: production, capital, diminishing returns and early population theory; value, distribution, wages, interest, profits and rent. On such topics as land, population and diminishing returns, where he was fiercely critical of several classical economists, especially Malthus, he analysed the old theories (and some newer ones) with a view to deciding what was still useful economics and what should be abandoned. Some of what he had to say on population theory appeared in his Cannan festschrift paper (1927b). Having lectured on the history of theories of production and value to his Oxford students in Hilary and Trinity 1928, Robbins lectured on distribution in Michaelmas 1928, at greater length than in his Comparative Economics lectures at LSE in previous years (Distribution, History of Theory General & Critical; Comparative Distribution, Comparative Economics, RP). One of the students who heard his Oxford lectures that year was the future Nobel Memorial laureate James Meade, who went up to Oriel in 1926 to read Greats and switched to PPE two years later. Rather like Robbins, he had initially been attracted to economics by the writings of Major Douglas. 12

The notes on some topics, eg wealth, in the ‘Long Course on Elements I’ notebook include revised versions as well as earlier versions which can be identified as such by their topical references.

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His economics tutor at Oriel was Hargreaves who sent him to Robbins’s lectures at New College. For Meade (1984), It was a memorable experience. The ebullient and exuberant purposefulness of his exposition was infectious. As an irreverent undergraduate I used to describe his performance as combining the qualities of a rowing coach with those of the conductor of a great orchestra. . . . He was not interested in devising new elaborate theoretical constructions, but used his first-rate analytic mind to discover and teach us how the application of good economic theory to the real problems around us could make an important contribution to the formulation of wise and effective policy. He . . . inspired me and, I suspect, many other students with the same philosophy.

As for his own work, on Tuesday 14 February 1928, after his day’s teaching at the School, Lionel read a paper to the London Economic Club (which had been founded in 1890 and revived after the war). The meetings, at LSE, began with dinner at 7.30, followed by the paper at 8 (notice of meeting in LSE 376 The Economic Club 1923–1960, BLPES). Robbins’s paper was on the concept of the ‘representative firm’ which Marshall had introduced to try and reconcile the existence of increasing returns to scale with perfect competition. Four days later, R.G. Hawtrey, who was an active member of the Economic Club, wrote to Robbins defending Marshall against some of Robbins’s criticisms (Econs Misc Theory, RP). The paper became Robbins’s most famous article (1928): he submitted it to Keynes as editor of the Economic Journal on 11 March. Keynes accepted it immediately, telling Robbins on 14 March that it was ‘a very interesting piece of work, which much wanted doing, and [with which] . . . I am in sympathy . . . I should like to do away with the representative firm altogether, and I believe you are right in arguing that it really serves no useful purpose’ (Keynes EJ/11 ). Keynes postponed publication until September, however, because he had already accepted an article by Pigou on the same subject for the June issue. The paper was certainly topical, as academic economists were then debating the nature of costs and supply curves and the meaning of equilibrium. In England Pigou and Robertson had contributed to the debate; in America Frank Knight and Allyn Young had been in friendly disagreement over the meaning and implications of increasing returns to scale. Young gave his Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science on 10 September 1928 on ‘Increasing returns and economic progress’, which became his most famous article (1928). Robbins’s article on ‘The representative firm’ showed not only that Marshall’s attempted solution of the problems created for neoclassical price theory by internal and external economies of scale would not work but that it was redundant. The article

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successfully banished the concept from the discipline, despite occasional attempts to reintroduce it (most notably Wolfe 1954). Robbins had plans for several papers, which he listed at some time in 1928 (Papers for the near future, Econs Misc Theory, RP): 1) Schumpeter (Hours) 2) [J.B.] Clark 3) Internal & External Economies 4) Division of Labour Indivisible factors Static Dynamic functions 5) The Optimum further considered 6) Mobility and the classification of factors 7) The Stationary State 8) Definition of Economics Choice 9) Economics & Democracy 10) Utility in Economic Theory 11) Imputation etc. This a lecture perhaps. 12) Supply curves. A year earlier he seems to have been toying with the idea of writing an economics textbook possibly on the lines of A.W. Flux’s Economic Principles (1904, 2nd edition 1923), the first post-Marshallian textbook (Dalton to LCR, 7 September 1927, Correspondence, RP; Whitaker 1987), but in his time at New College he concentrated on publishing in the journals. ‘The Optimum’ was the optimum theory of population – a term he attributed to Carr-Saunders (1922, 1925) – on which he had written for the Cannan festschrift (1927b). In that paper he had been concerned, not with the causes of population growth but with Cannan’s contribution (in his Elementary Political Economy [1888], in the second edition [1903] of his History of the Theories of Production and Distribution in English Political Economy and in Wealth [1914]) to the question of the effects of population growth on economic welfare. Cannan, having pointed out that population growth did not inevitably reduce the productivity of labour, as classical economists tended to assume, had defined the optimum population as the one with the maximum productivity per head and hence noted that the actual population of a country or region might be less or more than the optimum. Robbins emphasized Cannan’s further point that to demonstrate the possibility of underpopulation and overpopulation was not the same thing as

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establishing either, which he argued was not practically feasible. Lionel received some helpful criticism (which has not survived) from Salvesen and other unhelpful, from the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement who claimed that he had ‘little difficulty in showing that Dr Cannan’s optimum density theory was a new and important contribution to the problem’ but was ‘not equally successful in showing its usefulness for contemporary problems.’ Lionel responded to the latter, who was in fact Henry Clay, that it was odd to be criticized for a view he did not hold (clippings, RP); he told Salvesen on 23 May (Articles & Notes, RP) that he intended to write more on the subject. In the 1920s and 1930s British economists were particularly interested in population because of their predictions that the fall in the birth rate would lead by the 1940s to a stationary population in England and Wales. When Lionel wrote more on the subject, for his first talk to the Oxford Political Economy Club on 27 October 1928, he began from the predictions made by Cannan (1895) and by Bowley (1924) in the paper Lionel had been impressed by when Beveridge used it in his lectures on population at LSE (see Chapter 5). Given the conclusion of his previous paper he did not make any definite prediction about the effect of no population growth on productivity but contented himself with inferring the effects on such things as the mobility of labour, savings and so on (Robbins 1929b). It would have been an interesting talk to listen to, especially if it was illustrated by the tables which he thought of asking Colin Clark to compile for him (draft letter to Clark, Econs Misc Theory, RP), but it is less interesting to read. More interesting is his friend Benham’s (1928) application of the concept of the optimum population to Australia, as Lionel admitted to Beveridge (15 May 1929, Beveridge IIb28). A paper on ‘Hours’ was Robbins’s first paper to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which he presented at its annual meetings in Glasgow in September 1928. Although he was generally critical of Marshallian partial equilibrium analysis, in this paper, an exercise in labour economics, he used that method to explore ‘The economic effects of variations of hours of labour’. Concentrating on the effects of changes in hours worked on output and incomes, he demonstrated that the effect on the latter, and hence on employment, depended crucially on the elasticity of demand for labour and its product. His concern reflected not only his own earlier involvement in the labour movement but also the high unemployment in Britain in the late 1920s. The talk was favourably reported in The Times (12 September 1928) and the paper swiftly accepted for publication in the Economic Journal (1929a).

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Hugh Dalton continued to regard Lionel as his proteg´e. Supporting LSE’s application in 1926 to have Lionel recognized as a teacher in the University of London, he had praised him as ‘quite certainly the most brilliant student who has passed through the School since the war’ and ‘anticipate[d] that he will make a big name for himself in the world of economists before long’ (Statement by Head of Department, 2 November 1926, LCR Personal file A). He told Lionel on 23 September 1928 (Letters from Economists 1946–, RP) that he thought the article on the representative firm, though ‘essentially piffle’, should make an excellent impression: ‘It looks new, and balanced, and sensible, and ingenious, and cultured, & subtle, & it gives the suggestion, which is so valuable both to young economists and young politicians . . . that, good though this is, the author has lots of unused reserves, & could do something much better still.’ On 22 October (Econs Misc Theory, RP) he liked better the paper on hours and ‘scrawled all over it’ with constructively critical comments, of which Robbins took note in the final published version. He suggested developing the ideas in the paper with empirical work but admitted he suspected Lionel would prefer to write on theoretical topics. He approved of ‘stationariness’ as a topic for another article and encouraged Lionel to write more on the economics of labour. But he urged him to publish a book as soon as possible, if necessary a collection of articles though he did not think Lionel had enough yet, because, as he told Lionel in September, he wanted him to have a chance of succeeding Allyn Young at LSE when Young returned to Harvard. After the British Association meetings Lionel treated himself to ‘a stiff course of [reading] Schumpeter [(1908 and 1911)] . . . for some special lectures next term’ and wrote on 26 September of his reactions to Allyn Young as ‘the only economist I know, save Mises, who reads Schumpeter’ (Static States, RP). (The lectures were those on Distribution.) He was particularly exercised about the conditions for a stationary economic equilbrium as described, incorrectly he thought, by Schumpeter. On 5 January 1929 he told Graham Wallas, in the course of inviting him to Oxford to speak to the Adam Smith Society (Wallas 1/84, BLPES), that ‘I have thought a good deal about this part of the subject and I hope at some time to publish a paper or two embodying the result of my reflections.’ When he invited Maurice Dobb, Dobb agreed to come in Trinity term and hoped Robbins could be persuaded to speak to the Marshall Society in Cambridge (9 January 1929, Correspondence, RP). Lionel went on to give a paper on the subject to the Marshall Society in June 1929, subsequently developing it into one of his major journal articles (ms notes Static States lecture delivered at Cambridge June 1929 before Marshall Society, RP; Robbins 1930b).

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In his paper and the article Lionel brought together several of the topics he had been working on. He contended there had historically been two different ideas of stationary economic equilibrium. At Cambridge he labelled them ‘the classic & the Clarkian’, the classic deriving from Adam Smith and developed by Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, the Clarkian the more modern conception stated most clearly by the American John Bates Clark in The Distribution of Wealth (1899). In the classical stationary state population is constant, capital is constant, and wages and profits are constant, but this is the outcome of previous changes, the reaching of a position of rest, whereas in the static state described by Clark population growth, capital accumulation and other dynamic forces are assumed to be absent: ‘in the one [the static state], this constancy is the condition of equilibrium; in the other [the stationary state], it is simply one of the resultants of the equilibrating process.’ Among the mistakes and controversies which had arisen through failure to distinguish the two conceptions he included Schumpeter’s dynamic theory of interest in which interest is positive only when capital is increasing: this he thought was ‘quite definitely wrong’. Although Robbins was later to claim he never felt completely at home in Oxford University, he enjoyed College life and the company and conversation of the Warden and fellows, especially in the Senior Common Room after dinner in Hall. His glowing description of his time at the college was reprinted by the college in its sixth centenary history (Buxton and Williams eds 1979, 1112–19). The fellows included, besides the philosophers H.W.B. Joseph and Alic Smith, Hugh Allen (music), J.S. Haldane (physiology), G.H. Hardy (mathematics), J.L. Myers (ancient history), David Ogg (history), R.H. Lightfoot (theology), who was junior bursar as well as the chaplain and dean of divinity, and the senior bursar G.R.Y. Ratcliffe. He learned much from Hardy, in a friendship helped by their shared interest in cricket, including the importance of theory in all scientific work and some knowledge of calculus (Robbins 1971a, 110–18). Lionel played his part in college meetings – and not just in discussions of the stunted tree in the college garden which some, including Robbins, wanted to remove as a eyesore and others to keep as it had been planted by Warden Spooner – and on the estates committee to which he was elected in his second year as a fellow. The college is a large landowner and he enjoyed the discussions of agricultural improvements which were the responsibility of the college (Reports of Estates Committee to the Stated General Meetings, New College). He also enjoyed the chapel music for which New College is famed. At home the new house in North Oxford was large and ideal for a young family; he and Iris planted the garden with vegetables, flowers and young trees. Iris enjoyed

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Oxford life: ‘Lionel would go to dinners and come back with conversation on all sorts of things.’ They also entertained at home. Allyn Young came for a weekend in the winter of 1928–9, and on at least one occasion Beveridge with Mrs Mair and her daughter Elspeth: this was less enjoyable for Iris. Beveridge dined with Lionel in College while Iris had to entertain the others – an evening made all the more difficult when, having roasted a duck in honour of her guests, she did not know how to carve it. In October 1928 Dalton suggested that he and his wife Ruth, who were going to spend a weekend with friends in Oxford in November, come for a meal at the Robbins’s and meet the children. In the event he and Lionel lunched together at New College on the Saturday, a few days after Lionel’s thirtieth birthday. As Dalton recorded (Pimlott ed 1986a, 49), ‘He is making a reputation as a teacher and is, I think, rather happy at Oxford.’ A few weeks after his birthday Lionel reported to his father (10 January 1929) that he was ‘go[ing] on writing lectures & papers in a state of gentle middle aged melancholy. I have come to the conclusion that my good period was between 20 & 30.’ The definition of economics was one of the topics on which Lionel hoped to write ‘in the near future’. It formed the first and longer part of his lectures in Hilary 1929 on ‘Unsettled problems in theoretical economics’ – taking his title from John Stuart Mill, Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (1844). The second part was on ‘Variation of Hours’ – as in his British Association paper and subsequent article (1929a). The notes for the first part are filed with a slightly later set of lectures on ‘The Nature & Significance of Economic Science’ of which Lionel noted on the cover of the notebook that they were the ‘first draft of final form of N & S’ – that is, his most famous work, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932a). In the earlier set he pointed out the wide variety of available definitions of economics and classified them into four groups: ‘sociological definitions’; those ‘which turn on the fact of exchange & money measurement’ such as those of Pigou and Mises and Schumpeter; those which envisaged economics as the study of material welfare, most notably Cannan’s; and a fourth class which emphasized scarcity and economizing, for instance Cassel and to some extent Schumpeter. The first type of definition was too vague, the second too narrow. The third was ‘at first blush . . . extremely plausible’, not too narrow, not too vague and ‘harmoniz[ing] with certain habits of every day speech’. ‘But is it really?’ he asked, ‘I confess that long reflection about this matter has forced me to the conclusion that it is not. Indeed though at one time I myself used the definition in question I am compelled to say that at the present time

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I regard it as in the highest degree misleading & confusing.’ He now had several objections to it: (1) the word ‘welfare’ was suspect as having ethical implications; (2) if it were replaced with a colourless word like ‘satisfactions’ there was still a division into material and non-material satisfactions which seemed to him ‘very questionable’; and (3) it did not accurately cover the subject matter of economics. He explained how his doubts had arisen when he was lecturing on the economics of war. I was struck by the fact that although according to [Cannan’s] definition the discussion of the organization of war was outside the scope of economics . . . yet I had been able to stand on my hind legs for fifteen hours or so talking what seemed to me to be very tolerable sense on such matters enlightened as it seemed by the instruments of analysis which had been said to be inapplicable. Surely I felt there is an economic problem in wartime, even if as Dr Cannan says sensible people do not regard war as a particularly rational way of living.

After providing further criticisms of Cannan’s definition he told his students that ‘It is considerations of this sort which lead me to the belief that if we are satisfactorily to define the subject matter of our investigations we must turn away altogether from the materialist definitions and look for the solution in some completely different connection.’ His ‘new approach’ was to look for not a definition which classifies out a certain set of activities which it labels economic but one which indicates what aspects of human activity in general are significant to the economist. Now if we think of human activity in general there are two features which seem to have significance from our point of view. In the first place the ends are various. Secondly the means of attaining them are often very limited & are capable of alternative uses. ... It is in this aspect of human activity – activity as condition[ed] by the fact of scarcity that I think the economist is interested. He is interested in the way people individuals and societies economize, that is dispose of the things which are scarce & how changes in the scarcity of these things (whether coming from the demand side or the supply side) affect their activities.

Thus he had arrived by the end of 1928 at his preferred definition of economics: as he phrased it three years later (1932a, 15), ‘Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.’

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When he gave these lectures in Oxford he thought that ‘so far as I was able to gather from students (who are more willing to criticize you to your face . . . [than LSE students]) it was more useful than many things I did. I don’t think I was able to communicate new truth. I did feel that I was able to communicate to a few the feeling that new truth was attainable.’ At LSE, on the other hand, Dalton heard rumours that Lionel in his Comparative Economic Theory lectures was getting ‘a little pompous’ and sometimes even ‘rather dull’.13 In the winter of 1929 there was a epidemic of influenza in Britain. Allyn Young caught the disease and after only a few days died of pneunomia on 7 March (Blitch 1995, 182–3). Beveridge, needing to cover Young’s teaching for the rest of the academic year, immediately contacted Robertson in Cambridge and Robbins in Oxford. Robertson agreed to continue Young’s Principles lectures but was ‘anxious if possible not to do the examinations’ at the end of the year. Robbins took on the economic theory classes, arranging to give two on Thursdays when he was giving his Comparative Economic Theory lectures anyway, and joined Dalton and Gregory in the examining. He had already agreed to examine in Cambridge that summer, and it was fortunate that he was not lecturing in Oxford in Trinity term.14 Beveridge also had to consider the succession to Young: when he informed the Emergency Committee on 21 March of the assistance from Robertson and Robbins he reported that the Senate of the University of London had set up a Board of Advisors for the Chair; the committee decided to appoint a ‘small private committee’ of Gregory, Sidney Webb, Sir Josiah Stamp and Beveridge to ‘explore the situation’. Home life was not easy at this time. The winter of 1929 in Britain was cold: in February Iris went skating on Port Meadow, fell and broke her left wrist. She was taken to hospital and Lionel had to be summoned from writing his lectures in his rooms in college. By the beginning of May her wrist had mended, but, as she told Edith Plant (Plant 448), with two small children ‘it was frightfully awkward at the time & we all had ‘flu afterwards & had to go to the sea to recuperate. Directly we returned Beveridge invited himself for a long weekend (Sat – Wed) & we are only just recovering from that, term having just started.’

13

14

LCR, Memorandum on the Present Position and possible future expansion of the Economics Department, LCR Personal File A; Dalton to LCR, 23 September 1928 and 11 April 1929, Letters from Economists 1946–, RP. Beveridge to LCR, 8, 15 and 19 March, LCR to Beveridge, 9 and 22 March 1929, LCR Personal File A; Shove to LCR, 16 January 1929, Correspondence, RP.

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The visit from Beveridge was enjoyable. He did not come with Mrs Mair this time. He drove up from Avebury in Wiltshire where he was contemplating buying a cottage, on the Saturday (20 April). On Sunday they went to Whiteleaf, playing tennis there in the afternoon; in the morning Beveridge ‘Walked . . . and talked Unemployment’ with Lionel. On Sunday evening, and again on Tuesday, the two men dined at New College; in between they played more tennis and continued to discuss the second edition of Beveridge’s Unemployment (Beveridge Diary, Beveridge Ic). Lionel’s role in the preparation of this book was no longer the research assistant he had been in 1924. He had then suggested that Beveridge should reprint the first edition with a statistical supplement and add a second part dealing with developments since 1909. Beveridge had decided to submit this second part as a thesis for a London DSc(Econ) and Lionel had been appointed his official supervisor and in due course examiner (Beveridge 1931a, vii–viii and xi). Three days later Dalton wrote to Lionel (27 April 1929, Correspondence, RP). He had just lunched with Beveridge, who had commissioned him to ask Lionel whether he would be prepared to come back to LSE as a junior professor. Beveridge was ‘very puzzled about the main Chair [of Political Economy], but thinks (today at any rate, & after talking to me, though he made the reservation that he must talk to Keynes about it too) that an important item in any plan would be that you should come back as junior professor.’ Dalton also told Robbins that Beveridge had qualms about appointing Hawtrey, Robertson or Clay to the main chair and had asked Dalton to consider the alternatives of advertizing the position and choosing between the applicants; of Beveridge’s resigning the directorship and taking the chair himself; and of leaving the chair vacant for the time being. Dalton favoured the last, for ‘If you played your cards well, you would get the main chair in a year or two.’ He added, ‘If I were dictator, I should give you the main chair. But this is not yet practical politics, says my intuition.’ Dalton faced opposition from Laski and others but as he put it in his diary (Pimlott ed 1986a, 53), ‘Great jealousy of Lionel in the Ghetto, but I think I shall succeed in getting him back.’ On 2 May Beveridge recorded in his diary: ‘Keynes to tea. Decided on Robbins.’ The Board of Advisors for the Chair of Economics (Cannan, Macgregor, Pigou, Beveridge, Bowley, Gregory and Webb) met and recommended Robbins’s appointment on 6 June. The University continued to look for a successor to Young: according to Beveridge’s diary on 3 July there was ‘No recommendation (Clay, Robertson, Schumpeter declining).’ Beveridge told Robbins of the Board’s decision on 10 June (LCR Personal File A) and Lionel

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received the official offer from the Academic Registrar of the University of London on 24 June (History of Past Employment, RP). The initial salary was £1000 a year, starting on 1 August 1929. The decision to accept was harder than that of the New College fellowship only two years earlier. Iris wrote Edith Plant on May 26 (Plant 448): Of course Lionel had to say yes though we shall hate leaving this place. But ever since then we’ve been waiting to hear definitely about it & still they have been unable to collect all the members of Council together. It’s all very unsettling & disturbing though everyone says it is practically a certainty that he will be elected. We don’t know where we are – Lionel is frightfully rushed, examining in Oxford, London & Cambridge & I perhaps ought to be househunting a loathsome prospect with houses expensive & uncomfortable & this glorious summer goes on & we feel we ought to be enjoying every minute of it in this wonderful place when we may be leaving so soon. Lionel has been in a very difficult position as Laski has been turning Gregory against him (as an economist not personally) & he has had to know nothing about it. It’s all very involved.

Lionel was an external examiner for Part II of the Cambridge Economics Tripos. One of the candidates that year was Geoffrey Crowther, later editor of The Economist; Lionel was so impressed with his papers that he thought Crowther should be awarded the highest honours (Edwards 1993, 698): ‘I remember arguing for an hour and reading aloud the questions and saying “What would you give a 1:1 to?” I think they had given a 1:1 to Barbara Wootton, but, being a woman, she was not allowed to take a degree in those days . . . Eventually they yielded and Geoffrey got a 1:1.’ At Oxford one of Robbins’s last students was Kenneth Boulding: after a year reading chemistry he asked to switch to PPE (Lee ed 1993, 40–1): ‘I went to see Lionel Robbins who was just leaving New College. . . . He does not remember this . . . but I, of course, remember very vividly his very dramatic figure sitting in the window seat, telling me that I should read Marshall’s Principles of Economics, Pigou’s Economics of Welfare, Cassel’s Theory of Social Economy, and Hawtrey’s The Economic Problem.’ When Boulding returned from the summer vacation he ‘did very well . . . so I decided that economics was something I could do fairly easily’. Boulding’s new tutor was Phelps Brown who was appointed to a college lectureship in economics on Robbins’s recommendation (Tuition Committee 18 and 25 June and 6 July 1929, New College). The summer of 1929 was as disturbed as the spring. In July Lionel and Iris’s daughter Anne caught diptheria – fortunately not a severe case, although it involved a lengthy convalescence and meant they gave up a month’s holiday in Dorset (LCR to RRR, 24 July 1929). But he found the time to write to Evan Durbin on 24 July to congratulate him on his First

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(Durbin 11/12), and to two other students who had not done so well (John Fielding-Hall to LCR, 2 August, E.C. Pilkington to LCR, 27 July 1929, CORRESPONDENCE, RP). And there was the househunting. They decided they could not afford to live in Kensington again and also that they should try and buy rather than rent (LCR to RRR, 9 June 1929). In the event Lionel found the house, 10 Meadway Close in Hampstead Garden Suburb, near where Iris had grown up. She remembered seeing the houses being built when she was a child. But, as Lionel told Plant (2 February 1930, Plant 448) they had ‘had the very devil of a time getting a house & then there was a tedious delay before we could get into it’, so that it was already ‘just before Xmas’ when they moved to London. When they did, they were ‘very well satisfied. . . . It is very near [to central London] and yet very lovely for children.’ Beveridge had invited the Robbinses to stay at his cottage in Avebury during September. Lionel went over a couple of times on his own: they cleared rubbish from the garden, lit bonfires and planted trees (Beveridge Diary, 13 and 24 September 1929). In August he had visited the Daltons at their Wiltshire retreat, West Leaze, and talked about the School. They also talked about the new Labour government – in which Dalton was Undersecretary in the Foreign Office – that had taken office in June. On 21 October Lionel dined with Dalton in London (Pimlott ed 1986a, 63, 67–8). In Dalton’s words, ‘He has made a very good start this term, as I knew he would. Professor at [not quite] 31 (Pigou, I think, was Prof. [of Political Economy at Cambridge] at 26 [actually 30]) he has a long run home. Success is the great stimulant.’

SEVEN

The Young Professor

One of Lionel Robbins’s greatest achievements was what he did for LSE and its department of economics in the 1930s. In 1929 he could not know how much he would achieve in a decade but he started his new job with great resolution. His deep-rooted sense of duty was heightened by the unexpected good fortune which had given him the responsibility for the department – although at first he expected he would soon have a senior colleague. He told his father in February 1930 that he had been ‘working, or performing official obligations equivalent to work, up to a late hour every night . . . Nothing much has happened to me outside the School for the simple reason that I am never anywhere else. There of course things are still fresh and interesting. I am conducting a very vigorous campaign for an increase of staff in the Economics Department. So far this has succeeded very well – indeed there can be no question of Beveridge’s willingness to spend. The spice of difficulty arises from the fact that I have very strong views as to the persons we should appoint and since we shall be advertizing the jobs there is a good deal of intrigue & manoeuvring of an innocent variety to be done. Apart from this my lectures take all my time. I live from hand to mouth this term and I am never sure at the beginning of the week whether I shall be competent to expound to my satisfaction the subject which is on my programme for the end of the week. . . . I shall be glad when the year is over.

Robbins had to take over Allyn Young’s theory teaching but without the help of Hugh Dalton, who was on leave of absence to serve in the Labour government. As colleagues in economics he had only the assistants Harold Batson and John Hicks, and Batson was away studying at the University of Heidelberg. Fortunately he could call upon George Schwartz, the secretary of the London and Cambridge Economic Service; Roy Douglas Allen, an assistant in Statistics; and Leonard Marsh, a research student who had obtained a First in the BSc(Econ) in 1928. Hicks had been an assistant for three years and had been lecturing on Trade and Industry. He thought of 166

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himself as a labour economist. He had also spent part of 1928 at the University of the Witwatersrand filling in for the recently deceased Professor R.A. Lehfeldt (Hamouda 1993, 6–11). Robbins immediately recommended his promotion to assistant lecturer, telling Beveridge on 15 July (Beveridge IIb28): ‘he has done a good deal of rather dull routine work very effectively and conscientiously. We are asking him to do a good deal more next year and . . . [promotion] might be a great encouragement.’ Although Hicks continued to lecture on trade and industry while he was writing The Theory of Wages (1932), Robbins set him to lecture on economic theory where he could put his mathematical training to use. According to Hicks (1973, 2–3), ‘The first fruits were a draft of what was to become the elasticity of substitution chapter in Theory of Wages, and a paper about Edgeworth and Marshall on the labour market, which appeared in the Economic Journal in June 1930. It was this latter which set me up as an economic theorist.’ The new lectures, on the Theory of Risk and Profits, also led to a journal article (1931). Lionel sent Hicks’s book with a strong recommendation for publication to Macmillan, which agreed to publish it but only after a report from a second reader (D.H. Robertson) after an unenthusiastic one from Keynes (Schuller 2008). In the 1930s Hicks made his name as an economic theorist, in both microeconomics and monetary theory. Some of his most important work was carried out with Allen. In 1929/30 Robbins assigned Allen a short series of lectures on Recent Theories of Costs and, with Marsh, to assist him in taking economic theory classes. A year later he assigned Allen and Hicks a new course for graduate students on Advanced Problems in Theoretical Economics.1 Lionel gave himself the heaviest teaching load. In the Michaelmas term he taught, twice a week (and twice more for the evening students), the Elements of Economics to first year students, an extensively revised version of the course he had given in 1926/7 (Elements 1929 and Elements 1929 (cont), RP). He gave ten lectures (again repeated in the evening) on Schools of Economic Theory, a short introduction to the history of economics for second year BSc(Econ) students, which was ‘deliberately . . . not called History of Economic Theory because [it was] not comprehensive’ (Schools of Economic Theory, RP). He postponed the main economic theory lectures (and his inaugural lecture) until the Lent term when he gave twenty lectures on General Principles of Economic Analysis, concentrating on value and distribution, and Schwartz gave ten lectures on The Theory of Production. 1

Marsh left for McGill University in 1930. He is now remembered as the author of the Report on Social Security for Canada prepared for the Advisory Committee on Reconstruction (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1943).

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In the Summer term Robbins lectured on The Nature of Economics and its Significance in Relation to the Kindred Social Sciences, a course developed from his Unsettled Problems lectures in Oxford, and, also reflecting his current theoretical interests, delivered eight lectures on The Theory of Capital and Interest. He assigned himself the same stint the following year, except that he extended his Principles lectures over the Michaelmas and Lent terms and set Allen to lecture on the theory of interest (LSE Calendars 1929–30 and 1930–1). The elementary currency and banking course Robbins had given in 1926/7 was now given by Philip Barrett Whale, a lecturer in commerce. In addition Robbins’s friend Frederic Benham, who had returned from Australia as an assistant to Professor Coatman, contributed half a dozen lectures on Problems of Monopoly and State Control in the Summer term, while Coatman, who had been appointed Professor of Imperial Economic Relations at the same time as Robbins’s appointment, helped out with ten lectures on public finance. 1929/30 was the first year Lionel ran what became famous as the ‘Robbins Seminar’. It was not his innovation: Young had introduced a seminar in economic theory for research students in addition to the classes in economic theory for advanced undergraduates. Unfortunately little is known about the seminar in 1928/9 and 1929/30 except that in both years the first meeting was scheduled for the first Friday of the Michaelmas term at noon and in 1929/30 Lionel allowed a few senior undergraduates to attend. The graduate students attending in 1929/30 included Maurice Allen, Jack Gilbert and Brinley Thomas, who were awarded Research Studentships at LSE in 1929. (Allen and Gilbert had been undergraduates at LSE; Thomas had been at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth.) The undergraduates included three who gained First Class Honours in the BSc(Econ) final examination in 1930 and stayed on as graduate students: Leslie Gollop, Nicholas Kaldor and Honor Scott (later better known as Honor Croome). Kaldor, a Hungarian who had already studied economics at the University of Berlin for a year, had arrived at LSE in 1927. He kept extensive notes of Young’s lectures and of some of Robbins’s Comparative Economic Theory lectures in his second year (Sandilands 1990; Robbins: Comp. Economic Theory, Kaldor Papers). Lionel had noticed Honor Scott in the first of Young’s classes that he took over after Young’s death. She was very good looking, but ‘she dominated her class, not by reason of her charms, but by reason of her courage, her candour and the extraordinary zest and enthusiasm which she brought to the study of everything which came up for consideration.’ She went on to

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get an even better First than Kaldor’s in their final examination (Robbins 1961a). In the summer of 1929 the world economy began to slide into the slump which would become known the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1930s. Well before the Wall Street crash in October economic activity had peaked in the USA and other countries; international commodity prices had been steadily falling for several years. In Britain, where unemployment was already high in the 1920s, the world slump dashed the hopes of, and eventually destroyed, the second Labour government. In this government, Ramsay MacDonald’s second administration, Dalton was Undersecretary in the Foreign Office under Arthur Henderson, Philip Snowden was Chancellor of the Exchequer again, Sidney Webb (now Lord Passfield) was Colonial Secretary and LeesSmith Postmaster-General. Many economists outside government, including Robbins, were pulled into the government’s attempts in 1930 to find ways to arrest the rising tide of unemployment. In October 1929 Beveridge was hoping to persuade Hubert Henderson to accept a chair at LSE (Beveridge Diary 31 October). Even before Young died Beveridge had thought there should be a second professor of economics at the School: he had proposed the School revive the vacant Tooke Professorship of Economic Science and Statistics which had previously been tenable at King’s College London. By the time the University of London had officially approved the transfer Beveridge had approached Henderson. Henderson had been a lecturer in economics at Cambridge before Keynes persuaded him to become editor of The Nation & Athenaeum in 1923 and was known to want to return to research in economics. He was seriously interested in the Tooke chair, but in January 1930 Beveridge reported to the LSE governors that Henderson was not after all available. As ‘one further possibility’ had also failed, the Emergency Committee agreed that the endowment for the Tooke chair should for the time being be used for visiting professorships (Emergency Committee 21 February and 19 November 1929, 23 January 1930). Henderson had decided, persuaded by Keynes, to work for the second Labour government as one of the full-time staff of the newly formed Economic Advisory Council – an advisory body of businessmen and economists including G.D.H. Cole, Keynes and Sir Josiah Stamp (Howson and Winch 1977, 24–5). The secretariat was supposed to include at least two economists: Henderson tried unsuccessfully to have Dennis Robertson join him as an equal partner instead of taking on two junior economists (Henderson to Robertson, 25 January and 6 February 1930, Henderson Papers, Nuffield

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College Oxford). In the event two junior economists were appointed: Robbins was pleased they were both men he had taught at Oxford, Colin Clark and Henry Hodson. As he told his father in February 1930, ‘I can’t claim much of the credit for their status but it will be pleasant to have the freedom of the kitchen entrance to the holiest of holies so to speak.’ In October 1929 Lionel Robbins was elected to the Reform Club, proposed by his father-in-law and Graham Wallas. His first published letter to The Times appeared on 15 October (on Nicholas Barbon). In January 1930 he gave his inaugural lecture as Professor of Economics on ‘The present position of economic science’ (1930a). He made an eloquent plea for more theoretical work in economics, since ‘Economics . . . has reached a stage at which a desire to pass beyond first approximations is causing economists to turn back once more to the re-examination of its most fundamental problems’ where progress could not be made by empirical studies alone. (He gave several examples of such problems: the relations between savings, interest rates and prices; increasing returns and the theory of costs; wages and labour mobility.) Dalton came to hear him and thought it was ‘A good performance’ (Dalton Diaries Vol 13, BLPES). On the following Sunday Lionel wrote to Arnold Plant in Cape Town (Plant 448): As for me, things are much happier. I have more work than in a perfect world I ought to have & I badly need a senior colleague. . . . But I think I have got Economics going again. There are fifty specialists this year, and I do not think numbers will diminish. The hostility which was undoubtedly engendered by my appointment has very largely evaporated. I am bound to say that, faced with the fait accompli, Laski has behaved with generosity & decency & last week after my inaugural he told Schwartz that he recanted his criticisms & came & told me in person that he thought I had thoroughly justified the appointment.

He also told Plant, who had been offered the Cassel Chair of Commerce as from August 1930, that he looked forward to what he thought they could achieve together in their respective departments. When Plant arrived Mrs Mair told Beveridge on 15 August (Beveridge Supp 1/14) that ‘We have never done a sounder thing than getting Robbins and Plant back. They . . . both feel about the School as we do. They care about it.’ As part of his campaign to increase the number of economists Robbins wrote a long ‘Memorandum on the Present Position and possible future expansion of the Economics Department’ early in 1930 (LCR Personal File A, LSE). ‘It is clear . . . we are understaffed, both as regards lecturing and as regards . . . the more important function of supervision & classwork.’ There were serious deficiencies in what he called ‘maintrack’ lecturing: only ten lectures in public finance, no general course in applied economics, and a

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Principles course reduced to only twenty lectures compared with Young’s fifty-eight. He did not wish to extend the Principles course by much but to supplement it with lectures on current problems in economic theory. There also should be more ‘sideline’ lectures on special topics. As for classes, the second year students were fairly well provided for: ‘Marsh and Allen have things well in hand, but this involves at most three papers a year per student. This year I am trying to supplement this by an additional essay once a term to be read aloud to me. But this will involve at least two extra teaching hours a week for me, and if numbers continue next year at their present level I shall have to put on more third year classes.’ Adding in the growing number of research students and allowing for leaves of absence, there was a case for a permanent economics staff of two professors, two readers and two lecturers. Most pressing, however, was the need to allow time for research, especially to young staff who should be publishing journal articles. He advocated the institution of ‘research lectureships’ with only small teaching commitments, similar to research fellowships at Oxford (and to modern postdoctoral fellowships). Nothing came of this proposal but his final plea for more ‘collective research’ among the economists bore fruit later. Beveridge recommended to the governors two new readerships plus a new lectureship and an extra assistantship. The Emergency Committee agreed on 27 February and the readerships, in industrial organization and in currency and banking, went to Rowe and Whale, whose previous positions as Cassel lecturers in commerce went to Schwartz and Benham. Hicks was promoted to lecturer. Maurice Allen was given an assistantship, and so was Evan Durbin, Lionel’s former student at New College, who had been a research student at UCL for a year. Benham was to lecture on public finance and take most of the classes in economic theory; Durbin was to help Benham with the classes while carrying on with his research on underconsumptionist theories of the trade cycle. As Lionel told his father in July, ‘All my nominees got their jobs & I shall start next year with a strong and loyal department. . . . What a change from this time last year.’ Lionel published four articles in 1930, the first his inaugural lecture in Economica in March. The second, based on his static states paper to the Marshall Society the previous June (see Chapter 6), appeared in the Economic Journal in June. His third, ‘On the elasticity of demand for income in terms of effort’, also published in June 1930, is the only one of Robbins’s articles to contain a diagram: in fact two diagrams, devised for his Principles lectures, one showing the relation between the quantity of income demanded by an individual and the price of labour in terms of effort and the other the resulting quantities of effort the individual would be prepared to expend

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to obtain desired quantities of income. (He followed Wicksteed in using demand for income curves rather than supply of labour curves.) Using them to illustrate the effects of an income tax, he rightly concluded that ‘We cannot predict a priori what the effects of a change in taxation or of a change in wage rates will be’ (Robbins 1930c, 126). This appeared to conflict with arguments made by Frank Knight in Risk Uncertainty and Profit (1921) and Pigou in his Economics of Welfare (1929). When the article appeared Pigou wrote on 16 June from his holiday cottage in the Lake District that Robbins had misunderstood his argument. He did not disagree, however, with Robbins’s analysis, though he thought there was no need for diagrams. Lionel explained in his reply: The editors were hard up for material & turned what was sent in as a note into a front article. Originally it formed part of a course of lectures on general principles & consisted merely of the diagrams & the critique of Knight whose work I use as a supplement to Marshall for teaching purposes. I decided to publish it . . . because so many students failed to grasp the diagrammatic exposition that I got tired of having to lend out my notes. The paragraphs expatiating on what I believed to be your views were added later . . .

Pigou responded with a friendly note (Cambridge, RP). The lecture notes, which include the critique of Knight but not that of Pigou, survive (Principles Production – Factors Flexible Labour Supply, Principles of Economics I, RP). Contrary to Pigou’s view of the diagrams the paper became famous for their illustration of a ‘backward-bending’ supply curve for labour (that is, a rise in income per unit of effort past a certain point may lead to a reduction rather than an increase in the amount of work done).2 Knight also wrote to Robbins (12 January 1931, Viner and Knight, RP). He was interested in Robbins’s point about the elasticity of demand for labour in terms of commodities in general, which had ‘provoked considerable reflection’; he had not yet, he said, been able to resolve the problem to his own satisfaction. This was the beginning of a correspondence and friendship which lasted until Knight’s death in 1972; Lionel helped with the compilation of a collection of Knight’s essays to celebrate Knight’s fiftieth birthday in 1935, although they did not meet until 1938 (Knight 1935, 19; Stigler 1988). Hans Staehle wrote from Geneva on 3 July (Letters from Economists, RP): he liked the diagrams though he criticized both Robbins’s and Knight’s treatment of leisure as a commodity. Staehle also thanked 2

Its several reprintings include those in the AEA Readings in the Theory of Income Distribution (1946) and An Anthology of Labor Economics, eds Ray Marshall and Richard Perlman (1972). See also Buchanan (1971) and Spencer (2005).

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Robbins for a review in the same issue of Economica. Robbins had characterized Othmar Spann, Types of Economic Theory, which had recently been translated, as ‘dull, pretentious, inaccurate and superficial’. It would not been have worth a review but for the fact that Spann, Professor of Political Economy in Vienna, was ‘a leading nationalist and anti-semite in Vienna, who for years has resolutely set his face against rationalism in economics and liberalism (in its widest sense) in politics’. Staehle thought Robbins had rendered a great service to German economics by thus speaking out. After Wicksteed’s death in 1927 his family had asked his friend C.H. Herford, Professor of English Literature in the University of Manchester, to write his biography. Wicksteed, a Unitarian minister, was best known as a classical and mediaeval scholar, especially for his work on Dante. Herford asked Robbins to contribute a chapter on Wicksteed’s economic work, which he wrote during the summer vacation of 1930 (Herford 1931, 228–47). The family were well pleased with the result: Rebecca Wicksteed wrote on 7 September (Econs Misc Theory, RP) that she was ‘quite delighted with your account of my father’s Economic work . . . It is just what was needed to complete the picture of his life & work. It is wonderful & very gratifying to see how truly you have read his character through his works. If I did not know that you had never seen him, I should have thought it was written by an intimate friend.’ Robbins published his chapter as a separate article in Economica (1930e) and expanded it later into the introduction to his edition of Wicksteed’s Common Sense of Political Economy (1933). Lionel’s lectures in 1929/30 illustrated his new views on the nature and significance of economics. The opening lecture of his Elements course on 7 October pointed out that economics is a study of social phenomena, one of the social sciences, and distinguished from the other social sciences in that all economic phenomena are associated in some way or other with the fact of scarcity of time or means. Economics is, therefore, ‘the science which studies social phenomena as conditioned by the limitation of means available for the satisfaction of given ends.’ His notes, and those of Plant who sat in on the course in 1930/1, show that this first lecture was followed by one on the concept and measurement of wealth, where he argued that ‘wealth consists of all external objects of human desire’, so that wealth was essentially a relative concept and could not be unambiguously measured. Thereafter there were only a couple of lectures on production in general before he launched into price theory (still classified as part of organization) and its many applications. On distribution he reused an old (1926) lecture before discussing the effects of trade unions on wages and, more briefly, the effects of the state on distribution. A final lecture on ‘Interlocal differences

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of wealth’ allowed him to criticize tariffs (Elements 1929 and Elements 1929 (cont), RP; L.C. Robbins 1st Year Course of Lectures on Elements of Economics, Plant 170). According to Kaldor (1986, 4–5), who heard Robbins’s Principles lectures in his final year as an undergraduate, Robbins lectured on ‘the general equilibrium theory of Walras and the Austrians . . . – the keystone of which is the marginal productivity theory of distribution in its generalized form . . . with the fervency of a convert and . . . the zeal of a missionary’. According to Lionel’s notes (Principles of Economics I (Old Notes 1929– 31), RP) and the syllabus he produced for the 1930–1 Calendar, the course was organized around the concept of general equilibrium. The major topics were: exchange equilibrium; equilibrium of production first with factors given and then with factors flexible; special topics in equilibrium analysis such as the theory of consumers’ surplus, the law of diminishing returns and the theory of costs, where he was strongly critical of Marshallian partial equilibrium analysis (as he had been more gently in his inaugural lecture); and analysis of variations, which included the theory of money and interest (and which he probably did not give until 1930/1). Lionel’s lectures to the first-year students were remembered even more vividly. Braj Kumar Nehru recalled (Abse ed 1977, 24–5) ‘the young and very handsome Lionel Robbins, tossing back his flowing mane of hair (to the delight of the ladies), lecturing to packed classes’ in the Old Theatre. Aubrey Jones, who began to read for the BCom in 1929 and switched to the BSc(Econ) a year later, was most affected by the lectures of Robbins, Hayek, Laski and Postan (ibid., 35): ‘Robbins, long of hair and sonorous of phrase, had passion and his thought could be grasped without much difficulty. Both passion and thought infected me. I went home to an unemployed father [in South Wales] and argued vehemently with him that the only cure for unemployment was a reduction in wages. . . . In one particular peroration Robbins spoke of the generation lost in the First World War and insisted that such a calamity must never recur. We were all intensely moved. Spontaneously, we rose to our feet and gave him a standing ovation.’ Jones added, ‘It is the only such occasion that I recall.’3 In his Nature and Significance of Economic Science lectures in the Summer term 1930, Robbins’s discussion of ‘Definitions’ largely repeated that of his Oxford lectures on Unsettled Problems in Theoretical Economics (see Chapter 6). In those lectures he had only briefly mentioned the 3

The occasion may be the conclusion of a lecture on the supply of labour when LCR, explaining the importance of the age composition in determining the ability composition of the population, intended according to his notes to refer to ‘the bad effect from this point of view of wars [and] our present position’: Elements 1929 (cont), RP.

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implications of his preferred definition of economics; he now elaborated on them. In ‘Economics and ethics’ the first thing he wanted to emphasize about this definition was that ‘it is entirely neutral as between ends.’ Hence economists could not be charged with being concerned only with material things: ‘The economist is not concerned with ends at all. He is concerned with the way in which ends are achieved. The end may be base or it may be good.’ The definition also implied that economics was concerned with more than technology. As the scarce means were ‘capable of alternative application’ their allocation to one purpose would depend on their other possible uses: ‘it is because of this necessity of choosing . . . that those aspects of human activity which we study as economists come into being.’ Hence economic history was also more than the history of technology. And the socalled ‘economic or materialist interpretation of history’ was not an economic interpretation at all, only a materialist one. He then took up the question of whether economics should include ethics, as R.G. Hawtrey and J.A. Hobson had argued it should, answering in the negative as he had in his review of Hawtrey’s book (1927a). In ‘Statistics Technology & History’ he pointed out that the scarcity definition of economics also implied that ‘there are no absolute economic quantities. The quantities we contemplate – wealth productive power etc – are relative to human valuations.’ His illustration was the immediate loss of value of war material and hence of wealth at the hour of the Armistice on 11 November 1918. He explained the related difficulties in using economic aggregates such as national income estimates and price indices (without mentioning Austrian views). The new material also included two lectures on methodology, the first espousing a deductivist view of economics on the lines of J.N. Keynes (1917), the second on the (very limited) uses of induction to suggest and test the assumptions from which economic generalizations followed by deduction. He launched into a spirited attack on American institutionalism, the basis of his attack the standard philosophical argument about the validity of inductive (including statistical) inference. His final lecture, entitled somewhat misleadingly ‘Economics and Political Theory’, first strongly criticized the use of the law of diminishing marginal utility to justify policies of income redistribution, as it involved interpersonal comparisons of utility, and then discussed the doctrine of laissez faire, stressing its limitations and the resulting need for a wide range of public goods.4 4

The Nature and Significance of Economic Science, RP; for more on these lectures see Howson 2004a, 427–33.

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Robbins’s eight lectures on The Theory of Capital and Interest, which he gave only once, were, according to the LSE Calendar, ‘[to] deal chiefly with modern discussions of the Theory of Capital and Interest, but [to include] an account of the earlier history of this doctrine sufficient to elucidate these controversies’. Judging from his notebooks he cobbled them together from the Capital section of his Comparative Economic Theory lectures and notes on his more recent reading on the subject. The Comparative lectures had analysed the answers to the question ‘What is capital?’ of Adam Smith, Eugen B¨ohm-Bawerk and Irving Fisher and severely criticized the first two for the confusions they had introduced. The recent reading included the new work of Friedrich von Hayek (1928), which attempted to develop some of Ludwig von Mises’s ideas into a theory of cyclical fluctuations.5 This reading must have been done in the spring of 1930: when Lionel sent a copy of his inaugural lecture to Nathan Isaacs in June 1931 (N&S Drafts & Notes, RP) he noted that it was ‘horribly out of date’ and ‘defective too in that it does not take account of the Viennese renaissance – Hayek . . . Mises, [Gottfried] Haberler & so on’. In 1930 Austrian cycle theory was ‘a novel and potentially revolutionary doctrine whose policy implications challenged . . . conventional wisdom, but because that challenge was based on what seemed to be a coherent body of theory, it attracted much attention and not a little support’ (Laidler 1999, 50). It also held out the promise of a satisfactory explanation of the causes of the current world slump. The Swedish economist Knut Wicksell, who had distinguished between the money or market rate of interest charged by banks on their loans and the ‘natural’ rate of interest at which the demand for bank loans equals the supply of savings, argued that prices will rise if the market interest rate is below the natural rate and rise continuously as long as the market rate is below the natural rate. The neo-Wicksellians, including Mises, Hayek and Wilhelm R¨opke, developed this into a monetary overinvestment theory of business cycles. The boom is brought about by a discrepancy between the natural and money rates of interest, with the banks’ interest rates below the natural rate, so that the demand for credit exceeds the supply of savings. The resulting (over)investment in capital and hence the boom, which is accompanied by rising prices or at least prices higher than they otherwise would have been, will come to an inevitable end once consumers, whose desire for consumers’ goods has not fallen, find they 5

‘Comparative Capital’ notes written in 1926–7 and notes on ‘Mises on Prices & the Rate of Interest’, ‘Hayek on Interest Changes & Forced Saving (K. und G. Theorie pp. 120–)’, ‘Hayek on Wicksell & Mises’ written in 1929–30, Capital & Interest; notes on ‘Hayek Deficiencies of the Non Monetary Theories’, Cyclical Fluctuation Theories, RP.

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cannot afford to buy the desired level of consumers’ goods at current prices; they have in effect been forced to save more than they desired. Although this process of ‘forced saving’ can continue while the banks continue to lend, ‘sooner or later . . . it becomes clear that the newly initiated extensions of the structure of production cannot be completed, and the work on the new but incompleted roundabout processes must be discontinued. The investment boom collapses and a large part of the invested capital is lost’, when the banks become unwilling or unable to lend more. Any attempt to prolong the boom ‘artificially’ would only lead to accelerating inflation (Haberler 1937, 33–48). On 22 December 1930 Lionel gave evidence to a Committee on OverProduction chaired by Sir Edward Hilton Young. This had been set up by Neville Chamberlain, then chairman of the Conservative Research Department, to investigate the fall of international primary product prices.6 Robbins reviewed five theories. The overproduction and psychological theories of the trade cycle seemed to describe the development of a slump rather than its causes and the ‘shortage of gold’ explanation first advanced by Cassel could hardly explain the American slump. The ‘old monetary’ theory, which attributed trade cycles to the inherent instability of bank credit and the tendency of price rises to become cumulative, explained prewar booms and slumps but failed to explain why the boom of 1925–9 was accompanied by falling not rising prices and why the low interest rates of 1930 had not produced any signs of recovery. The ‘new monetary’ theory of Hayek and R¨opke could answer these questions: in 1925–9 low American interest rates had been preventing a fall in prices and the concealed inflation had encouraged unsustainable overinvestment. He admitted, however, that the new theory ‘applied most of all to the United States and least of all to the United Kingdom’ which had had its own troubles since the war, including the consequences of the return to the gold standard (Committee on Over-Production Eighteenth Meeting, Controversies 1929–32, RP). Although Lionel had met R¨opke of the University of Marburg and Haberler of the University of Vienna, the former in London, the latter when he was lecturing in Cambridge in October 1930 (R¨opke to LCR, 3 October 1930, Letters from Economists, Haberler to LCR, nd but November 1930, Vienna, RP), he had not met Hayek. Hayek was already well known outside his native Vienna. He had been director of the Austrian Institut f¨ur Konjunkturforschung (Institute for Business Cycle Research) since 1927 and 6

Chamberlain to Young, 31 July 1931, Kennet Papers 16/9, CUL; Summary of first Eighteen Meetings of Committee on Over-Production, CRD1/41/1, Conservative Party Archives.

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had met most of the economists involved with the London and Cambridge Economic Service. He first met Keynes at a meeting of economic research services in London in 1928, when he also visited Robertson in Cambridge (Hayek 1994, 89; Conference of Economic Services London School of Economics June 26–29 1928 Provisional Programme, LSE 241A; FAH 4, 178). Hayek also knew Gregory with whom he shared a common interest in the history of money and prices (Hayek to Gregory, 10 December 1929, COLL MISC 460, BLPES). After a second conference of economic research services in Berlin in 1930, Hayek wrote to George Schwartz on 31 July asking him if he could ask Robbins for his help in organizing an international conference of ‘younger economists’ which Hayek and Schwartz had been discussing in Berlin. Robbins then wrote to Hayek, who replied from holiday in the Austrian Alps on 20 August about the conference and the lectures he was to give at LSE in 1931 (Hayek, RP). Hayek recalled (1994, 75–7) that he owed the invitation to lecture at LSE to the impression that an article on the ‘paradox of saving’ in the new Viennese journal Zeitschrift f¨ur National¨okonomie (1929) had made on Robbins. He also claimed that Robbins invited him in order to acquire an ally in his dispute with Keynes in the autumn of 1930. But while Lionel was impressed by the article – a powerful critique of the theories of Foster and Catchings that had fascinated Robbins in 1924 – and had suggested to Beveridge that Hayek be invited to give the University of London Advanced Lectures in Economics for 1930/1, a year later he suggested Keynes, who declined because he was too busy (Keynes to LCR, 29 May 1931, Cambridge, RP). However, Hayek had already accepted before he wrote to Robbins in the summer of 1930, and the lectures were announced in the LSE Calendar before the start of the academic year. By the time Hayek arrived to give the lectures in January 1931 he had agreed that one of Lionel’s graduate students, Nicholas Kaldor, could translate his trade cycle book, which Kaldor did with Honor Scott (Hayek to Kaldor, 1 December 1930, NK 3/4 Kaldor Papers; Hayek 1933). Kaldor was working on ‘the commercial and economic policies of the Danubian countries after the war’ and spent the Summer term of 1931 in Vienna; Scott was a research student until she became secretary of the New Fabian Research Bureau in 1931. With Georg Tugendhat, Kaldor also translated the ‘paradox of saving’ article (Hayek 1931a). The 1929/30 academic year ended with an end of session ball at which Robbins danced with his favourite student, Honor Scott, as yet unaware of her outstanding First (Robbins 1961a, 27–8). After the ‘crescendo of examining’ Lionel joined Iris and the children at a house on the seafront

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at Swanage, Dorset, that they had rented for July. For the first ten days he did ‘roughly speaking nothing save read a few books & recuperate in the sun’ and swim. In a letter to his father he also told him that he was getting worried about the deteriorating political situation in India and about fiscal policy at home, especially the demands for protection: ‘These abysmal idiots of Bankers not content with their wooden & illtimed monetary policy seem determined to rush us into measures which isolate us from our best customers & lead to the political breakup of the Empire. And the worst of it is there seems no one to stand up against them.’ He was particularly incensed by an article by G.D.H. Cole in the Evening Standard and wondering whether or not to jump into the fray: ‘Controversy is very fascinating but scientific work is so much more important & respectable.’ As Arnold Plant was due to arrive from South Africa within a matter of days he would consult him: ‘If he is willing to come in too, then I may take up the battle.’ In the event Robbins first took up the battle in another forum. As a member of the Labour government’s Economic Advisory Council, Keynes had persuaded the Prime Minister to appoint a Committee of Economists, chaired by himself, with a brief ‘to review the present economic conditions of Great Britain, to examine the causes which are responsible for it and to indicate the conditions of recovery’ (Howson and Winch 1977, 40). He told MacDonald that analysis of the causes of the current slump was ‘essentially a matter of economic diagnosis, the sort of thing for which economists, if they are any good at all, should be useful. . . . Professional economists have a language and a method of their own, which, whether they agree or not, enables them to understand one another fairly quickly. . . . It may be that economics is not enough of a science to be able to produce useful fruits. But I think it might be given a trial . . . ’ He suggested as members Sir Josiah Stamp, Henderson and himself representing the Council, Clay who was now working for the Bank of England, and Pigou, Robbins and Robertson as ‘leading academic economists’. He recommended them because they ‘all . . . are well accustomed to the most up-to-date academic methods and ways of discussing these problems, are essentially reasonable and good members of a committee, and happen to have given already a good deal of time and thought to the problem’ (JMK 20, 368–9). Clay and Robertson did not in fact serve on the committee. Stamp, chairman of the London Midland and Scottish Railway since 1926, had previously been in the Board of Inland Revenue; he had taken an external BSc(Econ) in 1911 and his DSc(Econ) thesis became the classic work on the distribution of income and wealth in Britain (Jones 1964, 86–76; Stamp 1916). He was also a director of the Bank of England and vice-chairman

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of the LSE governors. Keynes had gotten to know Robbins in 1929/30, on the editorial committee of the London and Cambridge Economic Service, and, more recently, on the Council of the Royal Economic Society, to which Lionel had been elected in May. Robbins, honoured to be asked to serve on Keynes’s committee, accepted with alacrity, replying to the Prime Minister’s official invitation while still on holiday in Dorset (MacDonald to LCR, 23 July 1930, Robbins 1/1). Having promised MacDonald a report by the end of October, Keynes wanted to get as much as posssible of his committee’s work done before the beginning of the Michaelmas term. He suggested meeting first on 11 September, to consider a list of possible topics and to decide on the issues on which they were or were not in agreement, and then to go away and write memoranda on these issues in readiness for a weekend meeting at his house in Sussex before the end of September. He recruited his former student, colleague and collaborator Richard Kahn as secretary along with Francis Hemming, the permanent civil servant who was joint secretary to the Council with Henderson, and he asked members of the committee to send Kahn suggestions for the list of topics (JMK 20, 402–3). Robbins was the only one to do so. Robbins also suggested to Keynes on 31 August (JMK 20, 404) that ‘our deliberations might be very materially assisted if we could hear the views of three or four foreign economists (a) on the world slump (b) on the British position as it appears to outsiders.’ He recommended ‘informal conversations’ with ‘young men – we know what the aged major prophets (Cassel e.g.) are thinking – exactly what they thought twenty years ago’ and named ‘Viner for America, R¨opke for Germany, Ohlin for Scandinavia and Hayek for Central Europe’. Viner was visiting the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva in the autumn of 1930; Lionel had met Bertil Ohlin, recently appointed professor at the University of Stockholm, when he was visiting LSE in December 1929. Keynes replied on 7 September (Robbins 1/1) that he ‘doubt[ed] whether outsiders could tell us much to the point which we do not know between us’, although he would like to talk to Viner if he were passing through London. When Viner and his wife arrived in London en route to Geneva, Lionel and Iris entertained them at Meadway Close and Lionel persuaded Viner to give four lectures on the theory of international trade at LSE later in the term (Viner to LCR, 21 October 1930, Viner 22–14; Viner to LCR, 22 December 1930, Viner & Knight, RP). According to his appointment book, Keynes attended the first on 9 December.

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The secretaries of the Committee of Economists circulated Robbins’s list of topics along with Kahn’s.7 Kahn’s memorandum (EAC(H)7) reflected the analysis of Keynes’s just completed (but not yet published) Treatise on Money (1930) and raised a series of questions about the effects of potential remedies for high unemployment. Robbins’s list (EAC(H)4) was more concerned with the causes of the depression. Under the heading ‘The position of Great Britain before the world slump’ he listed as possible causes changes in world industrial structure, ‘artificial rigidities’ in prices and wages and monetary factors such as the UK return to gold in 1925 and the policies of other countries on the gold standard. The committee should look at the possible causes of the world depression before considering the extent of its impact on the British economy and comparing the UK position with ‘U.S., France, Germany and a raw material producing country’. The committee should also consider the probable duration of the world slump and the extent to which Britain was likely to share in the recovery when it came before discussing proposals for ‘Accelerating general recovery. International Gold Policy’ and for ‘Removing difficulties peculiar to our own position[:] (i) Public Loan policy. (ii) Tariffs and Taxation Policy (iii) Wage and Price Policy. (iv) Other measures designed to remove impediments to industrial readjustment’. Lionel then went with Iris and Clive to Burgundy – they ran into Dalton in Beaune on 6 September (Dalton Diaries Vol 13) – returning to London in time for the first meetings of the Committee of Economists on 10 and 11 September. On the first morning the committee quickly agreed to obtain copies of the evidence by Stamp, Robertson and Bowley to the Committee on Finance and Industry under Lord Macmillan, which had been meeting since November 1929 and of which Keynes was a member. Deferring the question of inviting opinions from foreign economists until they had a first draft of a report, they spent the rest of that day and the next discussing the lines on which they should proceed, not getting very far on the basis of Kahn’s and Robbins’s separate lists of topics (EAC(E)1st and 2nd meetings). Keynes eventually came up with a short questionnaire to which the members would produce replies before the weekend meeting, which was held at Stamp’s home in Kent on 26–29 September. Keynes’s questionnaire was brief (JMK 20, 405), and so were most of the replies. Lionel, however, took the time to write two memoranda (circulated together as EAC(H)13 on 23 September), the second of which he admitted 7

The official records of the committee are in CAB58/150 and 151, TNA; LCR deposited his own copies in the BLPES in 1950 (Robbins 1).

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to be ‘lengthy and verbose’. The first dealt with the second part of Keynes’s questionnaire which asked for his fellow economists’ estimates of changes in real wages in Britain and of productivity per head since before the war. Robbins was prepared to accept the findings of Bowley in a recent LCES memorandum for 1910–24, but for the period since 1924 he doubted that usable conclusions could be drawn from the conflicting evidence. He gave three specific reasons for his doubt but he also ‘confess[ed] that even if I were in a position to be surer about the quantities involved I should still regard the general inquiry as relatively fruitless. . . . It is not high wages but rigid wages which are the main condition of disequilibrium.’ In his second and longer memorandum Robbins discussed the theoretical analysis of the slump before turning to ‘expedients’. He had been reading the proofs of Keynes’s Treatise and, after his own recent reading of Austrian cycle theory, foresaw disagreements between himself and the others over analysis and policy: Sooner or later our views and our differences must be stated. Since it must be my duty to state my reasons for any attitude which I feel compelled to adopt and since I cannot expect that my colleagues are as well acquainted with my general background as I am with theirs, it seemed to me worth while taking this opportunity to indicate its main relevant outlines. If one has to be a bore, it is better to be a bore on paper than during important conversations.

Keynes’s Treatise on Money was as ambitious as its title suggests. He ‘propose[d] a novel means of approach to the fundamental problems of monetary theory’ in the first, theoretical volume; in the second, applied volume he offered an application of this theory to the contemporary world economy, including a description of ‘the salient features of modern banking and monetary systems’ and a discussion of the aims and methods of monetary policy, domestic and international. His supposedly novel approach was to explain changes in the value of money (and hence fluctuations in the general level of prices) in terms of discrepancies between savings and investment – but he made his ‘fundamental equations’ unduly complicated by an odd definition of income to exclude profits. As he conceded, the savings-investment analysis had been ‘gradually creeping into economic literature in quite recent years’ following the example of Wicksell (1898); as well as Robertson (1926) he specifically mentioned Mises, Hans Neisser and Hayek, admitting he had not carefully read their work (unlike Robertson’s) (JMK 5, 154 and 178). In his own work he adopted Wicksell’s concept of the natural rate of interest, at which savings and investment are equal and there is no tendency to inflation or deflation: if the actual or market rate of

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interest were lower than the natural rate, investment would exceed savings and prices would rise; if the market rate were above the natural rate investment would be less than savings and prices would fall. As he emphasized, Wicksell was ‘the first writer to make it clear that the influence of the rate of interest on the price level operates by its effect on the rate of investment . . . pointing out that the rate of investment is capable of being affected by small changes in the rate of interest, . . . that this increased investment causes an increased demand for actual goods in use . . . , and that it is this increased actual demand which sends up prices’ (JMK 5, 139, 166–7, 176–8). Keynes also argued that when savings exceeded investment, the shortfall of demand for total output would have a depressing effect on the profit expectations of producers who would therefore cut back production, causing income and employment to fall. In an open economy on an international gold standard there were two conditions of equilibrium: that domestic investment equal savings, so as to prevent inflation or deflation; and that foreign investment equal the balance of trade, so as to prevent gold flows. In Britain since the war market interest rates had been high – presumably higher than the natural rate – to facilitate the return to gold at the prewar parity and to keep sterling on gold at that high value. Even in the theoretical portion of the Treatise Keynes pointed out (ibid., 145–8): ‘In the first place, the amount of the foreign balance in any given situation depends on the relative price levels at home and abroad of the [traded] goods and services. . . . [while] the amount of foreign lending . . . depends on relative interest rates. . . . Now there is no direct or automatic connection between these two things; nor has a central bank any direct means of altering price levels’, only the indirect weapon of altering market interest rates. ‘In the second place, with an international currency system, such as gold, the primary duty of a central bank is to preserve external equilibrium. Internal equilibrium must take its chance, or, rather, the internal situation must be forced sooner or later into equilibrium with the external situation.’ Hence the chronic British unemployment problem of the 1920s, which had been exacerbated by high interest rates abroad. In Austrian cycle theory, ‘the theory of the depression [was] not nearly so fully elaborated . . . as the theory of the boom’, as Haberler (1937, 57) noted. But in Keynes’s 1930 analysis there was also a gap, as the concept of the multiplier relating output or employment to investment had not been incorporated, so it too could say little about the development of depression. An early version of Kahn’s multiplier idea (1931) was circulated as a note to the Committee of Economists (‘The relation between primary and secondary employment’, Robbins 1/7), but its significance was not

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picked up, Keynes using it only to give some idea of the magnitudes involved in a public works programme (Howson and Winch 1977, 49, 59). Robbins had not finished reading the proofs of the Treatise but the difference between the diagnoses of the origins of the slump implied by the Keynesian and the Hayekian versions of the Wicksellian analysis was readily apparent. ‘Now, if I understand Mr. Keynes correctly, his view is that in recent years in the world at large the money rate [of interest] has been above the natural rate [of interest] largely because of the financial operations of needy and nervous governments’, except in the USA before 1928. Since 1928 financial speculation had driven money rates above the natural rate until the Wall Street crash: on this point the two versions of the Wicksellian analysis did not disagree. But there were all sorts of good reasons why the natural rate of interest in all countries should have been high since the war (wartime destruction of capital, postwar inflations, rapid population increases outside the industrialized countries and a high rate of technical progress in them): it could be argued that in the USA in the 1920s there had been a boom due to the money rate of interest being below the natural rate. While the Keynesian view suggested an expansionary monetary policy could produce recovery by increasing investment, the alternative hypothesis implied there had been too much investment before the slump: ‘there is a “real” disproportionality in the disposition of factors of production [between producers goods and consumer goods]; recovery is no longer a mere question of readjustment and returning to prosperity at the old level.’ Recovery would inevitably be a slow process; attempts to speed it up by lowering money rates of interest could at best only artificially prolong the ‘boom’ and at worst deepen the inevitable depression (EAC(E)13, Memorandum II, para (5)). Moreover, the UK unemployment position since the war had been aggravated by insufficiently flexible wages and a lack of labour mobility between declining and (potentially) expanding industries, due mainly to restrictive practices on the part of both employers and trade unions and to a lesser extent to the unemployment insurance scheme. Whatever the correct diagnosis of the causes of the world slump, it was necessary to remove some of these domestic rigidities to bring about any lasting improvement in UK employment. In the first part of his questionnaire Keynes had asked for opinions on the likely effects on British employment, prices and wages of an increase of investment, a tariff and a reduction of money wages. Lionel was quite prepared to agree that increased investment in the world at large would be desirable and that increased investment ‘in “normal” channels’ at home would have favourable effects on wages and employment, but neither should be brought about ‘artificially’ by lowering interest rates. International central

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bank cooperation could help by, for instance, reducing the concentration of available gold supplies in only a few countries. Public works were ‘a difficult matter to decide a priori’ and difficult to make practically effective. Given his view of the position in Britain before the slump, Robbins could ‘see no hope of a solution [to the UK unemployment problem] save in the introduction of greater flexibility into the wage structure and the sweeping away of the great mass of obsolete restrictions which prevent labour from being sufficiently productive to earn the wages it demands. The other remedies which have been propounded seem to me to be likely to have long period effects much worse than the disease’ (EAC(E)13, Memorandum II, paras (6)–(10)). It was not clear how the government should try to remove the rigidities, apart from reforming the unemployment insurance system, but Lionel was clear on what should not be done. The worst of the possible remedies was a tariff. Robbins already had reason to suspect Keynes might be wavering in his support for free trade, as he had been taken as a guest to a meeting of the Tuesday Club (the private dining club of which Keynes was a founder member) in April 1930 when Keynes opened the discussion on ‘Are the presuppositions of free trade satisfied today?’ Robbins counterattacked with Keynes’s own earlier arguments against protection. He began gently, tongue in cheek: ‘In a society, in which money wages were held uniformly rigid above the equilibrium level, but in which there existed effective mobility of labour and complete willingness on the part of the unions to see money wages remain constant in the face of rising prices, it is theoretically possible that a tariff by raising prices and so lowering real wages might reduce unemployment. I should therefore be unable completely to agree with the pronouncement of our chairman that “the claim to cure unemployment involves the Protectionist fallacy in its grossest and crudest form” [in] The Nation and Athenaeum November 24th, 1923. . . . I so thoroughly agree with the general tendency of this argument that I venture to transcribe the passage in full. I can conceive no better tonic for a Chancellor of the Exchequer wavering in his adherence to the Free Trade Principle.’ He proceeded to list his reasons, economic and political, for continuing to believe Keynes’s earlier arguments, beginning with the obvious point that import duties would not help the exporting industries but rather harm them by adversely affecting their customers and by raising their costs of production. On the political arguments he emphasized the danger of a spread of protectionism: ‘To suppose the contrary in the face of the age long history of tariffs and the present position the world over is simply to bury one’s head in the sand. If the Committee requires evidence of [for instance] what will be the attitude of the Farmers to a tariff on manufactures,

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unaccompanied by blackmail, I can (very confidentially) produce intimate and irrefragable evidence.’ Furthermore, even if ‘our politicians being good incorruptible Trade Unionists and public school men’ resisted demands for other tariffs and a tariff on manufactures alone cured unemployment in a slump, what would happen in subsequent slumps? Presumably the tariff would have to be raised again each time (EAC(E)13, Memorandum II, para (11)). Among the economic arguments were two he was to use on several later occasions in the 1930s. One referred to the contention that because the international terms of trade between manufactures and primary products would sooner or later turn against manufactures making it more expensive to import food, Britain should expand its agriculture (with the help of protection or subsidies). This might have been alarming if the UK population were growing but was less so with a stationary population. An adverse shift in the terms of trade would make Britain poorer if and when it happened, but ‘Why be poor before we need?’ by increasing food prices now. The other was Keynes’s newest argument that a tariff would make it easier for Britain to maintain its overseas lending, a necessary outlet for the savings of an old country with relatively few opportunities for large-scale domestic investment, especially at a time when UK interest rates had to be high to keep the pound on the gold standard: if UK savings exceeded investment, unemployment would ensue. If the balance of trade, and hence the surplus available for foreign lending, could not be improved by lowering the price of exports because of wage rigidity, then a tariff could do it by reducing imports. To which Lionel responded that the argument required wages to be completely inflexible, assumed an empirically unverified low elasticity of demand for UK exports and exaggerated the difficulties of the socalled transfer problem (on which he referred to recent work of Haberler (1930) and R¨opke (1930)). The committee gathered for its weekend meeting on the Friday evening (26 September), holding a short meeting before dinner and a longer one afterwards. On the Saturday and Sunday they allowed themselves a break after lunch and for dinner but otherwise worked from 10 in the morning to 10 or 11 o’clock at night. The bland official minutes convey nothing of the intensity of the discussion – except the long hours and the number of papers they had to consider (EAC(E)3rd to 5th meetings). Robbins was not the only member of the committee to have found Keynes’s questionnaire unhelpful. Henderson (EAC(E)9) already ‘suspect[ed] that the present slump will be known in history as the Great Slump, that it will prove more prolonged and more severe than even the most pessimistic of us like to admit as

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probable, . . . [and] that the international historian will regard the Great Slump as forming an essential part of the story of the Great War and its Aftermath . . . ’ His pessimism led him to object to any domestic policy ‘in the nature of a gamble’ but to support as an emergency measure an import duty on manufactured goods in order to increase government revenue, improve the current account of the balance of payments and protect some domestic industries such as the steel industry. Pigou (EAC(E)12 and 12A) relied on the theoretical analysis of his own major publications on unemployment: ‘we may say generally that the quantity of employment is determined by the rate of real wage in relation to the productivity function of labour. . . . Hence employment can only increase if either w [the real wage rate] is diminished or ϕ [total product] is so changed that, for relevant values of x [the amount of labour], ϕ’ [the marginal product of labour] is made larger.’ In the longer term there was nothing much that could be done to reduce unemployment other than to encourage technical progress which raised the productivity of labour; in the short term expedients such as wage subsidies and tariffs could serve to reduce real wages but Pigou was only prepared to contemplate the former. Stamp alone provided straightforward guesses in answer to the specific questions (EAC(E)14). Keynes’s reply (EAC(E)15) to his own questionnaire used his Treatise analysis (JMK 12, 177–200). It listed several positive benefits of a tariff in present economic conditions. He also circulated some notes on the statistics and a lengthy commentary on Pigou’s memorandum. On Sunday morning he produced yet another paper, ‘A proposal for tariffs plus bounties’ (EAC(E)24), in which he advocated a general tariff of say 10 per cent on all imports and an equivalent subsidy to exports (JMK 20, 416–19). He gave as a rationale that it would have similar effects to a devaluation of the pound (which was ruled out while Britain remained on the gold standard) and was fairer than an attempt to reduce domestic money wages. Despite the opposition this generated, not only from Robbins, the weekend meeting ended with agreement that Keynes should prepare a draft report ‘embodying the general sense of the discussions’ and that they should meet again in ten days’ time. The drafts Keynes circulated on 7 and 8 October opened with a description of the catastrophic recent fall of world prices of staple commodities and the consequences for the British economy, as a prelude to discussions of remedies for unemployment. These were classified by the way in which they might restore some sort of equilibrium between prices and wages. Class A included the removal of restrictive practices and other obstacles to the mobility of labour, including reform of the unemployment insurance

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system, and improvements in productive efficiency. Class B covered (1) central bank cooperation to lower world interest rates, which was highly desirable, and (2) devaluation of the pound, which Keynes did not recommend. C was ‘a class of remedies, capable of being applied by this country acting alone, which . . . produce their primary effect on employment otherwise than as a result of the rise in prices’ and thus included all remedies which aimed at increasing capital investment. Here Keynes intended to include measures to improve the current account of the UK balance of payments (C2) as well as measures to boost domestic investment (C1). Having only drafted as far as C1 by Wednesday morning he produced a handwritten outline of the sections to follow, in which his tariff-bounty proposal was to have a section to itself (JMK 20, 423–50). This was too much for Lionel: he categorically stated that he could not sign a report with which he did not agree. Keynes with his aim to produce an ‘agreed diagnosis’ for MacDonald challenged Lionel’s right to produce a minority report with only one signature (LCR to Keynes, 8 October 1930, Robbins 1/1). The others agreed, according to the official minutes (EAC(E)7th meeting), that Pigou would redraft the sections on remedies of classes B and C – Henderson having already redrafted that on A since the previous day’s meeting – and that Robbins should prepare ‘a draft statement setting out the matters on which he was in disagreement with the Chairman’s Draft, together with such a note explanatory thereto as he considered necessary to make clear his position’. This would be considered at another weekend meeting, in Cambridge on 18–19 October, and they would hold two shorter meetings in London in the meantime. On 6 October the LSE Michaelmas term had begun. Around the Committee of Economists meetings Robbins had to fit in ten lectures that week: two each of his Elements and Schools of Economic Theory courses and one of a new course with Rowe on Problems of Applied Economics, all repeated in the evenings. He cannot have had much time to think about them – especially because he had Beveridge to contend with on the tariff issue as well as Keynes. Beveridge had been in North America since July; he sailed home on the Majestic, together with a number of Canadian politicians who were on their way to an Imperial Conference in London. On the day of his arrival (25 September) he met Arnold and Edith Plant and invited them to visit him at Avebury over the weekend. Robbins had given Plant a copy of his Committee of Economists memorandum, with the result that over the weekend that the committee was meeting at Stamp’s house Beveridge ‘Read Robbins memo & argued with Plant.’ The following Friday at LSE Beveridge,

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Plant and Robbins argued about tariffs over tea and Beveridge wrote some comments on Robbins’s paper (Beveridge Diary and Beveridge to LCR, 3 October 1930, Beveridge IIb30). Although Beveridge claimed he ‘like[d] and admire[d] this memorandum so much that I’ve little to say’, the little included his own willingness to consider tariff preferences for imports from food- and raw-material producing countries in exchange for preferences for British exports of manufactured goods, even though this would require a UK tariff on food imports. A few days later he drafted a letter to The Times recommending serious consideration of the offer the Canadian Prime Minister had made to the Imperial Conference (Drummond 1974, 154–5): an ‘offer to the Mother Country and to all the other parts of the Empire, a preference in the Canadian market in exchange for a like preference in theirs, based upon the addition of a ten percentum increase in prevailing general tariffs, or upon tariffs yet to be created’. Lionel was horrified. Beveridge’s diary for Thursday 9 October records ‘Violent opposition . . . by Robbins & Laski.’ Robbins asked for twenty-four hours’ delay, in which he wrote a long commentary on Beveridge’s draft with all the objections to food tariffs he could muster (Robbins 1971a, 157; Note on the Director’s Draft Letter, Controveries 1929–32, RP). The next day Beveridge had ‘Further argument with Robbins & Laski. Withdrew letter to please R.’ As Harris (1997, 297) commented, ‘when Laski and Robbins united their influence, Beveridge was forced to submit.’ After Keynes’s challenge at the Committee of Economists meeting on the Wednesday of that week, Robbins had written him a dignified letter asking to clarify the position with respect to points of procedure. Keynes had responded the next day (Robbins 1/1) that he did not know the precedents and asked Hemming to find them out. He claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that ‘as an individual, I haven’t the least objection to your writing a separate report if the authorities allow it’. Hemming on 11 October referred Robbins to the precedent of another subcommittee of the Economic Advisory Council (on proposals for a Channel Tunnel) where a member had put in a minute of dissent but also signed the main report. He hoped Robbins could follow the precedent ‘if ultimately you should feel constrained to differ from the other members of the committee’. Over the next fortnight he and Keynes did their utmost to avoid a minority report from Robbins. Robbins’s statement, ‘written in three days in a mild attack of influenza’ and in the form of a draft minority report, was ready to be circulated the day before the committee’s next meeting on Wednesday 15 October (EAC(E)45). It followed the lines of his August list of topics for the committee, but without emphasis on monetary factors where he did not disagree with Keynes. There

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was no use of Austrian trade cycle theory. He devoted the first half to the causes of depression, especially in Britain, which had been unable to adjust to adverse external changes since the war because of internal rigidities. In the second half of his draft report he analysed three groups of possible internal remedies: ‘(i) Measures designed to restore elasticity to the local economic structure (ii) Measures designed to operate through variations in the volume of investment [and] (iii) Tariffs.’ The only positive and permanently beneficial measure of type (i) the government could undertake was a reform of the unemployment insurance system which was impeding labour mobility and keeping up wages in declining industries. For (ii) and (iii) Robbins reiterated the arguments of his reply to Keynes’s questionnaire. On 15 October the committee also had a further draft by Keynes of the earlier parts of his report and amendments by Henderson and Pigou. They left their decision on how to use Robbins’s statement until the next morning’s meeting and went on considering the other drafts and redrafts. The next morning Keynes ‘stated that since their last meeting he had carefully considered the question whether it would be possible for the Committee to adopt for their Report a substantial portion of the draft prepared by Professor L. Robbins’ and suggested that almost all of the first half of Robbins’s paper should become the first part of the report (EAC(E)8th and 9th meetings). As a result the first substantive section of the final report, discussing the causes of the present depression, is essentially Robbins’s, and so, as redrafted by Henderson, is the first of those on domestic remedies, ‘Ways of restoring elasticity to the economic structure of Great Britain’. At the meeting Robbins also circulated a ‘Note on the present position of our discussions’ (Robbins 1/2 and JMK 20, 450–1) in which he tried to elicit direct answers from his fellow members on a run of questions relating to both diagnosis and remedies, ‘but in view of the material changes in the form of the draft report proposed by the Chairman and adopted by the Committee . . . he did not press for a discussion of his paper.’ Lionel wrote to Cannan, enclosing a copy of his draft report, two days later (Cannan 1030). ‘It has been a very exciting business. Keynes threatened to become very difficult at first and produced a perfectly monstrous report which I said flatly I could not sign at all. I then produced the enclosed and after a period of critique etc. it has been agreed to adopt my diagnosis & the part about restrictions & wages as the basis of an agreed document. We shall then append reservations about tariffs & public works.’ Cannan replied on 19 October (Cannan, RP) with ‘a few hasty remarks on the memorandum, such as I might make in conversation’, essentially agreeing with its lack of emphasis on monetary factors. On 10 November, having been told of the

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later developments in the committee, Cannan reported (Cannan, RP) he had overheard Harrod remarking to two other Oxford economists ‘ . . . and they’ve all gone over to protection except Robbins’. He reassured Lionel: ‘Don’t worry. By the time you’re my age all this will be quite amusing.’ The proceedings at the weekend meeting held in King’s College Cambridge were at first fairly amicable (EAC(E)10th and 11th meetings). The differences between the members were now clearly out in the open. Henderson had found himself ‘in such serious disagreement with [the] practical gist and tenor’ of Keynes’s drafts that he had circulated a long and critical memorandum (JMK 20, 452–6). Keynes’s draft report seemed to him ‘to run away, under cover of complex sophistication, from the plain moral of the situation which it diagnoses’, namely that as the world slump and falling prices were inflicted on an already uncompetitive UK economy, there was no alternative but to face up to the ‘disagreeable reactionary necessity’ of cutting wages and public expenditure. Henderson opposed public works that could not be justified on other grounds than employment creation – here he agreed with Robbins – but he was prepared to support a tariff as a temporary palliative. Pigou was not prepared to recommend a tariff even as a short-run expedient. Much of the weekend deliberations were devoted to redrafting in order to accommodate Henderson’s and Pigou’s objections and reservations. Nonetheless, on Sunday ‘At the conclusion of the discussion on Tariffs, PROFESSOR ROBBINS indicated that he would probably be unable to sign the Report prepared by his colleagues.’ When the committee met in London the following Wednesday (22 October) Robbins handed round a draft note of dissent. He asked again that higher authority should be consulted on the matter of precedents and Keynes agreed to consult the Secretary to the Cabinet. When Keynes reported the next day that Sir Maurice Hankey could not find a precedent for a minority report by one member, Robbins said that he could not sign the report and left. In the evening he dined with Dalton at the Reform Club. Dalton’s record (Pimlott ed 1986a, 123–4) muddles the chronology of the dispute but it conveys the atmosphere of that last meeting. He has had a very stiff time. . . . But he has done very well. . . . Pigou has been against all the Protectionist proposals, but won’t join Lionel in writing a Minority Report. Indeed he says that Third Degree Methods have been employed to prevent his writing such a Report. First they tried to make him believe that it would be ungentlemanly. ‘One never does that,’ said Pigou, ‘one tries to reach the greatest possible measure of agreement and then, if necessary, adds a minute of dissent on particular points.’ ‘If you want to make a row outside,’ said Pigou on another occasion, ‘can’t you find some other way of doing it.’ Then Keynes said

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that he had consulted Hankey, & that there was no precedent for a Minority Report by one member. Lionel asked, ‘What about the Sankey Report?’ Someone said, ‘Sankey never signed a Minority Report for one.’ Lionel asked for the files. They were brought, &, of course, he was right. Then they said, ‘O, a Minority Report by the Chairman is a different thing.’ Then he was referred, on Hankey’s authority, to the Channel Tunnel report, to which Lord Ebbisham added only a short dissenting minute on his fears for the Kentish fruit growers. Lionel said this seemed more important than that. Then he said that the Lord Chancellor (Sankey) had expressed the view that a Minority Report was perfectly in order. Hemming, Hankey’s second in command, wrote on a piece of paper ‘I know the Lord Chancellor didn’t think much of them.’ Hemming, looking a year or two older, had previously tried to bully Lionel in a corner. Lionel said he would be quite willing to refer the question to the P.M. or to the Cabinet. But they said there was no precedent for this. In the end he said he would send in a short Minority Report and if they didn’t print it he would send it direct to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He then left the room. Pigou buried his face in his hands; the others said goodbye.

Robbins’s own notes on the proceedings are scathing about Pigou: ‘Lofty old woman. Could not keep papers in order determined to be good committee man. Provided it was on record that Professor Pigou had recorded his dissent who cared if the vulgar were swayed by the opposing arguments.’ Stamp he thought a ‘big generous vital creature But out of his depth’ on economictheoretical issues: ‘Well Maynard it’s an idea – if you are willing to sponsor it I am agreable.’ Henderson was ‘Alert sensitive sensible. Occasionally he dreamt a nightmare. . . . One could differ but . . . could never fail to regard his opinions with respect.’ As for Keynes, ‘Having broken with Free Trade [he was] determined to villify it. One could not dislike him. One could only wish that Providence had combined such a noble brain with a temperament less mercurial.’ Lionel was less charitable to Keynes when he reported the outcome to Cannan on 5 November (Cannan 1030): The committee ended in a violent quarrel. Keynes and Stamp insisted on the most absurd Protectionist measures – . . . Pigou a gentleman to the last was content to record his dissent in parentheses. But I wouldn’t sign the thing at all, although I had written fully half of it, . . . Keynes cut up very rough about this, attempted to suppress my dissent altogether, then tucked it away behind a statistical appendix, and only consented to publish it as it stands when I had refused to meet him any further save in the presence of a witness and had declared point blank that if he altered a word of what I had written I would make a public shindig about the whole thing.

After Lionel walked out of the last meeting Hemming tried again to find a compromise which would permit Robbins to sign the report. He

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asked Henderson to try to persuade him (JMK 20, 463–6). Lionel held out: his note of his reasons for not signing appeared as a separate ‘Report by Professor L. Robbins’ before the statistical tables prepared by Colin Clark (Howson and Winch 1977, 229–30). When Lionel wrote to Henderson after their telephone conversation Henderson explained in his reply on 28 October (Robbins 1/1): ‘At any rate, when we [Henderson and Hemming] put the point to him [Keynes] that the only satisfactory solution was to waive the question of undesirable precedents & call your thing a Report, with appropriate changes in the introductory paragraph, he agreed quite readily. . . . Even while I was speaking to you I became quite clear that what has now been done was the best way out, & I should have thought Keynes very unreasonable if he had not agreed to it; but I couldn’t say so to you, until I’d discussed it with Hemming.’ Henderson added: ‘For the rest, I was stupid in not realizing until a remark of yours on Wednesday last [22nd] that the tariff issue was the one thing that you regarded as vital, . . . Having regard to that, I don’t think your attitude in the Cee was in the least unreasonable; & I sincerely respect you for the fight you put up for it.’ After its first six sections, with which Lionel had little disagreement, the report of the Committee of Economists reviewed possible ways to increase employment in Britain, emphasizing the difficulties of most of them, except, as Lionel feared, tariffs. In his own report he emphasized that it was here that he was ‘in complete disagreement with the majority of my colleagues’ on the committee. The majority report gave a misleading impression of professional economic opinion on free trade versus protection. In his brief statement he mentioned the objections that a tariff could not increase employment in the export industries and that it was likely neither to be temporary nor immune from political abuse. The report (EAC(H)127) is dated 24 October 1930, the day after the final meeting. That evening Lionel dined at the Reform Club again, this time with Beveridge, Plant, Walter Layton and Sir Arthur Salter, in order, according to Beveridge, ‘to talk Tariffs’. Beveridge suggested they form a committee of economists to prepare and publish a study of the whole tariff issue; the next day he was writing ‘heads of [a] Tariff Book’. When the group met again on 29 October for dinner at LSE it also included Benham, Bowley, Clay, Gregory, Hicks, Robertson and Schwartz. They agreed to produce a book, whose introduction, to be signed by those present and perhaps some others, ‘should include a statement of faith in Free Trade and an indication of general agreements with the contents of the book’. Beveridge would write the book on the basis of material supplied by the other members of the group. The committee met each Friday evening over dinner in the

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director’s room at the School and intended to publish the book early in the new year. If there were to be a sudden general election before then they might publish the introduction as a free trade manifesto, and they began to consider and canvass possible signatories, including Cannan and Pigou.8 In the following months Lionel spoke out often against protection. On 11 November 1930 he gave a paper at the London Economic Club on ‘The new arguments for protection’, afterwards sending it to E.T. Scott, who provided useful criticism (notice of meeting in LSE 376, BLPES; Scott to LCR, 24 November 1930, LCR to Scott, 25 February 1931, Manchester Guardian A/R34/156). In the published version (1931a) he dealt first with various common misconceptions of the fundamental argument for free trade (which is that it permits the maximum territorial division of labour) and of the admitted exceptions (notably ‘infant industries’ where the desirable intervention is not necessarily a tariff). He turned then to the ‘new arguments’ for a tariff as a means to cure present unemployment, against which he utilized all the arguments he had been using in the last few weeks. He added a separate section on ‘the subtler form of these arguments’ found in Keynes’s Treatise which he had tried to tackle in his reply to Keynes’s questionnaire to his Committee of Economists. On 2–4 January 1931 Robbins attended, probably for the first time, the annual conference of the Association of University Teachers of Economics, held this year at University College Oxford. (The first conference was held in January 1924 – and it and later conferences were reported in the Economic Journal – but the 1931 conference is the first at which Beveridge, a regular attender, mentions Robbins’s presence in his diary.) According to the report of this meeting (Marquand 1931), ‘The Conference was very well attended and excellent discussions took place. . . . On Saturday, Mr H.D. Henderson explained his attitude to proposals for imposing a moderate tariff upon imports into Great Britain. Professor L.C. Robbins opened a discussion which was very lively and lasted for several hours [until 3 p.m. according to Beveridge]. It was quite clear that only a very small minority favoured the tariff proposal.’ The Michaelmas term had ended with the lectures by Viner, which were a great success. Undergraduates such as B.K. Nehru and Aubrey Jones found them fascinating (Abse ed 1977, 25 and 38): ‘The visitor whom I most vividly recall,’ wrote the latter, ‘was Jacob Viner, of Chicago. . . . The subject of his lectures, given in the theatre off the main foyer which was then as it still is, 8

Beveridge Diary; Note on private meeting held at the L.S.E. on 29th October 1930, and notes of later meetings in COLL MISC 11/3; LCR to Cannan, 10 November 1930, Cannan 1030; Beveridge to Robertson, 11 November 1930, COLL MISC 11/1.

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was International Trade. What his message was I do not remember. There floats through my memory only the figure – an enormous head and brow, almost too large for the body, surmounted by a mane of black hair.’ On another second year undergraduate, Abba Lerner, the lectures had yet more impact: picking up on a diagram used by Viner (1937, 521) he wrote a paper on ‘The diagrammatic representation of cost conditions in international trade’, for which he gained the Hugh Lewis Essay Prize and his first journal article (1932) (Bloomfield 1992, 2062; Professorial Council 4 May 1932). Lionel suggested to Beveridge that Viner might be offered the Tooke chair; when Beveridge rose to the bait and wrote Viner on 3 February (Beveridge IIb63) Lionel told Viner that he ‘was pleased as a schoolboy’ for he could ‘not conceive of any happier academic prospect of having you permanently with us’. He also told Viner on 6 February (Viner 22–14) that Iris wanted the Viners to come and live near them in Hampstead Garden Suburb; Frances replied through her husband on 11 February that she thought so too (Viner and Knight, RP). Lionel learned a little of the fate of the Committee of Economists Report when Hemming wrote to him on 3 January 1931 (Robbins 1/1): ‘The discussions of our Committee’s Report have, I think, shown very clearly that the work its preparation caused for you and the other members was well worth while. Incidentally some of the things that all the Committee thought incontrovertible have been regarded by some people as highly controversial. In particular the section in the opening part of the Report that you drafted on monopolistic restrictions and other internal rigidities has been the cause of lively discussions.’ Hemming did not mention that the Economic Advisory Council had so far considered only the first half of the report, nor that a Cabinet Committee on Trade Policy had found the report ‘a disappointing document’ with ‘no practical propositions to which immediate effect could be given’. Its recommendations could cut no ice with a powerful Chancellor of the Exchequer who was a convinced free trader: the Chancellor, chairing the Cabinet committee, suggested ‘no good would come of a discussion of the conclusions . . . on wage reductions and tariffs’ (Howson and Winch 1977, 73–9). Dalton had already told Robbins of Snowden’s immediate reaction to the report on 31 October (Robbins 1/1): ‘He spoke with withering scorn of Keynes & Stamp. Of you he said “He has written a most trenchant rejoinder.”’ In the first week of the Lent term Robbins received a letter from Hayek about his forthcoming visit to London. He would be in London only a few days as he wanted to go to Edinburgh on a book-hunting expedition and perhaps visit Gregory, who was teaching at the University of Manchester

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while Clay was an adviser at the Bank of England. When Hayek arrived in England on 22 January he wrote again from Cambridge, where he was staying with Robertson in Trinity and giving a paper to the Marshall Society. He had been invited to attend Keynes’s Monday Club and wanted to accept as he wanted to ‘fight Keynes’ on the subject of his recent broadcast (‘Saving and spending’, JMK 9, 135–41), which had ‘horrified’ him. He would, therefore, arrive in London the next day, go first to his hotel and then call in at the School (Hayek to LCR, 11 and 23 January 1931, Hayek, RP). On Tuesday 27 January the door of Robbins’s office ‘open[ed] to admit the tall, powerful, reserved figure which announced itself quietly and firmly as “Hayek”’ (Robbins 1971a, 127). The two men hit it off immediately. ‘We at once understood each other’, recalled Hayek (1994, 77). They had much in common: they were the same age, had both served as artillery officers in 1917–18 (Hayek like Dalton on the Italian front but of course on the other side), had both been attracted to socialism before their serious study of economics and cured of the attraction by reading Mises. They both believed the Austrian analysis of capital and interest held out the best hope for understanding business cycles and were suspicious of Keynes’s policy proposals for reducing unemployment. They were both interested in the history of their subject and avid book collectors. When Hayek returned to Vienna after his visit to Edinburgh, he wrote Robbins on 14 February (Hayek, RP) that the ‘all-too-short days in London’ had been ‘some of the happiest I had for a long while’ and that he had never before received so much encouragement for his work. He hoped the Robbinses would spend their summer holidays in the Austrian Alps so that they could meet again. (Incidentally he thought the meeting of younger economists he had been contemplating the previous summer would have to be postponed until 1932.) The lectures on ‘Prices and Production’ were given on four evenings at 5 p.m., Tuesday to Friday 27–30 January. Jack Gilbert recalled (Shehadi Transcripts), ‘The hall was crowded . . . with students and staff. Everybody considered it a great event.’ In spite of Hayek’s halting delivery they were exciting and memorable and talked about and argued over at the School for months (Hicks 1982, 6). Ronald Coase (1994, 19), then a second year BCom student, thought they were ‘undoubtedly the most successful set of public lectures given at LSE during my time there’, even surpassing Viner’s. Hayek later wrote frankly (1994, 77–8): ‘The invitation reached me when I had for the first time a clear picture of this theory [of business cycles] but had not yet gone into all the complicated details. If I had progressed in working out an elaborate treatise, I would have encountered any number of

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complications. . . . Since I was not yet aware of the difficulties, I gave these incredibly successful lectures.’ Lionel was captivated by the first lecture, recalling on its fiftieth anniversary (ms Hayek 27.1.81, University & School Occasions Speeches etc, RP): ‘It was a historical introduction to the main subject of the course . . . and it was a conspicuous example of the historical scholarship which has always been one of the most outstanding features of our lecturers’ work.’ The history of economic thought had always been important at LSE, but ‘here were new perspectives’. In discussing the influence of money on prices, ‘our guest seemed to have the rare gift of gazing at bodies of apparently well known theories and then speaking of them in a way which cast them in an entirely new light.’ As for the subsequent lectures on Hayek’s own theory, their appeal can be judged from Lionel’s preface to the published version (1931b, xi–xii): ‘I can only say for profound theoretical insight and power to open up totally new horizons, I know only one work . . . published in English since the war with which they can be compared – Mr Dennis Robertson’s Banking Policy and the Price Level [1926].’ As for the practical implications, it seemed ‘to fit certain facts of the American slump better than any other explanation I know’. He did not think it was ‘altogether an accident that the Austrian Institut f¨ur Konjunkturforschung . . . was one of the very few bodies of its kind which, in the spring of 1929, predicted a setback in America with injurious repercussions on European conditions’. At the same time – as he told Beveridge on 2 February (Beveridge IIb30) – ‘what with Hayek’s visit and seven lectures and two classes and one seminar and four Committees, this [last] week has not been easy.’ The following week, and indeed the rest of the term, was not much easier. He and Plant wrote a memorandum on research in applied economics in preparation for a visit by representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation, who interviewed them at the end of the week after Hayek’s visit.9 The following week Professor Charles Rist of Paris was in London so there was a lunch at the School for him (Beveridge to Rist, 3 February 1931, Beveridge IIb63). Then the League of Nations Union held a two-day conference at LSE on Wages and Unemployment in which Robbins acted as the discussant of one of the sessions (programme in LNU 7/8, BLPES). There were meetings with Plant and Beveridge and others over the teaching of business administration (see 9

Beveridge to John van Sickle, 19 January 1931, Beveridge IIb63. LSE received large grants for both buildings and research from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial in the 1920s and was still the main European recipient of institutional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation after 1929 (Bulmer and Bulmer 1981; Craver 1986). The minutes of the School’s Rockefeller Research Fund Committee are in LSE MINUTES 12.

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Chapter 8). On top of all this Lionel was revising Hayek’s lectures for publication. He had a research assistant (his former student Leslie Gollop who worked for him in 1930–2), but nonetheless Hayek was ‘greatly horrified’ on 24 February when he realized how much time Robbins was spending on the manuscript – which Lionel described, though not to Hayek, as ‘very inchoate notes’ (Rockefeller Research Fund Committee 3 December 1930, 15 July and 16 December 1931). Hayek meanwhile was trying to review Keynes’s Treatise for Economica at Robbins’s request. As he told Robbins on 9 April (Hayek, RP), he found it ‘difficult to find the right “ton” if one does so completely disagree with a person whom one does at the same time esteem very highly’. He was also distracted by the international financial crisis which began with the collapse of the leading Viennese bank, the Kredit-Anstalt, in May. He did not achieve the right tone in his long review article (1931c and 1932): Keynes reacted badly to the first part by attacking Prices and Production in his review (1931) as ‘one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read’. Hayek was even more disappointed by Keynes’s reaction to the second part: Keynes told him on 29 March 1932 that he would probably not bother to reply because he had now changed his mind about the Treatise (JMK 13, 266). Keynes came out into the open with his tariff proposals in the New Statesman and Nation on 7 March 1931 (JMK 9, 231–8). The editor, Kingsley Martin, asked Robbins to reply. Lionel used several arguments in his reply on 14 March (1931b): Keynes had overestimated the probable yield of a tariff; a tariff would stimulate the wrong industries; small tariffs always grow and are unlikely to be temporary; there were other ways to raise revenue to deal with the budgetary problem and other ways to tackle high unemployment. He reminded readers of Keynes’s earlier stance on protection and deplored his abandonment of his previous ‘service of high and worthy ideals’: it was ‘a tragedy that he who shattered the moral foundations of the Treaty of Versailles should now turn his magnificent gifts to the service of the mean and petty devices of economic nationalism’. Lionel bristled when Martin wrote, twenty years later, in his memoir of Laski (1953, 79) that ‘Liberal stalwarts, like Lionel Robbins, were driven by fury [by Keynes’s tariff proposal], and indeed roundly accused Keynes of treachery to his profession’. Martin responded to Lionel on 27 January 1953 that he had heard the controversy from both sides: The tenor of the talk on Maynard [Keynes] at that time was that as an economist he was betraying his professional duty in abandoning the sacred principle of free trade for political reasons. . . . I remember that, on one occasion you said that Maynard

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was, after all, not as young as he used to be; perhaps, then, he should be forgiven on that account. Maynard, on the other hand, told me after one argument with you, that he really thought you were slightly off your head! (New Statesman 16/R, University of Sussex).

At the time, when Keynes replied in the New Statesman to Robbins and to a spate of critical letters (JMK 20, 493–7), he admitted he had overestimated the yield of a tariff and accepted Lionel’s estimate. He was also ‘more nearly touched’ by Robbins’s contention that a temporary tariff would turn out to be permanent, except that he thought that risk worth taking in present circumstances. He ended with Robbins’s ‘taunt’, defending himself on the ground that he was trying to avoid the even more disastrous consequences for international relations that a process of competitive international wage cutting would bring in its train. Keynes’s public declaration caused problems for the Beveridge tariff book. The intention had been to deliver the manuscript to its publishers by 15 April but now it was necessary to include a ‘considerable discussion of the present situation and of the inferences which distinguished economists like Mr. Keynes and Sir Josiah Stamp have drawn from it’. Beveridge and Robbins agreed to delay publication until September, which meant final delivery to Longmans by the end of July and another meeting of the group as soon as possible. Robbins drafted ‘Anti-Keynes’, a list of points on which to attack his tariff proposals in the book (Tariff Book – Progress Report by Chairman, April 1931, Beveridge to Layton et al, 25 April 1931, LCR ms notes, COLL MISC 11/3). He also publicly attacked the government import boards for foodstuffs which G.D.H. Cole and others in the Labour Party had been advocating as an alternative to tariffs. As well as objecting to the implicit subsidy to agriculture, he was not in favour of state trading, doubting its efficiency and fearing its consequences for international relations. He urged E.F. Wise, Labour MP for Leicester, to return to the internationalism of Karl Marx (Wise 1931a; Robbins 1931c). In his two signed contributions to Beveridge’s tariff book he attacked agricultural protection and (with Schwartz) tariffs for revenue (Robbins 1931d,e). Hayek first read Keynes’s New Statesman article and Robbins’s reply in their German translations in the Hamburg magazine Wirtschaftsdienst on 6 and 13 March, and told Robbins of his sympathy in his letter of 9 April. Hayek was replying to a letter from Robbins which had brought a completely unexpected enquiry: would he be interested in spending the next academic year as a visiting professor at LSE? He would accept without thinking if he were unmarried but he did not want to leave his wife and small daughter

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for nine months and he had to consider the running of the Institute in his absence (although he thought Oskar Morgenstern could take charge). Viner had not accepted the Tooke chair. He told Robbins on 11 February (Viner and Knight, RP) that he had been ‘really . . . very strongly attracted to London – the city itself, the School, and the friends I have on the Staff ’ and on 16 February (Viner 22–14) that he and his wife were thinking of visiting again from Geneva at Easter to find out more about the cost of living in London when the University of Chicago offered him a substantial improvement in salary and working conditions. Lionel was disappointed but admitted on 19 February (Viner 22–14) ‘if I were in your position I should do the same.’ It was Beveridge who then came up with the idea of offering Hayek a visiting professorship: ‘Beveridge, who on the whole was antipathetic to theoretical speculation in economics, said to me “These lectures of Hayek’s seem to have been a great sensation: would you like me to approach him, to see if he would take the vacant Tooke chair[?”] I could scarcely wait to tell him to do so at once. But, being a constitutional man, wait I did until I had consulted the relevant colleagues’ (ms Hayek 27.1.81, RP). After Hayek responded favourably to Robbins’s enquiry, Beveridge sent the official letter of invitation on 27 April (Beveridge IIb63). On 19 May he reported to the Emergency Committee that he had ‘already, on the recommendation of Professor Robbins and Professor Gregory, invited Dr. Hayek . . . to spend next session at the School as full-time Visiting Professor, and he has agreed for two terms certainly, and possibly for three’. Beveridge explained that Hayek ‘will take the place of the permanent additional professor of economics (ultimately to be called the Tooke Professor)’, in line with the decision a year earlier to use the Tooke funds for visiting professors until they found a suitable permanent occupant. Hayek had written Robbins two weeks earlier telling him that he had accepted and now sought his advice on accommodation for himself and his family (Hayek, RP). The Summer term was somewhat quieter for Lionel than the previous two, but it was not uneventful. His best students included the Albanian Rifat Tirana, who got a First in the summer and went on to work for the Financial Section of the League of Nations, Samuel Goldman, Marian Bowley and Victor Edelberg (of whom more later [Chapter 9]). As usual for LSE there were foreign visitors, including William Rappard, the director of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, for four public lectures in May. Lionel continued his efforts to make continental European economics better known in England by proposing a series of translations of the leading German, Scandinavian and Italian works in economics to

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be published under LSE auspices. The lack of translations was a problem for advanced students as well as for professional economists, because ‘In certain branches of the subject, notably the theory of money continuous consultation of certain foreign texts is . . . almost indispensible’ and ‘with the rapid growth of a really important body of modern economic literature in foreign languages’ the problem was becoming increasingly urgent. During the Easter vacation he had begun tentative negotiations with Routledge the publishers (LCR, ‘Suggested publication of Economics translations’, Supplementary Agenda for Emergency Committee 30 April 1931). The Emergency Committee approved on 30 April but in the Professorial Council on 6 May there was ‘considerable discussion’ over the question of a publisher and a subcommittee had to be appointed. Before the subcommittee met, however, Lionel fell ill, with chickenpox, just after the Whitsun long weekend which he and Iris had spent with Beveridge at Avebury. Quarantined at home for two weeks, he was sorry to miss ‘the various important committees which will be sitting & the opportunity of mothering my poor third year students’ who were taking finals in three weeks’ time. He promised to send Beveridge his comments on two draft chapters for the free trade book and on matters he had wished to raise in the committees (LCR to Beveridge, nd, LCR Personal File A, LSE). As Clay had recently had mumps, Robertson wrote on 9 June that he thought Robbins’s chickenpox ‘suggested a dangerous liability of Free Trade Economists to infantile diseases’ and Keynes, with whom Robbins had resumed friendly relations, commented on 29 May that ‘If it had been German Measles I should have said it was the result of Free Trade!’ (Cambridge, RP) Hayek, however, writing to Robbins on 11 June (Hayek, RP) noted that ‘from what I saw when in London and from what Kaldor tells me you seem to have been so overworked that you were likely to catch any infection.’ Plant stood in for Lionel at the School meetings. When the Publications Subcommittee met on 3 June Plant promised he and Robbins would draw up a list of possible translations of major economic works to be submitted to the publishers (Cape) recommended by Eileen Power and that they would ensure that ‘the first two volumes would be carefully selected as works likely to sell, in order to give a good initial impetus to the series’ (Professorial Council 10 June 1931). The first two translations to be published, both in 1934, were of Mises’s Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel and Wicksell’s Vorlesungen, by Cape and Routledge respectively. Lionel was obliged to miss the Liberal Free Trade Conference on 29 May, at which he had been going to give a paper on import boards (The Times, 28 May 1931). But there were compensations in being at home. He was able to send material

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for the tariff book to Beveridge and to correspond with Robertson about that and the latest articles about the transfer problem in the Zeitschrift f¨ur National¨okonomie (Ohlin 1930; Haberler 1931). Robertson asked him on 9 June to read the draft of his commentary on Keynes’s Treatise (Cambridge, RP). Most importantly, because it influenced his Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932a), he read a paper Nathan Isaacs gave to the Aristotelian Society on 1 June (1931). He commented on it at length, Nathan replied at even greater length and Lionel was able to reply to the reply before he returned to the School on 16 June (N & S Drafts & Notes, RP; see Chapter 8). The Summer term ended ten days later. Hayek had been hoping Robbins would attend a meeting of the Economic Research Institute in Geneva in July but Iris fell ill (perhaps also with the chickenpox). In London in July Lionel was trying to work on his book, which was based on the lectures on the nature and significance of economics he had given in the Summer term, but he had to concern himself with the tariff book which had made slow progress. When Robbins wrote to E.F. Wise on 17 July (Controversies 1929–32, RP) – in response to Wise’s reply (1931b) to his criticisms of import boards – he told him he would not publish a reply as he did not want to be a bore and ‘we have in preparation other little bombs which may be even more effective when they are duly tossed over’. Lionel spent a couple of days with Beveridge at Avebury in order to try and finish the tariff book. Afterwards he reported to Robertson on 29 July (COLL MISC 11/1): ‘I think that everything is satisfactorily in train and it should not take more than a couple of weeks to complete what further alterations and further writing there remains to be done.’ As most of the committee would be away in the vacation it had been decided that these final changes could be approved by Robertson, Beveridge, Plant and Robbins alone. Robertson was about to vacation in Austria; the Robbinses departed at the beginning of August for a seaside holiday with the children at Ste Marguerite sur Mer near Dieppe, France, intending to stay until the end of the month. There Lionel continued to work on his own book (outline dated 16 August in N & S Drafts & Notes, RP). On 17 August he wrote to his father. The weather had been dreadful: ‘We have had five days which might be described as fine up to now & this morning . . . it is raining cats & dogs again. Still I don’t want to complain too much. The air is good. The quiet is refreshing and one could not ask for better food or attention than we get from the proprietress of the little wayside caf´e at which we are staying.’ He went on to comment on the political and financial crisis in England that had been reported in the newspapers.

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The crisis had been brewing for some months. The international financial crisis which had begun in Austria had spread immediately to Germany. After the Darmstadter Bank failed and the entire German banking system closed in mid-July, attention shifted to Britain, one of Germany’s largest creditors, which was by now suffering from an adverse balance of payments and serious budgetary difficulties. The publication at the same time of the report of the Macmillan Committee which revealed for the first time the volume of London’s short-term liabilities also raised doubts that the UK could stay on the gold standard if foreign investors were to withdraw their funds. The Bank of England raised the Bank Rate three times in July and obtained credits from the Bank of France and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the beginning of August, but by another piece of bad timing the May Committee on National Expenditure, which the government had appointed in February, reported – forecasting a £120m budget deficit for the next financial year and recommending £97m cuts in public expenditure. The Prime Minister and Cabinet ministers on holiday returned to London as a matter of urgency. Lionel was at first rather smug: ‘The situation has not fundamentally changed. The only thing that has happened is that people have become alive to it. I have been talking about a possible flight of sterling for two years. Now that it has happened it is rather amusing to think of the utter scepticism with which one’s predictions were received even by one’s friends.’ Nonetheless he was worried: the panic measures which were likely to be taken to ‘save the pound’ probably would not be enough to remedy the ‘fundamental’ problems of the dole and inflexible wages. ‘And just at a time when economists should be most united you have people like Keynes urging the maintenance of wages & lavish expenditure on all manner of useless public works.’ He was also interested in the possible political repercussions: ‘Will not even this moderate effort to set things right split the Labour Party hopelessly? And if so what of the relations between the right wing Labour people & the Liberals? The prospect of amalgamation is not one which fills me with any enthusiasm.’ Over the next week (19–23 August) ministers argued desperately over the recommended ‘economies’ in public expenditure; they finally split irretrievably over a reduction in unemployment benefit which they were advised was necessary to obtain loans (to the government) from the United States and from France. Beveridge ‘Working at [the tariff] book all morning’ on 24 August was telephoned at Avebury by his secretary that the Labour government had resigned and MacDonald had formed a ‘national government’. As his diary also records, Beveridge returned to

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London that night; the next day he ‘Saw Plant, Book clearly urgent. Arranged him to stay with him Saturday & talk. Robbins to return.’ On Saturday (28 August) Beveridge and Plant ‘Read Chapters to each other. Walked on [Hampstead] Heath – crisis talk etc.’ On Sunday they ‘Put “finishing touches” to Tariffs up to about 4.’ The Preface to the book is indeed dated August 1931. The next day Beveridge left for Germany and Austria for two weeks. Robbins, back from France, held the fort in London in his absence, delivering the manuscript to the publishers on 1 September. On 2 September he called on Dalton, now out of government, when they agreed Dalton would return to teach at LSE in January. They talked of the crisis: Dalton (Diaries Vol 14a) found Robbins ‘curiously unhelpful, though he would like, I think, to be otherwise. Sceptical about possibility of raising the price level, or of mobilising foreign securities, or of development schemes, electrification etc. A prisoner, I feel, of his own subtle, but still incomplete, economic analysis. But he is inclined to think, the only ray of hope he can shed, that there may be an American revival in the spring, with good repercussions here.’ The same day Robertson wrote from Austria that he did not think he would be able to sign even the preface to the tariff book. On receiving it Robbins wired Beveridge suggesting he talk to Robertson in Vienna, but Beveridge missed him there. Writing to Robbins from Cambridge on 11 September (Cambridge, RP), Robertson admitted he had ‘lost interest in the book, which I think has missed the ’bus.’ As he explained, ‘If all sensible methods of stimulating trade and employment – such as afforestation, building, reduction of insurance-taxes on industry – have to be slowed down or reversed because of the effect on National Finance: and if we have got to be Puritan about National finance because (a) our current balance of payments is in a mess and (b) our short term capital balance of payments is in an even worse mess, – then I suspect that all the evils of Protection, which I don’t cease to feel, are becoming as irrelevant to the situation as the evils of inequality of wealth. And if we publish a book about them as though it were a practical contribution to urgent problems, we shall be flapping our wings as ineffectively as any T.U.C. man calling for “mobilisation of foreign investment” or “equality of sacrifice”.’ Robbins replied on 17 September that he was not altogether surprised at Robertson’s stance but he was disappointed – ‘I feel rather miserable about the whole business because I feel that in so many ways you and I were closer together than either of us were to many of the others’ – and tried to persuade Robertson to change his mind (COLL MISC 11/1).

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In the meantime the other members of the group, mustered by Robbins, had corrected the galley proofs in which they made few changes of substance. Longmans had agreed that an epilogue could be rushed through at the last minute and the group determined to make a decision on this when Beveridge returned. As Robbins briefed Beveridge (Sunday [13 September], Beveridge IIb29): I think it is an extremely difficult question to decide whether there should be an epilogue at all. Any pronouncement of this sort is necessarily to some extent sub specie aeternitates & we can’t be too contemporaneous. As an example of the difficulties of trying to be up to date – I rewrote the revenue tariff chapter in the light of your criticisms, and in the course of the rewriting, at Plant’s suggestion, I introduced more reference to the present Budgetary situation. By the time the galleys were back, I had to alter the emphasis. The main argument against the Epilogue, however, is that it would have to be so explicit on the wage issue that from the point of view of the people we wish to convince the pill might become altogether too bitter. . . . Personally I don’t mind saying this because I am convinced that without flexibility capitalism or any other progressive form of society cannot live & the present crisis is for me a gigantic object lesson in the principles I have been teaching & writing for years. But I can conceive that Cannan’s version of inter arma silent leges – ‘In time of war it is sometimes well to be silent about economic laws’ may be applicable here. It may be well that people should come to value the advantages of free trade before they fully realize its apparent disadvantages – I don’t know. . . . I think we should make up our minds about the Epilogue by say Thursday [17 September] at the latest.

On Sunday evening 20 September it was announced that the UK would leave the gold standard the next day. Hayek heard the news in Paris on his way to take up his appointment at LSE (Hayek 1994, 78). Beveridge wrote the final version of the epilogue and sent it to the still reluctant Robertson on 21 September (COLL MISC 11/1). A week later he finally sent the printers the corrected proofs together with the epilogue and a new appendix on the gold standard (Beveridge IIb63). When the book appeared in October Beveridge held a dinner for all those involved in its preparation ‘including one or two who for various reasons did not finally sign the Preface’ (invitation in Beveridge IIb63). Robbins himself now wished the book had never been commenced: he told Viner on 24 February 1932 (Viner 22–14) to ‘note that this child only acknowledges responsibility for the chapter he signed. Now it is all over I think it was a pity that we ever started. . . . Co-operative undertakings are the devil.’

EIGHT

Fritz and Lionel

When the LSE Michaelmas term 1931 opened on 5 October, Lionel Robbins had, for the coming year, a professorial colleague in economics. Friedrich Hayek rented a house for his family in Constable Close in Hampstead Garden Suburb near the Robbinses and the Plants. The two men became close friends, soon Fritz and Lionel to each other. Living near Robbins was important to Hayek (Shehadi Transcripts, BLPES): ‘When there was a problem, even if writing books . . . I was a great book collector at that time, but on particular things if I didn’t have a book I would walk over to Robbins and take it out of his library. . . . We were really a circle of close personal friends who got on extremely well together. . . . I could never have had the influence I did if it hadn’t been for Robbins.’ Hayek agreed to give the lectures on the Principles of Currency usually given by Gregory, who was still at Manchester. He told Robbins on 29 May that he wished also ‘to do something under the title Theory of Production, with special reference to capital, interest and fluctuations’ but preferably not as formal lectures (Hayek, RP). Since Robbins had already asked Hayek to join him in running the seminar he suggested that, as the Calendar duly announced, ‘During the session 1931–32 the seminar will be chiefly conducted by Dr. Hayek and will be devoted to informal discussions of the Theory of Production, with special reference to Capital and Interest.’ Hayek was very impressed with the junior staff members of the seminar, telling Mises: ‘There is much opportunity for me to learn, and I am hindered in doing so only because Robbins presented me as an eminent authority . . . ’ (H¨ulsmann 2007, 635). He also joined Robbins and Plant in a joint course for third year undergraduates on Problems of Applied Economics intended ‘to deal from the point of view of general Economic theory’ with current

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policy issues (including protection).1 Robbins continued to give his Elements lectures to first year students and the Principles lectures to the economics specialists. In the Summer term he repeated his short course on the Nature and Significance of Economics. The offerings in both economic theory and applied economics were now extensive. In addition to the contributions of Whale and Benham, in the areas of money and international trade, and Schwartz in public finance, Batson, back from Heidelberg, took over the Schools of Economic Theory lectures Robbins had given in 1929/30 and 1930/1, Hicks lectured on Problems of Monopoly and Economics of Disequilibrium as well as Problems of Industrial Relations, and Allen provided an Introduction to Mathematical Economics for third year undergraduates and graduate students. The assistants who helped their senior colleagues with classes included Richard Sayers, from Cambridge, in banking and Frank Pakenham, Lionel’s former pupil at New College, in economics. Evan Durbin was promoted to assistant lecturer in 1931. In 1931/2 he took over The Theory of Interest from Allen in the Lent term and repeated his lectures on Underconsumption Theories in the Summer term. For the Michaelmas term Robbins asked him – or rather, as Durbin complained to Plant on 7 August (Plant 448), ‘ordered [him] – quietly and politely but no less firmly’ – to give four lectures on the economics of depreciation to third year BCom and BSc(Econ) students. Plant took pity on him, providing Durbin with a syllabus and later, after the lectures had been postponed to the Summer term, suggesting that one of the assistants in Commerce, Ronald Fowler, give the course instead. Durbin was finding Lionel an autocratic head of the department, grumbling to Plant on 13 August (Plant 448) that ‘He is the oily boob who wants to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and who really thinks he can disguise his luke warm autocratic will under a veneer of Oxford politeness – a tin fist in an artificial silk gauntlet.’ But Durbin and Robbins were now on first-name terms and when Lionel suggested Evan’s academic work was slipping because he was devoting too much time to work for the Labour Party, he could defend himself with spirit. ‘I imagine,’ he wrote Lionel on 23 March 1932 (Durbin 8/14), ‘that you feel that I am doing too much apart from economics, and that I have not sloughed off, as you hoped I would, a Salvesian lack of scholarship.’ On the first charge he pointed out that he had been spending far more time on 1

LCR’s notes for this course, offered in each of the next four years, include material on the gold standard 1920–31, wages and unemployment, trade under flexible exchange rates, agrarian policy, preferential duties, quota schemes and government buying boards for agricultural produce (Applied Economics, RP).

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economics, especially on the theory of money and interest, than on political business. He was working closely with three colleagues outside the School, Hugh Gaitskell, now a lecturer in political economy at UCL, and Maurice Allen and James Meade in Oxford, and ‘It was my preliminary struggle with Mises in German, and mastering the voluminous and complicated Memoranda that Meade and Maurice Allen have sent me, that has kept my nose to the grindstone. . . . I have never worked harder, at economics, than I have in the last five months.’ On the second charge he admitted he did not think he would ever come up to Lionel’s standards of scholarship and have the whole literature of his subject at his fingertips, but he was after all learning German in order to be able to read Mises et al. Lionel did not reply to his letter (Evan had said he should not) but he did not assign the interest lectures to Durbin again, allowing him to devote more time to his work on underconsumption theories. When Durbin completed his book, Purchasing Power and Trade Depression (1933), he thanked Gaitskell, Robbins and Hayek for their help and dedicated the book to Lionel. Joseph Schumpeter, in his last year at the University of Bonn, lectured at LSE as well as in Cambridge and Oxford in October (Allen 1991a, 280). Otherwise the term was dominated by political events. When the National Government formed in haste in August 1931 won a landslide victory in a general election on 27 October, few doubted it would introduce a tariff in spite of the few free-traders remaining in the Cabinet, especially when Neville Chamberlain replaced Philip Snowden as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In its first month the new government introduced two temporary duties and promised to introduce a quota for imports of wheat. The NFU, whose position for the general election had been that if there were protection for industry there must also be protection for agriculture, welcomed the promise and appointed Lionel’s father to a Wheat Quota Committee: Robbins, with one other Council member, indicated he wished to resign from the Council and all committees and could not be dissuaded by the president.2 In February 1932 Chamberlain introduced an Import Duties bill, which imposed a general 10 per cent duty on all goods except basic foodstuffs, raw materials and goods already subject to duty, and provided for an independent advisory committee to recommend higher duties for specific products. The subsequent Wheat Act introduced a levy-subsidy scheme, with deficiency payments on the lines of the abandoned Agriculture Act 1920 but with the cost of the subsidy covered by a levy on all wheat 2

Council 15 October and 15 December, Wheat Quota Subcommittee 14 December 1931, NFU AD1/13; General Purposes Committee 20 January, Council 21 January and 18 February 1932, NFU AD1/14.

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flour, home-milled and imported. Under the Ottawa Agreements Act later the same year duties were imposed on certain food imports from foreign countries and quotas on meat imports from Empire countries (Murray 1955, 29–33; Whetham 1978, 243–4). There was also the question of the currency. After 21 September 1931 the pound had quickly fallen to US $3.40 from $4.86; although it soon recovered it fell back again in November and settled around $3.40 by the end of the year. When Britain left the gold standard Lionel wrote to the editor of the Manchester Guardian on 25 September pointing out that the argument for a tariff as a way of improving the balance of trade no longer applied. Although it was true that when a currency was tied to gold a tariff could help to reduce pressure on the exchange rate, when the exchange rate was free to move a tariff was not only unnecessary to bring about balance-ofpayments equilibrium but would raise the value of the pound and undo the beneficial effects of the depreciation on exports. During the election campaign he and Benham wrote a longer letter to the Manchester Guardian while The Spectator published a note by Robbins on the same subject on 24 October (drafts and clippings in Controversies 1929–32, RP; Robbins 1931f). On 2 December he spoke at a meeting of the Political Economy Club on the question ‘Does the Trade Balance need Treatment?’. He did not need to rehearse the classical arguments to the members of a club founded by the friends of David Ricardo; he criticized recent arguments for tariffs and for control of capital movements and concluded that the classical negative answer still held (ms notes, Speeches & Lectures & Articles on Public Affairs Pre-1946, RP). Leo Amery, the Conservative (and protectionist) MP for Birmingham Sparkbrook, was present (Barnes and Nicholson eds 1988, 222): ‘The discussion was initiated by Professor Lionel Robbins, a young man with a charming expression who talked theoretical nonsense for half an hour though not quite as bad nonsense as was talked by Professor Gregory afterwards.’ Before Britain left the gold standard Robbins thought the authorities should try to keep Britain on gold, if necessary raising interest rates and contracting domestic credit. Although going off gold and allowing the pound to depreciate would improve the balance of visible trade, it would probably reduce income from invisible exports and it risked inflation at home and financial disruption abroad. After the abandonment he first thought a return to gold would be desirable, and soon, to avoid the dangers of domestic inflation and exchange rate instability, but it must be at a new lower parity, for otherwise the country would find itself with the difficulties it had faced since 1925. His friends Oscar Hobson, Georg Tugendhat and Jacques

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Kahane were not convinced: Hobson in particular did not think the gold reserves of the Bank of England were sufficient to maintain Britain on gold even at a lower parity. Robbins soon accepted that an early return was out of the question.3 In September 1931 Mises was in London for the annual meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Beveridge held a dinner for him at the School on 24 September (invitations in Beveridge IIb63). Lionel, who had missed him on his previous visit to London in 1930, invited him to Meadway Close. On 23 November Mises wrote to Robbins from Vienna (Mises, RP, translation mine): he wanted to thank him both for the ‘friendly reception’ and ‘for the extraordinary service, which you have rendered me by the promotion of the translations of my books’. Since September he had signed a contract with Cape for the Theorie des Geldes and agreed to proposals from Benn, to whom Robbins had written on Mises’s behalf, about Gemeinwirtschaft. He offered to send the proofs of the second German edition of the latter along with some of the manuscript which showed the revisions to the part of the first edition that Robbins and Schwartz had translated. Lionel arranged for Batson to undertake the translation of the Theory of Money and Credit and Kahane to take over Socialism (to use the English titles of the translations, which came out in 1934 and 1936). Mises wrote Lionel on 30 December that he thought Robbins’s choices of translators were excellent (Mises, RP). He also commented to Hayek on 7 December (H¨ulsmann 2007, 636): ‘In England one can observe a decided turning away from the atheoretical direction. The movement that today is centered in the London School of Economics and in the person of Robbins will have the greatest scientific and political impact.’ Robbins was indeed much influenced by Mises and Hayek at this time. He wrote himself to Mises on 19 December: ‘The sad thing about this crisis is that it seems to be driving so many who at one time were good liberals over to the other side. With me it has been just the opposite: all sorts of doubts and mental reservations have been cleared up and I am conscious of being much more “streng” than in the past’ (quoted by H¨ulsmann 2007, 648). But, as Mises’s biographer has also noted, this did not last. The Christmas vacation was not restful and Lionel did not get much work done on his own book. As Iris had to tell her mother-in-law, just before they were to go to Sipson for Christmas Anne developed a high fever and Lionel had to go into a nursing home for two days for the removal of two teeth. On 3

Draft letter to the Editor of The Times, 18 September, and ts Notes on the Present Position of Sterling and Possible Measures for its Improvement, 30.9.31 (with ms notes of his friends’ comments), Essays on Trade and the Depression, RP.

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New Year’s Day the annual meeting of the Association of University Teachers of Economics began at Reading: Lionel must have attended because Hayek was giving a paper on the second day. Hayek’s paper, on ‘Some disputed points in the theory of the credit cycle’, was so long that he carried on all afternoon (Beveridge Diary). In the evening a paper by Robertson on ‘The British currency problem’ led, according to the report in the March Economic Journal, ‘to a very full and vigorous discussion on the practical issue involved in the alternatives of a managed currency and a return to gold, with or without devaluation’. Before term started Lionel and Iris visited Hugh and Ruth Dalton at their house in Wiltshire. Hugh did not take to Iris (the feeling may have been mutual) and he was disappointed in his former proteg´e (Pimlott ed 1986a, 165): He will do much distinguished work in economic theory. But he has stiffened in an old-fashioned laissez-faire attitude of approach to current problems. He is bemused by modern Viennese theory, & by the personality of Hayek, in particular. He has no belief, or interest in, or knowledge of, Planned Economy, such as in the Soviet Union. He over-cultivates his feud with Keynes. He thinks he is working out a diagnosis of our ills in the form of a monetary bacillus. He is exercising a powerful influence – for he has a forceful intellectual personality & much charm – on younger teachers & on students. He is still young enough to grow & change, but this phase is negative & rather tiresome.

In January 1932 Robbins contributed to a series of BBC radio talks on currency problems. His talk was a factual account of the restoration and maintenance of the gold standard up to September 1931 (ts The Gold standard in Great Britain since the war, Controversies 1929–32, RP; 1932b). He alluded to the view that the return should have been at a lower parity, but he did not think that the return to gold was the source of all Britain’s troubles since 1925: ‘if that had been the only difficulty, we should soon have surmounted it.’ His criticism of the British monetary authorities was for not having the courage of their convictions: ‘We did not do what we had so often told other countries in financial difficulties to do – put up a high Bank rate and attempt to readjust our costs. Instead, we raised a couple of loans abroad to give temporary support to sterling, and at home we raised the limit on the note issue. These steps did not reassure the foreigners. Rather the contrary. The drain continued, and eventually – a thing unprecedented in the history of this or any other country – we went off the gold standard with a Bank rate of 41/2%.’ Robbins ended his broadcast talk with the abandonment of gold. An unpublished ‘Memorandum on the Present Position of Sterling’ (Speeches

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& Lectures & Articles on Public Affairs, RP) he wrote the same month started from that point. Considering the effects of the abandonment, he first pointed out that if sterling had been overvalued then it would depreciate and this would remove the overvaluation. Against this benefit there were disadvantages: an increase in the value of external debt payable in foreign currencies, the risk of inflation, the damage to London as an international financial centre and, most of all, the worsening of the world slump: All countries having ‘gold exchange’ standard relations with such a centre [Great Britain] are bound to be adversely affected. These adverse effects are followed by exchange restrictions and misguided attempts to safeguard the local currency. Other centres follow the original example. World trade is plunged into confusion. Effects of this sort by themselves are likely in the short run at any rate to counterbalance any hypothetical ‘benefits’ from a relief from overvaluation which could have come another way.

Robbins was inclined here as elsewhere at this time to exaggerate the magnitude of the ill effects and he also assumed devaluation would bring little increase in employment unless there were an increase in credit or a reduction in money wages: ‘Before any more men can come into employment, there must be an increase in the effective circulation. Otherwise the increased employment in the export trades must be to some extent at the cost of other industries.’ This mistaken assumption was common to most orthodox economic theory at the time. Robbins accepted there was no support for a return to gold at the old parity or even for return at a lower parity in the near future. But he criticized the current proposals for experiments in managed currency, including that of Keynes which, according to ‘well-informed rumour’, had been circulated within the government and suggested ‘the Bank of England should be empowered to buy or sell gold at rates fixed at short intervals according to the movements of an index number and other indices of “stability”’. Lionel was doubtful of the virtues of price stability and concerned about the vices of fluctuating exchange rates, which he feared could not be avoided by stabilization within a ‘sterling bloc’ (as the Keynes scheme envisaged). Hence in the end a return to gold would be better but it could not happen unless and until there was international cooperation to settle the problems of war debts and reparations and perhaps also the distribution of gold.4 4

Keynes’s memorandum was ‘Notes on the Currency Question’, 16 November 1931 (JMK 21, 16–28), which he sent to the Treasury, to the Governor of the Bank of England, and to the Prime Minister. Keynes’s plan for the management of sterling on the basis of an index of prices of the main raw commodities of international trade was a variant of that in his Treatise on Money (JMK 6, 349–54). His recommendations were seriously discussed by

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By February 1932 Lionel had finally completed turning his LSE lectures on the nature and significance of economics into a book (1932a). Although he had drawn up several alternative outlines during the last couple of years, the book followed the order and material of the lectures quite closely. In his first chapter, ‘The subject matter of economics’, he criticized materialist definitions of economics such as Cannan’s and developed his own proposed scarcity definition. The next two chapters, ‘Ends and means’ and ‘The relativity of economic quantities’, were concerned with the implications of his definition for ‘Economics as a positive science’, deferring the question of whether economics should also include ethics to the last chapter. As in his LSE lectures the first implication he drew was that economics is ‘entirely neutral between ends’ and ‘not concerned with ends as such’: ‘in so far as the achievement of any end is dependent on scarce means, it is germane to the preoccupations of the Economist’ (23). Economic analysis was as applicable to a community of ascetics as to a community of sybarites. Since it was not concerned only with the purely material there was no need to try, as Sir Josiah Stamp had done, to claim that the inclusion of aesthetic considerations in economic decisions would increase economic welfare as a justification for including such considerations; such considerations were one of the (competing) ends that could (and should in Robbins’s view) be taken into account anyway (28–9). The second implication on which he elaborated was that since the scarce means were capable of more than one use, the economic problem of allocating resources is more than a purely technical problem of finding the best means to produce a particular good. Similarly economic history is more than the history of technology (32–40). The third implication was that economic ‘quantities’ are not absolute but relative to current valuations. He began with the same example he had used in the lectures: the change in wealth at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918 when war material immediately became less valuable. As in the lectures he went on to emphasize the conceptual difficulties of economic aggregates such as national income estimates and price indices, but adding examples from the recent work of Hayek and Haberler. Another addition was a section on the arrangement of the core of economic theory. Here he noted that, instead of following the traditional English classical division between theories of production and distribution, ‘We enquire rather concerning the conditions of equilibrium of various economic “quantities”, given certain initial data, and we enquire concerning the effects of variations of these data. . . . we Treasury officials as part of their deliberations on sterling policy in December 1931–March 1932 (Howson 1975, 173–8).

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have a Theory of Equilibrium and a Theory of Variations’ – as he did in his Principles lectures (see Chapter 7). In support he cited Knight, Wicksell and Schumpeter (and his own 1930 article on equilibrium). Robbins’s definition has long been widely accepted by the economics profession, although it took time for it to be so and it remained contentious during the 1930s (Backhouse and Medema 2009). The second half of the book has come in for far more criticism and is still controversial. The two lectures on method became two chapters, ‘The nature of economic generalizations’ and ‘Economic generalizations and reality’. The first attempted to demonstrate, by way of examples, that the propositions of ‘Economic Science as it actually exists’ (72) are purely logical deductions from basic assumptions: ‘Economics is concerned with the disposal of scarce goods with alternative uses. That is our fundamental conception. And from this conception we are enabled to derive the whole complicated structure of modern Price Theory.’ The examples were the theory of demand (which had been used in the lectures), the modern theory of costs and the quantity theory of money (75–83). Hence, as he had discussed in the lecture, the propositions of economics did not depend on any psychological theory or on a concept of ‘economic man’ (83–92). In the second lecture, which had been entitled ‘The place of induction’, induction had been given two roles: ‘to select our assumptions’ and ‘to test the suitability of our theories’. In the second chapter he was even less charitable to empirical studies. His arguments had been sharpened by his exchange with Nathan Isaacs the previous summer: Nathan had tried to persuade Lionel of the usefulness of induction and the need to test scientific theories; Lionel had responded by pointing to the utility of economic theories derived by deduction, notably the quantity theory of money (Howson 2004a, 433–8). He now opened by bluntly stating that ‘The scarcity of goods and services . . . is a known fact both of introspection and observation’ and that ‘on the basis of this knowledge, we may assert the applicability of the abstract deductions from the concept of scarcity to the actual condition of the world in which we live’ (96–7). He went on to attack the usefulness of ‘quantitative economics’ such as estimates of the demand for individual commodities and statistical analyses of business cycles. He still allowed some role for ‘realistic studies’: to check the applicability of particular theories to given situations and to indicate new problems requiring new or improved theories. He cited Viner’s study of the Canadian balance of payments (1924) as an example of the former and Hayek’s trade cycle theory (1928) of the latter. Other Austrian friends were critical of these two chapters and Robbins tried to clarify his position in the second edition to meet their objections (see Chapter 9).

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The sixth and final chapter, ‘The significance of economic science’, turned first to the issues Lionel had discussed at the end of his lectures under the heading of ‘Economics and political theory’, such as the inapplicability of the law of diminishing marginal utility in the theory of public finance, laying more emphasis on the illegitimacy of interpersonal comparisons of utility and omitting his views on laissez faire. His argument was not that such comparisons cannot be made, since ‘in daily life we do continually assume that the comparison can be made’ (140), but that since there is no way of objectively testing them we cannot rely on them to derive scientific statements in economics. Hence ‘all that part of the theory of public finance which deals with “Social Utility” . . . does not at all follow from the positive assumptions of pure theory’ (141). Even if it could be shown that certain policies could increase ‘social utility’, ‘it would be totally illegitimate to argue that such a conclusion by itself warranted the inference that these policies ought to be carried out’. He went to justify his view that economic science should not include normative statements as against Hawtrey and J.A. Hobson, using an argument he had used in his article on Hawtrey (1927a) (151): Shut Mr Hawtrey in a room as Secretary of a Committee composed of Bentham, Buddha, Lenin and the Head of the United States Steel Corporation, set up to decide upon the ethics of usury, and it is improbable that he could produce an ‘agreed document’. Set the same committee to determine the objective results of State regulation of the rate of discount, and it ought not to be beyond human ingenuity to produce unanimity – or at any rate a majority report, with Lenin perhaps dissenting. Surely, for the sake of securing what agreement we can in a world in which avoidable differences of opinion are all too common, . . . it is worth while delimiting the neutral area of science from the more disputable area of moral and political philosophy.

The significance of economics was, therefore, that it enables us to make choices with full awareness of the consequences (152): ‘There is nothing in Economics which relieves us of the obligation to choose. . . . But, to be rational, we must know what it is we prefer.’ He gave three examples of choices which should be informed by economic analysis: the introduction of protection; fixed versus flexible exchange rates; and alternative systems of society. He ended with a moving peroration, which I quote only in part: ‘And thus in the last analysis Economics does depend, if not for its existence, at least for its significance, on an ultimate valuation – the affirmation that rationality and ability to choose with knowledge is desirable.’ It was the ‘tragedy of our generation’ that this affirmation had been rejected in favour of irrationality. ‘But for all those who still affirm more positive values, that

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branch of knowledge which, above all others, is the symbol and safeguard of rationality in social arrangements, must, in the anxious days which are to come, by very reason of this menace to that for which it stands, possess a peculiar and a heightened significance.’ He dedicated the book to his father. Although the book shows that Lionel had been discussing its arguments with Hayek over the autumn and winter, the only surviving written comments on the manuscript are those of Dalton, who sat up until the early hours of 5 February reading it and writing a long commentary (N & S Letters, RP). While he took Lionel to task for arguing that interpersonal comparisons of utility were always empirically unverifiable, and teased him for the ‘usual superlative bouquets to Mises’ in his footnotes, he was unusually complimentary on other portions, thoroughly approving of the peroration and of much of the methodological argument. He thought chapter II, ‘Ends and Means’, was ‘full of good fun & good sense’ and he was sympathetic to the criticism of ‘economic welfare’ as used by either Pigou or Cannan, but ‘not yet convinced’ it should be given up, since he still believed ‘the proposition that “A is better off than B” seems to mean something.’ It is hard to tell how much revision Robbins undertook as a result of Dalton’s comments, since the manuscript Dalton was commenting on does not survive, but it is clear from comparison of Dalton’s screed and the published version of the book that some footnotes were altered or omitted. Lionel sent his manuscript to Macmillan & Co on 19 February. He did not have to wait long for their decision: they wrote on 3 March offering to send it to the printers as soon as he had signed the contract so that it should be ‘available for the people proceeding to the final examinations in June’ (N & S Letters, RP). The referee had been Henry Higgs, the retired civil servant and founder member of the Royal Economic Society who was one of the firm’s most reliable referees on economics manuscripts. He had no hesitation in recommending publication on 26 February: ‘It is polemical, provocative in its challenges, but contains important original thought and deserves publication.’ It went beyond the standard works on economic methodology by John Neville Keynes and Henry Sidgwick, and ‘as Professor of Economics in the largest British centre of Economic studies he [Robbins] has a commanding position, and is secure of a large circle of readers. . . . It will undoubtedly be advantageous to Macmillan to enrol him among their authors.’ He noted it appeared ‘in parts hurriedly written, perhaps from lecture notes’ but thought ‘such phrases as “Every first year student knows” &c. will no doubt be eliminated in revision’ – which Macmillan did not in fact request (Reader Reports volume T f611, Macmillan Papers, BL).

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From the manuscript Robbins turned immediately back to public affairs. He had again been invited to join a subcommittee of the Economic Advisory Council. The government expenditure cuts of the summer of 1931 had been in effect for six months and the Prime Minister asked a small group ‘to advise him personally on the question of the effects on trade activity and national prosperity of the economy policy in recent months, and as to whether and what safeguards and limitations are needed, or whether any expansion would be desirable.’ Besides Robbins the group comprised Sir Basil Blackett, Sir Woodman Burbidge, Ernest Simon and Sir Josiah Stamp, with Hubert Henderson and Francis Hemming as secretaries. Blackett, a senior Treasury official in the early 1920s, had more recently been the Finance Member of the Executive Council of the Governor-General of India; Burbidge was the managing director of Harrods Ltd; Simon had been Liberal MP for Manchester Withington until October 1931. They met only three times and produced a short report strongly supportive of government policy.5 In their history of the Economic Advisory Council Howson and Winch (1977, 125) commented ‘It would be hard to imagine a more atavistic document [than this report] – and not simply judged on post-General Theory standards.’ Robbins reviewed their book (favourably) ‘with mixed feelings [about] his own activities in two of the investigations that it records’ (1978b, 114). As he had told Colin Clark a couple of years earlier (15 September 1975, 1975 Correspondence, RP), commenting on the manuscript of Clark’s memoir (1977), he was ‘still proud to have differed from Maynard [Keynes] on the matter of protection’ but had become ‘very ashamed to have differed from him on the matter of public expenditure, perhaps not so much for 1930 . . . [when Britain was still on the gold standard] But particularly for the letter [to The Times in October] of 1932, and for the part I played in another special committee of the Economic Advisory Council when the rate of exchange having changed, I was still, quite wrongly, against any reflation.’ At the first meeting of this committee, on 19 February, the members agreed that Stamp should act as chairman, that they would prepare their report on the basis that ‘each member acquiesced in what was stated rather than that each necessarily approved the exact wording adopted’ and that rather than each signing the report they would submit it to the Prime Minister with a covering note by Stamp. For the second meeting each member would produce a note of his own views on the effects of private and public expenditure cuts and Henderson would try to provide a summary. 5

The minutes and memoranda are in Robbins 1/9 and CAB158/182, TNA.

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At that meeting, on 11 March, when the committee had the notes from Blackett, Burbidge, Robbins and Simon, and one from Henderson which attempted to reconcile the different views, they decided that Henderson should draft a report based largely on his note. At their third meeting on 18 March they adopted it with minor revisions. They had agreed in believing public expenditure cuts had been necessary in 1931 in order to balance the budget and avoid tax increases. The cuts in the salaries of public employees may also have been beneficial in so far as they reduced imports (Blackett) and encouraged wage reductions in the private sector (Robbins and Simon); only Burbidge claimed that they could be deflationary and even he thought that they had been offset by a fall in the cost of living. Robbins alone was in favour of further cuts in public sector wages and salaries – in order to reduce taxation and to help to reduce wage rigidities elsewhere. On public capital expenditure Blackett, Burbidge and Simon drew a distinction between non-remunerative and remunerative capital expenditure projects by public authorities: cutting back the former was good but the latter should be encouraged. There was less agreement on the effects of increased private saving: Blackett and Simon thought it was adverse, Robbins that increased saving was ‘one of the main ways out of the present depression’ and Burbidge that no saving was going on. Robbins agreed with the others that increased savings were probably not yet finding their way into investment, but this was only a temporary problem: they would sooner or later lower interest rates, encouraging investment and hence recovery. Henderson’s line of argument (EAC(S1(32))9) was, briefly, that since it was essential that the government budget be balanced and desirable that taxes should be reduced, the cuts in public sector salaries, in unemployment benefits and in public works financed out of current expenditure should be maintained. Local authorities and other public institutions should, however, be allowed to proceed steadily with remunerative capital projects. As for private savings, since ‘There is a possibility when trade revives that development may be limited by an insufficiency of savings . . . it would be unwise to discourage tendencies to thrift at the present time. On the other hand, drastic economies, involving marked disturbances of normal demand, which are not necessitated by straitened circumstances, are to be deprecated.’ The report elaborated these points but omitted another suggestion of Henderson’s, that private investment should be encouraged, perhaps because Robbins was doubtful (EAC(H)148, Sub-Committee on the Limits of Economy Policy, Report, 18 March 1932). Stamp’s covering minute to MacDonald stated that the report ‘gives the general views of the

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Sub-Committee . . . without attempting to express the different shades of opinion of individual members’. Those different opinions were expressed elsewhere. Blackett and Stamp – along with Sir Arthur Salter, Keynes, Clay and Beveridge – contributed to the Halley Stewart Lectures on ‘The world’s economic crisis and the way of escape’ in January–February 1932. Stamp saw in a tariff a way of escaping the immediate problem of the adverse British balance of trade. Blackett wanted ‘stable money’, that is monetary policy directed towards stability of the domestic price level, what he elsewhere called planned money (Salter et al 1932, 44–67 and 91–114; Blackett 1932). Beveridge had consulted Robbins, Plant and Hayek on the contents of his lecture (Beveridge Diary 26 January 1932). Their influence shows in his analysis of the crisis: ‘It has come about through a fall of prices initiated from the side of money, a deflationary fall of prices [which] has produced unexampled paralysis . . . because it has met with unexampled rigidities of the economic system. Though the deflation of purchasing power and consequent fall of prices may be described as the cause of the crisis, the deflation itself is probably an inevitable sequel of a previous inflation.’ After taking issue with Blackett’s optimistic recommendations for stabilizing prices, he came to the conclusion that ‘If the view that I have suggested above is right, if this deflation is the inevitable aftermath of inflation, the headache after the debauch, then there is not much that anyone can do now to help us; what is wanted ought to have been done five years ago.’ The best to be hoped for 1932 was that governments would take steps to deal with reparations and war debts and some of the obstacles to trade (Salter et al 1932, 175–87). Beveridge was proud of his performance on the night (Beveridge Diary 25 February 1932): ‘Middle part (economics) dragged a bit. Beginning & end went well. Rather pleased with myself.’ Beveridge was less pleased with events at the School in the Lent term 1932. He was having trouble with the Professorial Council over a memorandum on University Teachers and Political Activity he had written in November 1931. Given its origins, and the presence of Harold Laski, LSE was always vulnerable to attack, usually unjustifiably, as a leftwing institution. As opinion within and without the School became increasingly polarized in the 1930s, Beveridge was getting tired of fending off attacks and was also under some pressure from the governors to rein in his colleagues (Harris 1997, 287–8). He had agreed his memorandum with senior academic staff in November, and when the Emergency Committee of the governors had amended it in December the Professorial Council objected strongly. The

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discussion of 20 January had to be continued at another Council meeting on 10 February, when the resolutions were redrafted, with Robbins among those contributing to the redrafting. By the time the governors accepted the new version in May it had been for Beveridge (1960, 126) ‘a riot of discussion, with amendments and counter-amendments, lasting nearly five months’. At the same time Beveridge was having trouble with Robbins and Plant over the teaching of business administration at LSE. In 1929 Beveridge had accepted the offer of funds from a few businessmen to set up a new department which would conduct research and offer training in business administration to a small number of potential managers on the model of the Harvard Business School (Department of Business Administration, History of the Department, LSE Calendar 1933–4). Robbins was not involved in this development, initiated before his appointment as professor. Neither was Plant since he did not arrive back from South Africa until August 1930; in May 1930 Beveridge had told the governors it was probable Plant would head the department but a few weeks later the governors had approved the appointment of Jules Menken, whom Beveridge had known for some years, probably through the Liberal Summer Schools (Emergency Committee 1 May and 19 June 1930; Liberal Industrial Inquiry 1928, v–viii). The first students were admitted in October 1931. The relation between this venture and the responsibilities of Plant and his colleagues in commerce was distinctly unclear. The problem was raised in the Professorial Council on 25 February 1931 when, the bland minutes record, ‘It was agreed that Professors Sargent, Robbins, Plant, Chorley, Rodwell Jones and Dr Power should be constituted a committee to consider the questions involved and to report to the Commerce Sub-committee . . . for later report to the Professorial Council.’ The Commerce Committee was at that time busy reforming the BCom degree which had been introduced in 1918 and had become increasingly unpopular as both too demanding, with seven or eight examinations every year, and academically inferior to the BSc(Econ). Lionel criticized it strongly for its overload of examinations and for its ‘technical and particularised’ subjects which ‘do not in themselves satisfy the requirements of . . . a liberal education’ and which did not even provide a good education for business (Observations on the present position and future prospects of the B.Comm., Plant 222). The reformed BCom produced by the Commerce Committee in the summer of 1931 (Professorial Council 10 June 1931) and introduced a year later retained the old Intermediate syllabus, adding elementary statistics and accounting; it transformed

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the syllabus for the second and third years by introducing three compulsory papers in economics and economic history for the Final examinations and allowing only a limited number of papers in the options of Banking and finance, Trade and transport, and Industry and public utilities. As Robbins described it to Beveridge in March 1932, it was ‘merely another B.Sc.[Econ.] with more emphasis on languages & the technical subjects’. It was harder for Plant and Robbins to influence the teaching of business administration: they could make little headway while Menken was ostensibly in charge of the new department. On 25 March 1932 Lionel wrote a long memorandum to Beveridge that is noteworthy for his views on the teaching of business in universities as well as for his outspokenness (LCR Personal File A, LSE). As regards the nature of the training I venture to submit the following rather dogmatic propositions. . . . I) Business Administration is not and can never be a science. A science describes uniformities of fact, it does not prescribe particular modes of conduct. Business Administration is an art. II) At the same time it is an art which, in part at least, is based upon science. Since business is concerned with buying & selling it is clear that the science most relevant to the art of business must be Economics. . . . (III) University training for Business has a twofold function. Firstly to provide a general background of the relevant scientific knowledge (supplemented of course by various technical disciplines Law Accountancy etc). Secondly to provide a training in the application of this general knowledge to concrete situations – to specialize the perceptive faculties & to cultivate the faculty of judgment. iv Hence the courses of study which should be pursued should consist partly of instruction in the various branches of Economics likely to be relevant, partly – and at the postgraduate stage, I think, predominantly, of detailed study of particular business problems.

He objected to the Harvard ‘case method’ being made ‘a fetish’ in teaching business administration as he claimed Menken did. But his main point was that the Department of Business Administration had to confine itself to postgraduate teaching. There is room for a school of postgraduate studies in Business Administration. But it must be a school of postgraduate studies. If not, then it is a menace to the other work of the School. Either it is a competitor with the B.Com. – which is fundamentally undesirable. Or it is not – in which case it is a backstairs entrance to university status which can only bring the School into ridicule.

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He was equally dismissive of Menken’s grandiose plans for the research activities of his department and scathing about Menken’s abilities. Menken had to go. Until some facesaving way of getting him out could be found, Lionel proposed that Paish be made secretary of the department and Plant and himself should serve on a new management committee. Lionel offered to go down to Avebury where Beveridge was spending the vacation. Beveridge responded, however, by coming up to town on 14 April, for a morning at LSE with Plant and Robbins followed by lunch with Paish and Robbins at the Reform Club, where, as he put it in his diary, they ‘Settled business’. A management committee was set up, but with Menken as secretary. Plant and Robbins had to put up with Menken for another three years; when he left Plant took over the business administration course, staffing it with members of his own Commerce Department (Emergency Committee 17 January 1935; LSE Calendar 1935–6). On 14–21 July 1932 an ‘economic course’ was held at LSE as part of the International Congress of the British Association for Commercial Education. Hawtrey, Macgregor and Robbins were to contribute ‘addresses on general economics’ (Professorial Council 8 June 1932). Lionel’s remarks on ‘The place of economics in the teaching of business’ were summarized in The Times (21 July, 1932): Economics could not tell business men what specific goods were likely to be demanded in the market. Nor could it lay down in advance the ‘best’ forms of business organization. But it could be claimed that in the framing of general business policy a knowledge of general economics might be useful. Economics made it possible to anticipate more accurately the remoter effects of given changes in the economic system. The financing of industrial enterprise and the framing of buying policies during times of monetary instability were particular examples of cases where a sound knowledge of economics might be helpful. Even there, however, care must be taken not to put the claim too high. Economics could not claim to provide quantitative predictions; at best its anticipations were qualitative. If economics was to be taught at all it must be taught thoroughly, for a watered-down economics for the use of commerce students was not only useless, it was often positively misleading. Unless schools of business were prepared to take economics seriously they had better leave it alone.

Robbins’s appointment as Professor of Economics had always included ‘attendance at meetings of Faculties, Boards and Councils . . . [as] an important part of his work’ (copy of Regulations on University Titles in History of Past Employment, RP). He had joined the editorial board of Economica as soon as he became a professor in 1929. (He would have replaced Dalton on the board in 1926 had not Beveridge thought he was too young: Beveridge to Dalton, 1 July 1926, LSE 122/25/A.) A year later the three

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editors – Beveridge, Laski and Robbins – decided to expand the journal which since its first publication in 1921 had covered the full range of subjects taught at the School. They proposed to issue it quarterly, to raise the subscription and to pay contributors, and to continue to review books but no longer those published by LSE staff. The LSE governors agreed to the proposal even though it would probably mean a loss at first in the hope that the improvement in the journal would eventually reduce the deficit (‘Proposals for the Reorganisation of “Economica”’, LSE 122/25/A; Emergency Committee 30 October 1930). A couple of years later Robbins had a better idea. He suggested that the journal be split into two, Economica and Politica, with the former devoted to economics (with economic history), and that the editorial board of the new Economica consist of the professors whose subjects would be covered (Beveridge, ‘Economica: proposed new editorial and publishing arrangements’, 21 July 1933, LSE 122/25/B). The governors having agreed, the last of the old Economica appeared in August 1933. Within a year the new series had more subscribers than the old (Director’s Report on the Work of the School for the Session 1933–4, LSE Calendar 1934–5). When the new editorial board met in October 1933 they agreed Lionel Robbins and Eileen Power should be the Acting Editors, with Frank Paish the assistant editor. The board met frequently, almost every month, to assign submitted articles to readers and books to reviewers and to agree on the contents of each issue; as was to be expected Robbins continued to be a very active editor, as he had been before the split (minutes of Editorial Board in LSE122/25/B). It was in his editorial capacity that he resumed his correspondence with Jacob Viner in 1932, asking him on 26 January (Viner 22–14) to review Mountifort Longfield, Lectures on Political Economy (1834), which LSE was publishing in its series of Reprints of Scarce Tracts on Economics and Political Science. To Lionel it seemed ‘a long time . . . since we had an opportunity of talking together, and what a dreadful state the world has got into in consequence’. Viner responded on 8 February (Viner 22–14) offering a ‘longish article on Longfield and all his works’: their friendship was not affected by the fact that he never wrote it. Lionel’s administrative and editorial duties were on top of six lectures a week plus his graduate seminar. It is appropriate that he should contribute to ‘Too Many Lectures Spoil the Student’ in Clare Market Review (1932c). He defended lectures as against the inefficient Oxford tutorial system which exhausted the tutors, but since ‘lectures will often be a bore and lecturers will tend sometimes to be boring’ lectures should be optional, just as he had argued as an undergraduate (see Chapter 4). His fellow contributors Laski and Power agreed with him, and suggested fewer lectures too.

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Fortunately Lionel had a very good research assistant, Stanley Tucker, who worked full time for himself and Hayek in 1932–4 (Rockefeller Research Fund Committee 7 July and 12 December 1932, 14 June and 14 December 1933). It was a relief in the Easter vacation to turn to editing the economic works of Wicksteed as well as to checking the proofs of his own book. He expanded his article on Wicksteed to form the introduction to his edition of The Common Sense of Political Economy which also included a number of articles and reviews by Wicksteed. With Tucker’s assistance he also edited Wicksteed’s Co-ordination of the Laws of Distribution for separate publication in the LSE series of Reprints of Scarce Tracts on Economics and Political Science, correcting most of the many misprints in the first edition.6 When Common Sense was published it was widely reviewed in the press and featured as The Economist’s ‘Book of the Week’ on 28 January 1933, as had the Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science six months earlier (18 June 1932). In the middle of the vacation Robbins received a letter from Dr Fritz Machlup-Wolf in Vienna. Machlup, who had been a student of Mises and Wieser, was then working in the family cardboard manufacturing business while continuing to pursue his interests in economics and the philosophy of science in association with other Viennese economists. ‘You know,’ Machlup wrote on 11 April (Vienna, RP), ‘the great desire of all Austrian economists is to receive your visits in Vienna as soon as possible.’ As Machlup was going to be in London in the middle of May, he suggested Robbins visit Vienna in late May or early June. He hoped Robbins would give two lectures in Vienna, one at the National¨okonomische Gesellschaft and the other to either the Gesellschaft der Volkswirte or the Osterreichische Club. Lionel declined but he had accepted another invitation for 1–8 May. A few days before Machlup’s letter one had arrived from Walter Schindler, the London correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt, inviting him on 7 April to participate in a ‘World Conference of Economics’ during the World Commerce Week in Berlin that his newspaper was organizing. The conference was to cover ‘the following fundamental problems: 1) New ways in trade policy 2) International trade organisation and technique 3) The “interlacing” of international capital . . . and world commerce’ (Berlin Conference 1932, RP). 6

A revised edition of LCR’s edition was published with the remaining misprints corrected and an introduction by Ian Steedman in 1992.

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Lionel travelled to Berlin with Oscar Hobson by overnight train on Saturday 30 April. The next morning he found they were staying at one of the two best hotels in the city and that he had a marble tiled bathroom to himself. When he wrote to Iris during the opening session of the conference later that morning, he was sitting next to Mises, and the city editor of the Berliner Tageblatt was making ‘a heavy speech which (because it is about nothing) I only imperfectly understand.’ The rest of the day was devoted to refreshment and recreation, as he told Iris on 2 May: We then repaired to the Kaiserhof & consumed expensive food & wines until four o’clock. . . . After the meal we were taken round Berlin in charabancs. I didn’t see much of Hobson & I had fallen in with a very intelligent man who was telling us about the Hitler movement. The more I hear about this the more menacing it seems. I am going to try to see a live Hitlerite. They sound too absurd to be true. By six o’clock we were back in the centre. Tea for the party in the Vaterhouse [sic] restaurant – an enormous place with different rooms each representing different parts of the Fatherland. We sat in the Rhineland an enormous hall with the Rhine (in card board) at the end. As we were an important party we were privileged to see a storm over the Rhine (Real Rain carefully sprayed behind the card board). There were also dancing girls. We extricated ourselves from this at about half past seven. Then back to the hotel for a quiet meal with Mises who had stayed at home to write his speech. After dinner we went to a Theatre-cabaret Theatre der Komiker chosen by Mises who hates dancing girls etc.

The next morning Lionel gave his speech (in English) on capital movements and world trade, describing the adverse effects on international capital flows of tariffs and trade restrictions (conference programme and ts Capital Movements and Restrictions on Trade, Berlin Conference 1932, RP). He told Iris: ‘I think it was a success. At any rate I felt pleased with it and Mises praised it.’ For the rest of the day he listened to others’ speeches but he spoke a good deal in debates on exchange restrictions and on currencies on Tuesday (3 May) and in the sessions on trade policies on Wednesday. The other participants included Moritz Bonn, Rector of the Berlin Handelshochschule, Emil Lederer of the University of Berlin, the private banker L. Albert Hahn who held an honorary professorship at the University of Frankfurt, and Jacob Marschak, a private docent at the University of Heidelberg. In the evenings there was further entertainment. On Tuesday we (Hobson Mises & I) went round to the flat of one Albert Hahn a wealth[y] Banker & Economist where we found a number of young journalists & bankers all talking at the top of their voices on difficult subjects. This continued until about eight when

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we repaired to a restaurant in a distant part of the town. Here the confusion was worse. A piano began to play & my poor ears, already strained to the utmost to pick up the strands of two or three different conversations in a foreign language at once, gave out almost altogether. From time to time I succeeded in picking up something & for about an hour I argued myself – at first in German – which comes back very rapidly – and then – in sheer exasperation – in German [sic]. We broke up at midnight & I came back & slept until nine o’clock

On Wednesday evening, ‘Hobson & I walked in the Tiergarten until 8. We then joined Mises & went to dine with Lederer & his wife – nice people but bad economists. At half past eleven we left & spent the next 21/2 hours talking in cafes. Mises wanted us to see how Berlin spent the evening & took us first to a place where journalists & artists congregate – the Romanshe cafe & then to the big middle class place we had visited on Sunday. This time we went to Vienna. It was all very pleasant & not a bit tiring as the preceding evening had been.’ On Thursday evening he saw Richard Strauss’s opera, Ariadne auf Naxos, and after another day of sightseeing he left for London on Friday night. While he was in Berlin Lionel told Iris that he would try to write an article for The Spectator on what he had seen in the city. When he did so, he commented not on the nightlife he had enjoyed with Mises, but on the lack of life in the streets (1932d): ‘one does not need to be in Berlin many hours to realize that something is wrong, very wrong. These wide, handsome streets were built to take more traffic than this. The shops, surely, should be doing more custom. The state of affairs in which some of the main quarters are not much more animated than a Bloomsbury square is not a natural one.’ He drew attention to the tense political situation as well as the deteriorating economic situation, to the vicious circle that each was making the other worse. He was pessimistic: he doubted the government of Heinrich Br¨uning would last long and ‘there is no hope whatever from the Nazis . . . [in whom] there is nothing positive, nothing but black passion and prejudice.’ He thought the depreciation of sterling had made things worse, but not as much as the exchange restrictions imposed to protect the mark from following suit. But Germany could not itself leave gold after its last experience of a floating exchange rate (the 1923 hyperinflation). Hence ‘short of a miracle at Lausanne [that is, the forthcoming conference on reparations in June–July 1932] I see no rational ground for not expecting a grave catastrophe in Germany before long.’ He also wrote a memorandum for private circulation with a friend (presumably Hobson) on the damaging effects of the German exchange restrictions (Robbins 1934b, 103n; ‘Draft No. 4’, Essays on trade & the depression, RP).

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Before Lionel went to Germany Neville Chamberlain had presented his first budget, in which there were no tax reductions or expenditure increases in spite of the revenue expected from the new tariff. He also announced the creation of an Exchange Equalization Account to enable the Treasury and the Bank of England to intervene in the foreign exchange market to avoid ‘undue fluctuations’ in the value of the pound. He did not announce that he and his officials were also preparing to usher in a period of ‘cheap money’ by converting a large block of First World War government debt to a lower interest rate (Howson 1975, 86–9). When The Economist urged the government to make a declaration of its monetary policy which should include the desirability of a 30 per cent rise in wholesale prices as well as a commitment to cheap money, Lionel reacted strongly: ‘I submit,’ he wrote to the editor on 14 May, ‘that it is open to many who accept much of your diagnosis, to question very seriously whether the remedy you propose is not likely to prove worse than the disease.’ The inflation would, like that which preceded and helped to cause the slump, encourage investment in the wrong directions: ‘You propose to cure the patient by a small dose of the same poison which has brought him to his present condition’; and the prescribed dose, the 30 per cent price rise, was not in fact small. Other readers criticized Robbins strongly and he responded, to O.T. Falk and R.F. Harrod, equally vigorously on 28 May and 11 June. He also inveighed against the popular policy of restoring the 1929 price level as a dangerous gamble in an article (1932e) in The Times Trade and Engineering Supplement on 2 July. But since he approved of the cheapening of money initiated by the conversion of 5 per cent War Loan to 31/2 per cent War Loan announced on 30 June, he had some justification in claiming to Colin Clark he was not advocating further deflation, only opposing ‘reflation’ (ts marked N.L.C. 4.11.32, Speeches & Lectures & Articles on Public Affairs pre 1946, RP; LCR to Clark, 15 February 1934, Clark Papers). In the Summer term, with only a few lectures to give, Lionel could concentrate on the classes for the final year undergraduates specializing in economics. He had a particularly fine crop of oustanding Firsts that year: Ralph Arakie, Roland Bird, Aaron Emanuel, Abba Lerner and Ursula Webb. Bird was an evening student, a clerk in the City; a year after receiving his degree he went to work as a financial journalist on The Economist (from which he retired as finance director forty-five years later) (The Economist, 23 December, 2000, 122). The others stayed on at LSE as graduate students – Arakie and Lerner under Hayek’s supervision, Emanuel and Webb under Robbins’s. Emanuel worked on the application of the theory of capital to the theory of international trade, Webb on British public finance since

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the war. Samuel Goldman, who had gained a First the previous year, was already working under Robbins on the relation between the English and the Austrian theories of capital (Professorial Council 23 November 1932 and 29 November 1933; U. Hicks 1938, vii). One of Lionel’s graduate students, Solomon Adler, who had been an undergraduate at New College and gained a First in PPE in 1930, completed his dissertation for the MSc(Econ) in the spring of 1932. Lionel asked Dennis Robertson, by now a good friend, to examine the thesis, inviting him to stay at Meadway Close when he came down from Cambridge for the examination on 6 June. Robertson criticized the thesis, on Wicksell’s theory of interest and its influence, for its ‘wholesale swallowing of Hayek’ but, allowing for ‘the natural tendency of a young and able man to swallow a new gospel whole’, he thought Adler deserved his degree – for which Adler subsequently won the School’s Hutchinson Silver Medal, awarded annually for ‘excellence of work in research’, as did Goldman the following year. Adler later emigrated to the United States, worked for the US Treasury Department for a number of years and became an expert on the Chinese economy – and a victim of the McCarthy ‘witch hunt’ in the 1950s.7 Hayek had, in his own words (1994, 78), ‘fitted in so well’ at the School that in the Summer term he was offered the Tooke chair on a permanent basis, that is for five years in the first instance and renewable. When this was announced officially the Professorial Council on 8 June ‘received . . . [the news] with acclamation’. Hayek then returned to Austria for the summer vacation. While he was away Lionel read and revised the translation of Hayek’s Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle. Hayek was reading the manuscript of Durbin’s book as well as the published version of Lionel’s Essay – which was, he told Lionel on 7 September, ‘a very easy and pleasant means’ to bring him back to intellectual work and the preparation of his inaugural lecture (Hayek, RP). Evan and Marjorie Durbin spent six weeks in Austria that summer: Evan told Lionel on 31 August (London, RP) that ‘Mises was out of Vienna . . . but we met all the others – Machlup, Haberler, Morgenstern & Hayek. They were all extremely kind to us – extremely.’ The Robbinses spent the month of August on holiday at Tanpits Farm, Chillington, near Kingsbridge in Devon. From there Lionel continued to contribute to a debate on ‘Spend or save?’ in The Spectator which had opened with articles by the underconsumptionist economist and journalist 7

Robertson to LCR, 20 March, 1 and 2 June 1932, Cambridge, RP; Professorial Council 1 March 1933 and 28 February 1934; ‘Sol Adler’, RES Newsletter 87 (October 1994), 15.

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J.A. Hobson and himself. Hobson had argued on 18 July ‘spend’, Robbins on the 23rd ‘save’ (1932f). His argument was Hayekian: Suppose that the heads of the various companies in this country were to be persuaded by Mr. Hobson and his followers that above all more spending on consumption goods was desirable. Suppose that to bring about this desirable end they decided to pay out their amortization funds . . . as dividends or even as wages. What would be the result? . . . If there were new capital about, it would go to trades making for consumption rather than trades making for constructional purposes. The depression would be intensified just where it is already most intense. The country would be living on its capital.

He conceded it was not clear that there had been capital consumption in Britain as opposed to Central Europe but he claimed that the picture I have given is not very far removed from reality. How many companies are there which, in the last few years, have not paid their dividends and sometimes even wages by drawing on hidden reserves or by failing to replace their equipment at the usual rate? If this takes place, it means that savings, which otherwise would go to maintain demand for the products of the heavy industries, &c., are in fact being used to maintain consumption and while it persists there cannot be full industrial recovery.

The implication was that taxes and government expenditure should be reduced together since high taxation could contribute to capital consumption. Needless to say, Hobson replied and others jumped into the fray. The editor gave Robbins the last word on 27 August (clippings in Controversies 1929–32, RP). Lionel interrupted his holiday to stand in for Dalton (who was visiting the Soviet Union) at a meeting in London of a scholarships committee (LCR to W.C. Dickinson, 18 August 1932, LCR Personal File A, LSE). Dalton thought he was ‘a brick’ to do this, especially since the three scholarships to be awarded were for study in Berlin, Rome, Geneva and Paris as part of a project supervised by Dalton on public works and deficit financing. Lionel had no difficulty agreeing with Dalton on awarding the scholarship to Germany to Brinley Thomas (now an assistant in commerce at LSE) (Dalton to LCR, 1 July and 1 September 1932, London, RP: Dalton et al. 1934). On their way back from Devon the four Robbinses visited Beveridge at Avebury, arriving for tea, staying the night, and spending the next morning playing croquet (Beveridge Diary 29 and 30 August 1932). Two days later Lionel read a paper on ‘Consumption and the trade cycle’ at the British Association meetings in York (Robbins 1932h). His paper had two purposes: to attack underconsumptionist theories, such as Hobson’s, of the causes of trade depression, taking the opportunity first to dispose of the

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claims of Major Douglas (see Chapter 3); and to outline the very different view of the role of consumption in Austrian trade cycle theory. As Robbins noted, both theories assumed there was overinvestment at the height of a boom. ‘On Mr Hobson’s view, this over-expansion is due to voluntary saving. On the [Austrian] view . . . it is due to what is sometimes called “forced saving” and it is the cessation of this process which brings about the collapse. [Hence] on Mr Hobson’s view, the only remedy for such a state of affairs would be a diminution of voluntary saving – i.e. an increase in consumption. On the [Austrian] view . . . the situation can be saved only by such an increase of voluntary saving – i.e. a diminution of consumption . . . ’ This had the obvious practical implication that measures for ‘maintaining purchasing power’ might well be undesirable: indeed, ‘It may prove to be no accident that the depression in which most measures have been taken to “maintain consumers’ purchasing power” is also the depression of the widest extent and most alarming proportions.’ This part of Lionel’s talk was widely reported in the press, The Times on 2 September also noting that an American professor at the conference had commented that Robbins’s sketch ‘fitted well’ the recent US experience. Nature on 5 September, on the other hand, described his demolition of Douglas. The letter to The Times Lionel later so much regretted appeared on 19 October 1932. Before that he wrote his first article for the monthly review which Lloyds Bank had been publishing since 1929 (1932g). He used the opportunity of the rather vague resolutions on money and finance issued at the conclusion of the Imperial Economic Conference in Ottawa in August to argue once again against any inflationary policies designed to raise prices to their 1929 level. He urged his readers to be sceptical of proponents of an ‘easy way’ out of the depression: ‘we should ask them . . . to show that this process would not have the effect of postponing inevitable liquidations and of fostering false expectations; and that it would not be followed by a lapse into a state of depression perhaps worse than that from which we now suffer.’ He also reiterated his view that the only satisfactory monetary regime was an international gold standard ‘worked on sound and austere lines’. The Times reported on this article on 3 October. Two weeks later it published a letter drafted by Pigou and signed by Macgregor, Keynes, Layton, Pigou, Salter and Stamp stating the economic case for increased private and public spending in depressed conditions (JMK 21, 137–9). Robbins, with Gregory, Hayek and Plant, responded the next day, claiming it was not ‘a matter of indifference’ whether money was spent on consumption or investment. ‘We, on the contrary, believe that one of the main deficiencies of the world to-day is a deficiency of investment’, so that it was undesirable

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to discourage people from buying securities (and hence making money potentially available for investment). They objected even more strongly to increased public expenditure: borrowing for municipal swimming baths etc would mortgage the budgets of the future and tend to drive up interest rates, crowding out private investment. The original six wrote again (JMK 21, 139–40), pointing out that ‘This conception [of a limited supply of funds available for investment], though since its burial by Adam Smith it has enjoyed many resurrections, is an illusion.’ Or, as Robbins (1971a, 154) admitted, ‘Assuming that the original diagnosis of excessive financial ease and mistaken real investment was correct . . . to treat what developed subsequently in the way in which I then thought valid was as unsuitable as denying blankets and stimulants to a drunk who has fallen into an icy pond, on the ground that his original trouble was overheating.’ Pigou, like Meade and Harrod in Oxford who had sent a circular letter to The Times three months earlier, had hoped to demonstrate that the economics profession was generally in favour of increased spending in the slump. Beveridge and Cannan had been asked to sign Meade’s letter (Meade 2/5). They had refused; but Cannan was not wholly in agreement with Lionel, as he told him on 27 October (Cannan, RP). He agreed that local authorities rarely need encouragement to spend but not that they should be prevented from building swimming baths. ‘You Londoners never know anything about local affairs . . . or you would know that . . . the [central government] ministries have been refusing sanctions to local capital expenditure all over the country and thereby diminish[ing] the earnings of the constructional industries and the railways &c which depend largely on these industries.’ Furthermore, ‘Are you sure that the local finance in which everything is amortised in time [such as that for sewers and waterworks] . . . is so inferior to commercial, as anyone would gather from your manifesto?’ In correspondence over Robbins’s ‘Consumption and the trade cycle’ he was also clearly unsympathetic to the Austrian capital theory of which Lionel was enamoured (Cannan to LCR, 19 and 29 November 1932, Cannan, RP; LCR to Cannan, 24 November 1932, Cannan 1032). Cannan reviewed Lionel’s book for the Economic Journal (1932). Although he commented that ‘A teacher who tries to restrain what appear to him the vagaries of his old pupils when they have already reached the early stages of maturity and of the acquisition of reputation runs great risk of presenting a spectacle like that of the heroic hen which plunged into the Cherwell to rescue ducklings which she had fostered’, he was severely critical of Robbins’s critique of his own conception of economics as the science of

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wealth. Hayek was quite shocked by Cannan’s review, but Lionel was more upset by the adverse review by Piero Sraffa of Cambridge of Hayek’s book in the same journal, if only because, as Durbin realized, Lionel regarded Sraffa as a friend (Durbin to LCR, 13 September 1932, London, RP). Since the summer Lionel had received consistently favourable reviews of his book in newspapers and magazines, and he was beginning to receive the equally complimentary comments of his colleagues and friends. Durbin, with his background in zoology, had some disagreements with the methodological position but he was very impressed with the last chapter on the significance of economics. Laski told Lionel that it was ‘a brilliant piece of logical and systematic argument’ and it ‘made me proud of you, a little as pupil, even more as colleague’; Viner that ‘There is almost nothing in it with which I would take serious issue, and with most of it I am in violent agreement. It is an excellent piece of work and I am going to make my students read it next year.’ Mises intended to (and did) use it in his seminar in Vienna. R¨opke offered to translate it into German (though he thought Robbins and Max Weber had gone too far in their attitude towards value judgments).8 His older friends also read the book. Eddie Rose wrote on 25 March (Personal letters from Iris & Clive etc, RP) that he appreciated the literary style and ‘the steadfastness with which, with a kind of senatorial coyness, you avoid making any overt judgments of value. All the same, I wish you could bring yourself to penetrate this obscure & perilous region, & bring back some water of life for a parched humanity.’ He was also curious as to Lionel’s target in his peroration against irrationalists (where Durbin had spotted that Lionel had struck a blow against his younger self). Nathan Isaacs, on the other hand, characteristically composed a forty-page commentary, showing once more that he was still more of an empiricist (and a socialist) than Lionel (10 October 1932, N & S, RP). In the next eighteen months the Essay was the subject of several critical articles. In the Economic Journal the Oxford economist Lindley Fraser (1932) wrote on what he took to be the ‘main thesis’ of the book, namely that economists should not concern themselves with practical policy issues, particularly objecting to the apparent prohibition of welfare economics. Lionel drafted a note pointing out that Fraser had completely misunderstood him, but he did not submit it (ts ‘How do we want economists to behave? A comment’, Plant 223). The Cambridge literary journal founded by F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Scrutiny, published a lengthy piece asking ‘Will 8

Clippings of reviews and letters from Durbin nd, Laski 23 April, Mises 18 June, Viner 26 August, and R¨opke 8 December 1932, N & S, RP; Wintersemester 1933/34 Prof. Mises, Gaitskell B3.

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economics follow the Robbins road?’ (Kitchin 1933) with a reply by Batson (1933). Kitchin agreed with many of Robbins’s arguments, for instance on the distinction between economics as a science, which should not include ethical considerations, and the ‘art’ of political economy which should – but he thought Economics with a capital letter should comprise both. Thus, ‘In the main Professor Robbins’ contentions are unlikely (save on special points) to gain assent from his colleagues, at any rate from economists of the Cambridge school.’ Batson enjoyed pointing out that Joan Robinson’s Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933) successfully exemplified the deductivist methodological approach of Robbins’s Essay. Frank Knight (1934a), always a critical reviewer, was by his own standard complimentary: ‘Professor Robbins’ work, a transplanting onto English soil of the Austrian or “neo-Austrian” economics, is an improvement, in many respects, on the traditional British-Classical doctrine. . . . But only with qualifications can the book . . . be indorsed as a satisfactory treatment of its topic, for in spite of much insistence, of a rather too-much-protesting sort, on “precision”, and on being “scientific”, many of the positions taken fall considerably short of being thought out to definiteness and accuracy.’ Knight did not think economics could be a science, at least not of the deductive variety. He conceded, however, that ‘the space of this review could as easily have been filled with notation of particular features worthy of special commendation’. He explained to Robbins on 9 February 1934 that he had had to cut his article which had originally included those commendable features and sent him the uncut version (N & S Letters, RP). The most vociferous critic was Ralph W. Souter (1933a), a Marshallian (and Hegelian) economist, who was then teaching at Columbia University before returning to his native New Zealand (King ed 2007, 261–3). He saw Robbins’s book as an example of ‘a general theoretical trend – . . . on both sides of the Atlantic – toward static formalism’, a trend he found ‘disturbing’ as ‘a direct and unequivocal challenge to the integrity, continuity and further organic development of the true Classical Tradition’. Souter expanded his long article into a short book (1933b), which, as Knight pointed out in a devastating review (1934b), ‘becomes explicitly a defence of Marshall as a kind of hero-saint, with Robbins as the chief enemy’. Souter admitted to Dennis Robertson that Robbins’s book had ‘aroused my worst instincts’ and to Robbins himself a couple of years later that he had almost completed his own book when Lionel’s appeared and ‘it was the very clarity with which you spoke for “the enemy” in general that led me at the last minute to train my guns upon you (Why bother with Max Weber when I can demolish you?).’ When Machlup told Robbins that he had met Souter in New York

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and found him ‘better than his article’, Lionel responded: ‘Have you read his book? It’s much more violent than his article. But I can’t feel any bitterness about it it. He’s so desperately sincere and so obviously misinformed about nearly everything he attacks. I certainly shan’t make any reply: it would be perfectly impossible to make an interesting article out of a critique of these tortured and needlessly obscure sentences.’9 As Machlup (1936, 39) remarked, Souter’s book was ‘more heavily interlarded with Hegelian philosophy than a normal economist can stand’. By 1932 Lionel’s sister Caroline had been teaching at Bryn Mawr for three years. On 21 September she married Joe Herben, a professor of English there. She did not tell her father before the event – partly because she ‘didn’t think he would like me marrying an American’ – and he was furious. After inflicting on Lionel in the middle of October ‘several lengthy phone conversations each one more gloomy than the last’, he went up to town to read Lionel the stiff letter he had written his daughter. Lionel wrote to his sister on 31 October, trying to explain his father’s attitude – ‘he simply doesn’t understand that not consulting him can imply anything but what he calls a “lack of confidence” [and] this makes him intensely miserable’ – but mainly to say that he was very much on his sister’s side. It was a long letter: Iris, who was watching him write it, commented ‘like father like son for length at any rate’. He encouraged Caroline and Joe to visit her parents; when they did so a couple of years later he and Joe took to each other at once (LCR to RRR, 9 September 1934). Caroline had described him to Lionel on 19 October 1932 as ‘something of a giant [at 6’4”], about your own age and with your own passion for the south of France. Also Bach Brahms and the modern French. Also philology by which he keeps himself, poetry of most kinds, ghost stories . . . P.G. Wodehouse and the usual movies. He is amazingly well informed and could I suppose shine if he wished . . . [but in] candour I don’t think he will. He loves teaching and loafing combined. . . . He is by the way promising to read your book in the near future.’ On 30 January 1933 President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor of the German Reich. In February Lionel talked both to the Marshall Society at Cambridge and to the Jowett Society at Oxford, the latter at the invitation of Roy Harrod, who gave a paper in the LSE seminar in return (Besomi ed 2003, 204). In Cambridge he talked on the theory of costs, as he was to do in Vienna; 9

Souter to Robertson, 1 November 1933, Robertson Papers; Souter to LCR, 23 December 1935, Correspondence, RP; Machlup to LCR, 26 October 1933, Vienna, RP; LCR to Machlup, 14 January 1934, Machlup 61–1.

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in Oxford he talked on the (nonexistent) relation between psychology and economics, a paper which he published after he had given it again in Manchester (G.W. Daniels to LCR, 9 January, and T.S. Ashton to LCR, 23 November 1933, Letters from Economists, RP; Robbins 1934f). The main topic for the LSE seminar, which Hayek and Robbins were jointly running in 1932/3, was ‘Collective Economics’ but Harrod spoke on utility, on a day chosen so that Paul Rosenstein-Rodan from Vienna could be there (Harrod to LCR, 26 February 1933, Letters to Economists, RP). Rosenstein was already well known as an economic theorist, having contributed the entry on ‘Grenznutzen’ (marginal utility) to the Handw¨orterbuch der Staatswissenschaften in 1927; he was at UCL on a Rockefeller Travelling Fellowship and became a close friend of Hugh Gaitskell (Postan 1971, 172). Hayek gave his inaugural lecture at LSE, ‘The trend of economic thinking’, on 1 March. On the same day Wilhelm R¨opke wrote Robbins a very disturbing letter (N & S, RP). He told him that he had been unable to find a publisher for a German translation of Nature and Significance. Mohr in T¨ubingen and Fischer in Jena had declined politely but definitely, saying that their publishing programme for this year were already filled up. I am afraid that other publishers may say the same if Mohr and Fischer who always lend a willng ear to my suggestions see no chance for your book. I would, however, try other publishers were not the present political situation in Germany so hopeless and distressing. The whole atmosphere is so laden with dynamite that nobody can tell what the next minute will bring. I am extremely pessimistic about any chance of avoiding the fate of Italy [under Mussolini] on an even greater scale. What that means for a liberal-minded man like myself can easily be imagined, but I simply do not know what to do because I have a wife and three children. The situation is desperate as it never was before. Even the secrecy of correspondence is not respected any more as you know perhaps.

The letter, unlike previous letters from R¨opke, was written in English. On 13–16 March The Times published Keynes’s articles on ‘The means to prosperity’ (JMK 9, 335–66), in which he advocated, more strongly than previously, loan-financed public works as a way to reduce unemployment. Keynes also recommended a plan for an international currency issue devised by Hubert Henderson and himself as a proposal for the forthcoming World Economic Conference in June and July. It is perhaps surprising that neither Robbins nor Hayek responded in the press to these articles. Lionel reacted publicly only to a reference in The Spectator to ‘The London school, all for continued deflation’. ‘I know of no economist, at present domiciled in London,’ he wrote indignantly to the editor on 24 March, ‘who stands (or who has stood) for a policy of “continued deflation” . . . A London school

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of deflationists is a figment of your contributor’s imagination’ (clipping in Controversies 1929–32, RP). During the Easter vacation Lionel and Iris went to Vienna, where, as arranged with Machlup, on 7 April Lionel gave his lecture to the National¨okonomische Gesellschaft on ‘certain aspects of the theory of costs’ (Machlup to LCR, 17 September and 30 October [1932], Vienna, RP; Robbins 1934a). The first aspect was whether the opportunity cost of a good or service is better expressed in the terms of the value of the other goods and services foregone (as Wicksteed and most Austrians believed) or in terms of physical quantities (as Knight had argued in 1928). Robbins argued for the former: ‘The price which the entrepreneur pays for the factors of production which he uses is determined not by the number of products which they can produce elsewhere, but by the value of such products.’ The second and later parts of Lionel’s paper criticized Marshallian supply curves, whose limitations illustrated the inferiority of partial equilibrium as compared with general equilibrium analysis. Viner for one was unconvinced by Robbins’s arguments – according to Haberler (nd, Letters from Economists, RP), ‘He says that the English writers have said everything in the theory of cost, before the Austrians were born’ – and their friendly disagreement featured in their correspondence for several years (LCR to Viner, 18 December 1934, Viner to LCR, 7 January 1935, 14 December 1937, Viner 22–14). In Vienna the paper naturally went down well. On the way home Lionel and Iris went to Turin, meeting Rosenstein-Rodan who was lecturing there for a few weeks; ‘Rosie’ took them to meet the Italian economist (and later President of the Republic of Italy) Luigi Einaudi and inspect his magnificent library one evening (Faucci 1986, 231; Einaudi to LCR, 7 May 1933, Einaudi Papers; LCR to Einaudi, 9 March 1950, Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950, RP). Beveridge was also in Vienna in April 1933. According to his diary, he lunched with Lionel on the 12th and dined with both Iris and Lionel that night and the next. Robbins (1971a, 143–4) recalled one meeting: he and Iris had arranged . . . to spend the evening with von Mises, when we ran into Beveridge. . . . It was too late to change our commitment for the evening. It was arranged therefore that we should meet at the Hotel Bristol before going out to dinner and get von Mises to join us there. It thus came about that, as the three of us were sitting together exchanging impressions of travel, von Mises arrived with an evening paper carrying the shocking news of the first academic dismissals by the Nazis – Bonn, Mannheim, Kantorowicz and others. Was it not possible, he asked, to make some

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provision in Britain for the relief of such victims, of which the names mentioned were only the beginning of what, he assured us, was obviously to be an extensive persecution. This was one of Beveridge’s great moments. . . . Slumped in a chair, with his great head characteristically cupped in his fists, thinking aloud, he then and there outlined the basic plan of what became the famous Academic Assistance Council.

According to Beveridge (1959, 1), ‘As Mises read out the names to our growing indignation, Robbins and I decided that we would take action in the London School of Economics to help scholars in our subjects who should come under Hitler’s ban.’ The dismissals, under the Law for the Reconstitution of the Professional Civil Service of 7 April 1933, were only the beginning of a large-scale forced exodus of Jewish and liberal scholars and scientists from Nazi Germany. They took action at the beginning of the Summer term. On 3 May the director formally called the attention of the [Professorial] Council to the position of teachers in Continental Universities who were at present on compulsory leave of absence owing either to traces of Jewish ancestry or the fact of their holding Socialist Liberal or Pacificist opinions. He considered that this constituted a serious attack upon the whole principles of academic and scientific freedom of thought and he hoped that some action would be taken by British Universities in the matter. On the motion of Professor Power, seconded by Professor Robbins, it was agreed to appoint a small committee of the Council to consider the best means by which the School and its teachers might co-operate in making it financially possible for University teachers who have lost their posts for reasons of race, religion, or political opinion, to continue their scientific work.

The committee, comprising Theo Chorley, Laski, Webster, Dalton and A.V. Judges as well as Beveridge, Power and Robbins, was to meet the next day and report to a special Council meeting on 17 May. By that meeting the committee had met twice; had suggested that Moritz Bonn (or failing him Wilhelm R¨opke), Herman Kantorowicz of the University of Kiel and Karl Mannheim of the University of Frankfurt should be invited to the School as visiting lecturers; the governors had agreed; and the committee had agreed to ask LSE staff to contribute to a special fund to provide grants to other displaced teachers. ‘From figures submitted by Professor Robbins it appeared that a contribution averaging 3% of the salaries of professors, 2% of that of readers, and 1% of that of lecturers, with some contributions from other sections . . . such as the senior administrative staff . . . would produce a sum of approximately £1,000 a year.’

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On 7 June Beveridge reported to the Professorial Council that £900 had already been pledged for the first year, by sixty members of the staff and one of the governors, and £600 guaranteed for the three following years; two meetings of the trustees of the fund had been held and one offer of assistance already made and accepted. The director had made the invitations to Bonn, Kantorowicz and Mannheim (Emergency Committee 4 May). Beveridge had also had discussions in Cambridge with the historian George Trevelyan, the biochemist Frederick Gowland Hopkins and the physicist Lord Rutherford. They had drafted an appeal to go out from the Royal Society for the establishment of an Academic Assistance Council with Rutherford as its president. When the Council held its first meeting on 1 June, the appeal had already raised £10,000. Beveridge persuaded a young historian, Walter Adams, to give up his lectureship at UCL to become its first fulltime secretary (Beveridge 1959, 2–6; Dahrendorf 1995, 288–9). For the next three years the LSE Academic Freedom Committee met every six months or so to decide how to allocate the money that was coming in by payroll deduction from the LSE staff. The day-to-day administration fell to Robbins, who with David Hughes Parry, Professor of English Law, was appointed secretary in order to handle the correspondence, investigate urgent cases and communicate with the Academic Assistance Council (minutes in COLL MISC 683/1, and Academic Freedom Committee, Correspondence and Personnel Sub-Committee, Memorandum on Procedure, COLL MISC 683/2). Their first recorded decision on 14 June was to make a grant of £25 a month for three months to Jacob Marschak ‘in order to enable him to complete the piece of statistical research [on demand analysis] described in his letter to Prof. Robbins’. This tided him over until he could take up the lectureship he had been offered at All Souls Oxford in the autumn; two years later he became the first director of the new Oxford Institute of Statistics (Hagemann 2007, 336–7).10 The intellectual and social life of the School in the Summer term 1933 was lively. An American graduate student, Alan Sweezy, spending the academic year in Vienna, came for three weeks to visit his brother Paul, a PhD student at Harvard, who was spending the year at LSE. He wrote to Haberler in Vienna soon after he arrived (Haberler 66): ‘I have already met most of Paul’s friends – notably Lerner, Arakie, Adler, Emanuel, Neuman, Edelberg and others – and have a chance to see them practically every day. The 10

For the committee’s later decisions see the next chapter.

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student life is well developed at the London School – the concentration of all activities in the one building, including tea and recreation, brings the students very frequently together – and with the present group of brilliant graduate students is of course very interesting.’ By far the best student was Lerner, who had ‘an extraordinarily clear and fruitful analytical mind’ and ‘a much more mature conception of the nature and purposes of economics than the others’. Lerner was about to give a paper to the graduate seminar on the Optimum Price: ‘fundamentally Pigouvian I think, though diferent in many details – which brings up a whole flock of subtle and bristly points. It will be a real test for Robbins, Hicks, Hayek, Kaldor, etc. to see what they can do with it.’ Lerner’s ability was a great help to his fellow students: when Andrew Neuman, a Polish doctoral student, published his dissertation on the British coal industry (1934), he thanked Lerner along with Robbins and Rosenstein for help on points of theory. Sweezy was nonetheless critical of the emphasis on pure theory, which he attributed partly to Rosenstein’s influence. The ‘chief event’ during Sweezy’s spring 1933 visit was four lectures by Arthur Marget of the University of Minnesota on the Natural Rate of Interest, of which the first at least was ‘very elegant and amusing’. A month later Schumpeter, at the end of his first year at Harvard, was in London for two weeks, followed by his now colleague Frank Taussig (Allen 1991b, 2; Beveridge to Taussig, 12 June 1933, Beveridge IIb32). R¨opke also visited at the end of June; he was still at the University of Marburg but his position was ‘an extremely precarious one’ (Academic Freedom Committee 14 June 1933, COLL MISC 683/1; R¨opke to LCR, 6/11.33, Letters from Economists, RP). Lionel was himself ‘very unwell’ during the term, ‘under doctors’ orders . . . to confine [his] activities to work which was absolutely essential for the carrying on of the department’, as he told Frank Knight on 20 July (Knight 61–17). In spite of illness he contributed an article to The Times on 20 June on international currency systems (1933), again coming down in favour of the gold standard as superior to the various proposals for managed paper currencies. The subject was topical, for the World Monetary and Economic Conference had opened in London on 12 June. The conference achieved almost nothing, effectively destroyed by US President Roosevelt’s ‘bombshell’ message of 3 July refusing to join in any plan for exchange stabilization. (The USA had gone off gold when Roosevelt took office in March 1933.) Before the conference disbanded Robbins attended two gatherings of economists and delegates: a lunch given by Gregory and a dinner hosted by Alexander Loveday, director of the Financial Section of

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the League of Nations. Per Jacobsson, the Swedish manager of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, recorded in his diary for 28 June: ‘Lunch: Gregory (whom I liked), Hayek (whom I did not like), Lionel Robbins, . . . I liked Gregory very much. . . . I liked Hayek less: he seemed to be a primadonna wanting admiration. Lionel Robbins made no distinct impression.’ Despite the last remark Robbins and Jacobsson agreed to dine together at the Reform on 5 July but Jacobsson cancelled because of the commotion at the conference (Jacobsson to LCR, 3 July 1933, Jacobsson C 16). Lionel met Jacobsson again at Loveday’s dinner on 21 July, where he also met three of the major Australian economists of the interwar period, Douglas Copland (professor of economics at Melbourne), Edward Shann (professor of economics and history at the University of Western Australia) and Leslie Melville (economic adviser to the Commonwealth Bank, with whom he was to cross swords a decade later). Bertil Ohlin and the French economist Jacques Rueff were also there. According to Jacobsson’s diary, there was ‘Interesting discussion. Ohlin good – Rueff elegant and very clear but one sided.’ In August and September 1933 Iris and Lionel and the children took the family holiday in Austria that Fritz Hayek had been encouraging them to take since he and Lionel met in 1931. It was a long holiday – five or six weeks – and while they were away the Viners, who were going to spend the year in Geneva, stayed at 10 Meadway Close. As he reported to Viner on 31 August (Viner 22–14), the Robbinses first enjoyed ‘a kindly sun and a warm lake and a romantic horizon’ at St Gilgen in the Salzkammergut – in those days much less crowded than it is now. When the water of the Abersee began to feel cold at the end of August they went south to Carinthia, staying at the Villa Morak at Velden on the W¨orthersee: ‘The scenery is not so picturesque . . . but the weather is more reliable & the water is very warm indeed.’ They had had many visitors: ‘Mises spent a week with us and the Haberlers & the Machlups came down for a couple of days. Benham & his wife were here for part of the time & my parents-in-law & their family joined us in the middle of August. All very inimical to work – I have done little but read Haberler’s new book [1933] and one or two stray papers.’ (The conversations with Haberler and Machlup were, however, to bear fruit in the second edition of Robbins’s Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. He also later [1937a] reviewed Haberler’s book and its English translation.) As Lionel commented to Knight on 6 October (Knight 61–17), in spite of the developments in Germany, ‘In Central Europe this year there were

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still plenty of places where the sun was warm, the prospect bright and there was no danger of being overheard.’ The holiday ended, he told Viner on 18 September (Viner 22–14), with ‘a lovely journey back – Dolomites Unter Engadin Zurich etc. ending up with a glorious bathe at Calais before the boat went.’

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The LSE Michaelmas term 1933 began on 9 October. On 11 October the Academic Freedom Committee met again. Robbins reported upon the cases he had investigated since the spring. The committee decided to make grants to assist five people – Adolf L¨owe, Werner Friedrich Bruck, Charlotte Leubuscher, Eugen Fink and Robert Ren´e Kuczynski – and to use the balance of the fund for two fellowships for young scholars to continue their studies. For L¨owe, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Frankfurt since 1931, who already had a temporary position at the University of Manchester, the committee offered to finance a course of lectures by him at LSE. For Bruck, dismissed from his professorship of economics at the University of M¨unster, the committee agreed to pay £100 to University College Cardiff to help with his removal expenses and salary as a visiting professor. It awarded £100 to Leubuscher of the Friedrich Wilhems University of Berlin to enable her to spend the academic year at Girton College Cambridge.1 Lionel had heard of the predicament of Fink, the research assistant and collaborator of the retired professor of philosophy at Freiburg Edmund Husserl, from Felix Kaufmann, a young Viennese philosopher who was a friend of Haberler and Tugendhat: Kaufmann had studied under Husserl and had read Fink’s work (Fink 1995, xxi, lxxxi). Fink was not Jewish but by staying with Husserl who was, he could not complete his Habilitation under Husserl’s successor, the Nazi Martin Heidegger, thus depriving himself of an academic career – and of a living if the grant which supported him was not renewed (Bruzina 2004, 27–8, 36–44). The committee decided to offer him a grant of £100 but on 15 December Lionel reported that Fink had received assistance from another source. Kuczynski, who had been the Director of 1

The minutes and other papers of the Academic Freedom Committee are in COLL MISC 683/1–4, BLPES; information on the individuals assisted comes from Hagemann and Krohn (1999) except where otherwise noted.

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the Statistical Office of the City of Berlin in the 1920s and more recently at the Brookings Institution, came to the School as an assistant to the Professor of Social Biology Lancelot Hogben; the fund contributed £200 towards his salary. He was appointed Reader in Demography five years later. By the end of 1933 the fund was also helping to support at LSE Eugen Altschul and Moritz Julius Elsas from Frankfurt while they were working with Beveridge on the history of prices and the political scientist Hans Simons. On 15 December the two fellowships had been awarded to Alexander Elkin and Leo Gross, whose field was international law (Strauss and R¨oder 1980–3, 420). Harro Bernadelli, who had completed his doctorate on the methodology of economics at Frankfurt under Altschul in 1931, arrived in England too late to be considered for a fellowship; he attended the Robbins Seminar at LSE and Lionel, who thought him ‘by far the most distinguished of the younger men who have come under our observation’, successfully applied to the Academic Assistance Council on his behalf (LCR to Beveridge, 31 January, and LCR letter of support 14 February 1934, SPSL 228/6, Bodleian Library). The committee later (2 November 1934) decided to contribute to his support as a visiting research fellow at the University of Liverpool and to two others (Gustav Mayer and Otto Prausnitz) as well as to continue its grants to Kuczynski and Leubuscher. It had also decided to make another appeal for funds from the LSE staff and to use some of the funds for bursaries to students who had been displaced from Germany. Among the first to receive a bursary was Erwin Rothbarth, later known for his collaboration with Keynes in 1939–40 on national income estimates. In almost all cases the contribution of the fund for established scholars was intended to help the recipient until he or she could obtain permanent academic employment in Britain or elsewhere. Many of those helped moved on to the United States, several to the ‘University in Exile’ which opened at the New School for Social Research in New York City in October 1933 (Krohn 1993, 205–9; Mongiovi 1997, 383–403). Others, like Kuczynski, stayed at LSE, to its great benefit.2 Moritz Bonn arrived to take up his research professorship at the School in October 1933, as did the sociologist Karl Mannheim. Bonn stayed until his retirement in 1940 when he took up a series of visiting appointments in 2

Bernadelli went to the University of Rangoon in 1935 and soon regretted it. He managed to escape from Burma during the Second World War; after the war, again with LCR’s help, he made his career in New Zealand (Bernadelli to LCR, 5 June 1937, Letters from Economists 46–, Bernadelli to LCR, 27 June 1947, Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47; LCR to J.W. Hayward, 24 October 1950, Testimonials 1.9.50–31/3/53; Bernadelli to LCR, 17 August 1961, Economists Correspondence January 1960-September 1961, RP).

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North America (Bonn 1948), Mannheim until 1945 when he moved to the University of London Institute of Education, only two years before his early death. When Bonn gave his inaugural lecture, ‘The age of countercolonisation’, on 19 October, he received ‘a great welcome’ (Mrs Mair quoted by Dahrendorf 1995, 294): ‘Robbins made an admirable introduction, and students packed the theatre, standing patiently to hear it all. It was indeed both remarkable and moving.’ According to Krohn (1996, 190), L¨owe obtained his position at Manchester on the recommendation of Robbins. Lionel also made representations there on behalf of Wilhelm R¨opke to Professor G.W. Daniels, who wrote to R¨opke with a fairly generous offer for two years. R¨opke also had an offer of a chair for five years at the University of Constantinople where the government of the reforming Mustafa Kemal ‘Ataturk’ was taking the opportunity provided by Hitler to bring in eminent German academics to modernize Turkish higher education (Buhbe 1997, 411–36). R¨opke would have preferred Manchester in spite of the lower salary and less attractive city, but the German government was prepared to provide a pension and assurances that his mother in Germany would be protected (R¨opke was not a Jew, ‘only’ a liberal) if he went to Turkey. As he put it to Lionel on 9 September (Letters from Economists, RP), ‘The government knows quite well that it would be very foolish to let me represent German science in Turkey without some window-dressing, concealing the fact that I am decidedly unwanted at home.’ R¨opke and his family moved to Constantinople in October 1933, staying until 1937 when William Rappard, on Lionel’s initiative, offered R¨opke a position at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. Robbins’s Austrian friends, seeing the writing on the wall, were beginning to leave Vienna. In the autumn of 1933 Haberler was offered the task of undertaking an enquiry into the causes of business cycles for the League of Nations (Haberler to LCR, December 1933, Letters from Economists, RP; Haberler 1937). He was in Geneva from February 1934 until 1936, when he was appointed a professor at Harvard. Machlup, taking leave from the family business, sailed with his wife to New York in October 1933, on a Rockefeller Fellowship; he spent a term at Harvard before driving across America to visit several other universities (Machlup to LCR, 26 October 1933 and 8 April 1934, Vienna, RP). Mises remained in Vienna for another year before moving to Rappard’s Institute in Geneva. Rosenstein-Rodan did not return to Vienna: UCL appointed him a special lecturer in the history of economic thought, until 1937 when he became a permanent lecturer (and a

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year later reader) in political economy. For the first couple of years he shared a flat in Mecklenburgh Square with Nicholas Kaldor and another Hungarian economist, Thomas Balogh, who was working in the City (information from Clarisse Kaldor). Kaufmann, who like Machlup and Mises did not have an academic position, remained in Vienna until 1938, when he emigrated to the New School. In June 1933 Robbins had been asked to join a Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) study group on International Monetary Problems. The group, which had been formed in July 1932 to review, according to its terms of reference, the problems involved in the establishment of an international monetary standard and also to determine the most effective way of raising prices, included the international banker Sir Charles Addis as chairman, Henry Clay, Noel Hall, Hubert Henderson, Oscar Hobson, Jules Menken, Dennis Robertson and Arthur Salter. It had published its first report, Monetary Policy and the Depression, in May 1933.3 Clay and Salter then resigned and the group agreed to approach Robbins and Harrod. The intention at that stage was to produce another book under a title such as ‘International and National Monetary Policies’. Robbins’s response to the invitation from Stephen King-Hall, Secretary of the RIIA Study Groups Department, was that ‘He is anxious to do anything he can to assist in the exposition of informal points of view on monetary questions but he does not feel that he is in a position at present to know whether he could most usefully help in this matter as a member of the Group or as an authority technically outside the Group but in contact with its work through the Secretariat.’ King-Hall therefore suggested he attend the group’s next lunch meeting on 5 July, which he did, before the group took a break for the summer.4 When the group resumed its fortnightly meetings on 28 September, it discussed a paper by Henderson (Clay ed 1955, 110–25). Lionel had not said much at the meeting in July – as he had commented then, ‘One should be quiet at the first meeting of a Committee’ – and he said relatively little at his second meeting, since he was in agreement with much of Henderson’s analysis of the international monetary problem. He disagreed with him over the desirability of an ultimate return to the gold standard and when, towards the end of the meeting, Menken asked whether it would be possible ‘to have Professor Robbins state whether in his view it would be desirable to try and 3 4

The records of the group are in 9/6, RIIA Archives. 9/6g Stephen King-Hall, Note by The Study Groups Department, 23 June, and 9/6h Note by Stephen King-Hall, 27 June 1933, 9/6x Group VI: International Monetary Problems, 9th meeting, RIIA Archives.

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re-establish the conditions in which there are automatic adjustments, or comparatively automatic adjustments, a pre-war gold standard, or whether those conditions do exist or are likely to exist in the near future’, Robbins responded characteristically: although it was short notice to produce a paper for the next meeting on 14 October, ‘I will make an attempt.’ In the paper (9/6cc, Note for Second Autumn Discussions, ‘The international monetary problem’) he restated his case for the ‘old-fashioned’ gold standard as a lesser evil than either freely floating currencies, which were seriously damaging world trade, or fixed but adjustable exchange rates, which were impractical and unlikely to be sustainable: ‘The most important advantages of the gold standard, in my judgment, are of a negative character. It does nothing to lead us to heaven, but it goes less obviously in the opposite direction than the alternative policies.’ According to the record of the next meeting on 28 September, Harrod, who opened the discussion of Robbins’s paper, could not ‘take such a rosy view as he does about the possibilities of the gold standard’, nor did he share his fears about all the alternatives. Henderson, who had been active in trying to devise a managed international currency system, before and after the failed World Economic Conference (Howson and Winch 1977, 114– 21), also wanted Robbins ‘to face candidly all the difficulties of a restoration of the gold standard’ now that it had already broken down twice since 1914. Hobson supported Robbins; the others were inclined to side with Harrod and Henderson. The discussion of Robbins’s paper at this and the next meeting on 26 October continued for so long, especially when the tiresome Menken posed a long string of questions, that he had to reply to his critics in writing. He took up the challenges posed especially by Harrod and Robertson to his interpretation of history, contending that the postwar experience with the restored gold standard corroborated rather than refuted his views: in 1925–9 ‘the ideas not of the Gold Standard school but of the price stabilisers have had full sway . . . [with] considerations of internal price stability . . . given priority over considerations of international equilibrium’, so that it was not surprising the gold standard had not worked satisfactorily. He went on to make ‘a perfectly clear breast of the matter’ that he was ‘definitely opposed to the policy of stabilising the general price level’ in one country or in the world as a whole. He argued forcefully that the gold standard ‘compared with the available alternatives, . . . is the best we can hope for . . . [and that] the proposals of Mr Henderson and Mr Harrod will create just those risks and difficulties which . . . they are equally designed to avoid. I am not particularly optimistic about the future in any case, and I will join enthusiastically with Mr Henderson in describing the Gold Standard, as I

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want it, as the frying pan, if he will join me in recognising that the alternative he has put forward is the fire.’5 Lionel took part in the group’s discussions on 23 November and 7 December, finding himself in less disagreement with his friends when they focussed on the importance of international lending. In the spring of 1934 he missed the first of the meetings which considered a draft report written by the group’s secretary Alec Grant on 22 March. For the second on 31 May the members of the group had answered a questionnaire in order to help them agree on the conclusions of the report. Given his divergent answers to the various questions, Lionel raised the possibility that the report be published under Grant’s name, but the others preferred to follow the usual RIIA practice of describing it as a collaborative effort, albeit after extensive revisions. As Robertson noted of the final draft, although he thought the difference of opinion on the question of an early return to gold had been unduly fudged, ‘apart from that the numerous members of the C[ommit]tee who are only too ready to ride off on their several hobby-horses have been restrained’ (Besomi ed 2003, 291–2). Lionel attended the remaining meetings on 14 and 28 June but he did not sign the report. As the foreword said (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1935, v), the group was ‘indebted to Professor Lionel Robbins, who took part in a large number of its discussions but is unable to accept the general standpoint of the Report’ – which reflected the majority preference for price stability over exchange stabilization: the minority Addis, Hall and Hobson recorded their dissent within the report (Dayer 1998, 250). Robbins enjoyed a better opportunity to express his views on economic policy when he gave four Saturday afternoon lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, on the ‘Course and Causes of the World Depression’, in October and November 1933 (ms notes in Great Depression, RP). On 14 January he told Fritz Machlup (Machlup 61–1) that ‘it seemed worthwhile trying to make them into a book which should be at once an explanation of the chief events of recent economic history and a sort of running commentary on current policy’. He had thought he could finish it by Christmas 1933 but he was still two chapters from the end. He completed it by the end of the Lent term and sent the manuscript, then entitled ‘World Depression’, to Macmillan who were happy to publish it on the same terms as his Nature and Significance (Harold Macmillan to LCR, 21 March 1934, Letters on GD, RP). 5

9/6dd, The International Monetary Problem – A Reply to Critics, 7 November 1933. He answered Menken’s fourteen questions in a brief appendix.

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In his first lecture Robbins described the course of the depression to date, taking the story back to the war: ‘World depression may be dated from 1929. But causes go back much further. 1914. [1933 is] XIXth year of World Crisis.’ He singled out four consequences of the war: structural changes such as new countries; reduced flexibility in economic organization with the growth of cartels and trusts; monetary instability; wartime consumption of capital and the creation of postwar debt. After the postwar inflation and collapse, ‘Gradually some order [was] established’ and there followed the ‘Halycon days 1925–29’, but ‘to any one who could see clearly [it was a] position of great peril . . . if & when forces making for prosperity slackened recession likely to be worse than usual.’ He divided the ensuing depression into three phases (1929–30 with falling interest rates, 1930–1 with deepening depression ending with financial crises and 1931 onwards with fluctuating currencies), illustrating them with many striking statistics. In his second lecture on the causes of the depression he considered and dismissed overproduction, falling agricultural prices, deflationary monetary policy, and a shortage or maldistribution of gold as explanations. In his third he outlined an alternative hypothesis, a ‘theoretical explanation . . . [to be] submit[ted] to test of facts’. After indicating the role of interest rates in determining capital investment in different industries, he described the effects of an expansion of bank credit brought about by a lowering of interest rates without an increase in savings. The production of capital goods will increase and the incomes of their producers, including wage earners, will rise, increasing the demand for consumers’ goods. As consumers’ goods producers compete with capital goods producers for factors of production and for bank loans, factor prices and interest rates will rise, confounding the initial expectations of capital goods producers. Sooner or later they will be obliged to reduce their investment and depression ensues. ‘If this is so we can say that the cause [of] depression is a previous boom & the cause [of] boom is a monetary inflation.’ Although he did not say so, this was an ‘Austrian’ hypothesis but one also put forward earlier by Robertson. It tallied with the facts given the misguided monetary policies of the US Federal Reserve System which had allowed the stock exchange boom to get out of control and result in the Wall Street crash of 1929. But it did not explain the severity of the slump. In his final lecture he provided an account of the complex of circumstances, including the politics and economics of the postwar world and the trade and monetary policies since the onset of the slump, which had combined to prolong and deepen the world depression. The recent breakup of the World Economic Conference introduced a new era of uncertainty. Although he had

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‘believe[d] slow recovery possible before new policy [of US President] Roosevelt, whether [it is possible] now much more difficult [to] say’. He viewed recent developments – which included the US Administration’s attempt to raise commodity prices by buying gold – ‘with very grave misgivings’. On 5–7 January 1934 Lionel attended the AUTE meeting again, held this year at Leeds, and presented a paper on the Saturday afternoon on the difficulties of teaching economic theory (ts in Articles & Notes, RP). He was concerned, he said, that what was taught to first year students in the attempt to be relevant often meant they were given oversimplifications: ‘Actual cases studied before abstractions as though in physics asked to explain avalanches & thunderstorms before simple theory [of] statics.’ He thought there was a case for ‘reversing present custom – practised now at L.S.E. – of keeping so-called “abstract theory” till end’; it would be better to start that way. ‘No difficulty in teaching if students prepared to work as at natural science.’ Beveridge in the audience was unconvinced, recording in his diary (6 January 1934) that ‘Robbins . . . would like to teach first year pure theory (indifference curves). In role of intelligent business man I argued for theory + laboratory (i.e. course on “Current Problems”).’ As for what should be taught, Lionel emphasized the wide areas over which there was general agreement among economists even in the midst of current controversies; but there was a ‘Great need [for a] textbook – do for general theory what e.g. Haberler has done for international trade theory: Wise eclecticism.’ In the meantime he had to use a combination of ‘Wicksteed Wicksell Knight Mises . . . judiciously chosen articles, and last but not least Marshall.’ He closed with a ‘plea for not throwing baby out with bath here. Many things in Marshall[’s Principles] would put differently. Still incomparably best general introduction to all problems.’6 On the Saturday evening and Sunday morning the conference discussed the US National Industrial Recovery and Agricultural Adjustment Acts. When Lionel wrote to Machlup in January 1934 he described the meeting: ‘There were about fifty present, chiefly people from the provinces – the Keynes crowd being conspicuous by its absence. It was very gratifying to see how opinion has swung round to our point of view in the last two years. We had a discussion on the policy of going back to the 1924 price level. There were scarcely any voices in favour & those who at earlier meetings had been most critical of the London Group were really very friendly & 6

In his reading list for his Principles of Economic Analysis course, LCR starred three books as ‘indispensable’ for passing the final examination: Marshall’s Principles, Pigou’s Economics of Welfare and Cannan’s Review of Economic Theory – in that order.

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much more willing to admit that we had been at least partly right. You see the president [Roosevelt] is not without his uses!’ Lionel told Machlup of the progress of his own work – although not that he had been editing the translation of Wicksell’s Lectures on Political Economy, with the help of his former student Solomon Adler and his research assistant Stanley Tucker; he wrote a lengthy introduction once he had finished turning his Royal Institution lectures into a book (Wicksell 1934/5, vii–xix). He also told Machlup of recent activities at the School. The pioneering econometrician Henry Schultz of the University of Chicago had been in London and Lionel had been impressed: ‘We all liked him very much. He is really a very good economist: knows the literature inside out and loves the subject. He read a paper on his [statistical demand] curves at the [London] Economic Club. Would that the other statisticians were so aware of the difficulties.’7 In the seminar there had been ‘some very fruitful discussions on the pure theory of value. Hicks and D. Allen have discovered some new formulae which have really path breaking significance and should do much to unify views on this fascinating subject. You will see the first fruits in the first number of the new Economica [Allen and Hicks 1934].’ Hayek had an article on capital theory coming out in the Economic Journal (1934), and Rosenstein-Rodan, who was ‘a great success’ as a lecturer at UCL, one in Economica (1934). Rosenstein enjoyed the ‘very active theoretical life’ at LSE which, he told Haberler on 1 February (Haberler 65), was not only a revival of old issues but genuinely new thoughts. On complementarity (a topic in the theory of consumer demand on which Rosenstein had been working: Rosenstein-Rodan 1933) there had been three or four weeks of discussion involving especially Hicks, Kaldor and Erik Lindahl who was visiting from Stockholm. It is appropriate at this point to discuss the seminar at length: 1933–6 were the peak years of the seminar for its intellectual excitement and its contribution to the development of economic theory. Plant had joined Robbins and Hayek in running the seminar in 1932/3: the three ran it jointly until 1937 (LSE Calendars). From 1934/5 Hayek ran a separate seminar on Wednesday evenings, which he had started the previous year as a class for graduate students writing theses on topics in capital theory. Although this was largely for his own students, other graduate students and some lecturers would come along. It was for that seminar in the spring of 1935 that the Canadian Robert Bryce, a research student in Cambridge, wrote his evangelical paper on Keynes’s theory as he had 7

On LCR’s views on Schultz’s work see page 257.

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understood it from Keynes’s lectures (Bryce 1978, 40; JMK 29, 131–50). Most recollections, however, are of the ‘Grand Seminar’, especially in 1933/4– 1936/7 when it took place on Monday afternoons. From these recollections and from unpublished correspondence as well as the LSE Calendars one can identify the general topics chosen for each year’s discussions and the regular participants. In 1930/1 there were two topics: cycle theory and trade theory; in 1931/2 and 1932/3 the topics were, at Hayek’s request, capital theory and collectivist economics respectively; in 1933/4, as Robbins told Machlup, the theory of value. In 1934/5 the seminar focussed on imperfect competition following the publication of Joan Robinson’s and Chamberlin’s books in 1933, in 1935/6 international trade following the publication of Haberler 1933 and Ohlin 1933 (Professor A.K. Dasgupta interviewed by Professor Partha Dasgupta in India 2 August 1988, LSE Oral History, BLPES). It was Robbins who set the general subject for the year. He would then allocate seven or eight specific topics for papers to the graduate student members of the seminar. The students’ papers were supposed to be brief and to raise issues; they were usually circulated in advance of their first discussion, which would be of the general ideas in the paper, and discussed in detail at subsequent meetings. Tibor Scitovsky, an MSc(Econ) student 1935–8, remembered (Shehadi Transcripts, BLPES): ‘What happened was that at the beginning of term Robbins assigned different students to different papers, and then in the process of discussing the papers some faculty members got good ideas that could extend the argument in such and such a direction, and then that person would be asked to give an extra paper at that stage.’ As Scitovsky’s account implies, Robbins’s procedure did not prevent faculty members from giving papers: many famous journal articles by LSE staff first saw the light of day, and the heat of discussion, as papers in the seminar. In addition there were papers by visitors from other universities, often but not invariably on the subject for the year. The seminar soon increased in size, becoming, as Hayek described it (FAH 9, 56), ‘a fairly large group, some thirty or forty students and often half a dozen members of the staff participating’, with ‘a continuous flow of foreign, chiefly American, visitors and students, who greatly enriched the discussion’. At the same time it ‘preserved an intimate character through the informal development of a sort of front bench of the older members and more active participants in the discussion, while the newer members would at first mainly listen and gradually, on the strength of the contributions, advance to the front row – or rather to that circle of students and faculty among whom the conversation mainly took place’. In the first half of the 1930s the circle included Hicks, Allen, Kaldor and Lerner.

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Hayek particularly remembered the discussions which resulted in the Hicks–Allen articles (1934) and Hicks’s Value and Capital (1939). Allen and Hicks followed the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto in using the technique of indifference curves devised by Edgeworth, rather than marginal utility theory, to explain consumer behaviour, thus eliminating the need to rely on the unmeasurable concept of utility. (The drawing of indifference curves showing quantities of goods between which an individual consumer is indifferent requires assuming only that the consumer has an ordinal scale of preferences.) The resulting analysis also resolved a complex of knotty problems about competing and complementary goods. Hicks, who was awarded a Nobel Memorial Prize in 1972, wrote (1939, vi) that the ideas in his book were conceived at LSE in 1930–5: ‘They were not by any means entirely my own ideas; they came into being by a sort of social process which went on among the people who were working there, at that time, under the leadership of Professor Robbins. Those whom I remember particularly as having contributed were Mr R.G.D. Allen, Mr Kaldor, Mr Lerner, Professor Hayek, Dr Rosenstein-Rodan and Dr Edelberg.’ He told Lionel himself later (14 January 1964, Special Letters, RP) that his years at LSE were ‘the formative years of my life as an economist; I do not think I have had as important years since.’ Robbins (1971a, 131–2) recalled the Allen–Hicks articles, chapters of Hayek’s book on capital theory (1941), and articles by Plant (1934), Lerner (1952), Kaldor (1934a) and Edelberg (1933) that were first presented to the seminar. A list of seminar participants for 1934–6 found in the Robbins Papers adds the names of Evan Durbin, Brinley Thomas, J.J. Anjara, G.L.S. Shackle, Marian Bowley, Frank Paish and Michal Kalecki. Kaldor was the most voluble and vigorous member of the seminar, usually remembered by other participants for his acrimonious disputes with Hayek in the later 1930s (Galbraith 1982, 78; Colander and Landreth eds 1996, 207–8). In 1935/6 he spent a year in the USA on a Rockefeller Travelling Fellowship, read Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) while he was there and returned to LSE a Keynesian. Earlier he contributed greatly to the discussions on imperfect competition (Kaldor 1934b and 1935). Dasgupta remembered him as the ‘bright young man, but Hicks was the one to whom Robbins turned when discussion got tough’; he also told his son that he thought Lerner was ‘the real star’ although Edelberg was almost as bright (information from Partha Dasgupta). According to the interview (LSE Oral History), When it was a discussion on Imperfect Competition, Kaldor probably was the person who would take the most leading part . . . [but] Lerner on the whole I suppose in every seminar would be taking the leading part in the sense that most of the students would ultimately turn to Lerner asking him what his reaction was on a particular

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point. And further discussion would go on . . . If there wasn’t a solution, in that case probably Robbins would just turn to Hicks and say ‘Hicks, do you have anything to say?’ Hicks would not be saying anything; he would be sitting in a corner. . . . [But] he would in his own way explain some of the things.

Lerner was the most prolific paper-giver among the students. From his first year as a graduate student came five published papers, including one of his most brilliant, ‘The concept of monopoly and the measurement of monopoly power’ (Lerner 1934; Scitovsky 1984, 1550). The following year he presented the first proof of the factor price equalization theorem (that under certain conditions international trade will equalize factor prices in different countries even when the factors themselves are not mobile between countries). This was not published until after Samuelson had produced his proof in 1949 and then only because Robbins remembered Lerner’s December 1933 paper of which he still had a copy (Lerner 1953, v). He and Ursula Webb and Paul Sweezy founded the Review of Economic Studies specifically for the publication of the work of the younger generation of economists. Its first issue in October 1933 included papers by both Cambridge (Richard Kahn and Joan Robinson) and LSE economists (Hicks, Lerner and Sweezy). Lerner and others had visited Cambridge to solicit contributions to their new journal and they started a joint London–Cambridge seminar to bridge the growing gap between the two ‘schools’ of economics, beginning with a weekend meeting at Newport, Essex (on the railway line between London and Cambridge) in August 1933 (Kahn 1984, 182–3; Colander and Landreth eds 1996, 87–91). Lerner himself spent six months in Cambridge in 1934/5 and became a Keynesian (Faculty Board 15 October 1934, UA Min v 117, CUL; Lerner 1944, viii). Amiya Kumar Dasgupta, who was already a lecturer at Dhaka University, had intended to study at Cambridge with Sraffa but on reading Lionel’s Nature and Significance decided he would prefer to work under Robbins. Lionel supervised his dissertation, on the idea of surplus in consumer theory and production analysis, which he completed in only two years (1934–6), but, as Robbins had predicted, he ‘got much more from Robbins’ seminars and acquaintance with some of the members of the seminar than I ever got from Robbins himself’ (Dasgupta 1942; Sen 1994; Dasgupta interview, LSE Oral History). His closest friend at LSE was Edelberg, who had been born and educated (until 1925) in Russia, completing his secondary education in London before entering LSE in 1928 (London School of Economics 1934). He graduated with a BSc(Econ) in 1931 and registered for a PhD under Robbins’s supervision. In October 1934, the second day Dasgupta met Robbins in his room, ‘he [LCR] asked me whether I was interested in ballet. I said I had never seen ballet. “You must see ballet”, he said. He gave

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his own experiences about how he was attracted by ballet dancing and so on and so forth. And then he just called Victor Edelberg to his room and introduced me to him saying “Victor, you must take charge of this young man and you must take him to the ballet to see Russian ballet”. So that was the beginning of my friendship with Victor Edelberg.’ Edelberg frequently took Dasgupta to his home as well as to the ballet. They would talk for hours in Dasgupta’s lodgings where Edelberg typed his second published paper (1936) on Dasgupta’s typewriter. He won the Hutchinson Silver Medal in 1935 for his dissertation, ‘Wages and capitalist production’ (Professorial Council 20 November 1935), and began to teach as an assistant lecturer in 1936. But in 1939 he suffered a severe mental breakdown from which he never really recovered. Lerner (born 1905) was somewhat older than the other LSE research students and already married. So was Dasgupta, who had had to leave his wife in India in order to study at LSE. Ursula Webb was older still – indeed she was older than Hayek and Robbins; born in 1896 she had read history at Somerville College Oxford, receiving her BA in 1918, and worked for several years as a WEA tutor before taking a second undergraduate degree at LSE. She was the ‘mother’ of the economics research students, a friend of all of them, and in that role served the tea at the end of every seminar. She joined the staff as an assistant lecturer in 1935 but as it turned out she did not stay long. She did, however, remain an editor of Review of Economic Studies for twenty-seven years. Lerner’s and Webb’s fellow students, Aaron Emanuel and Ralph Arakie, were members of the seminar in 1932–4 before they left for jobs overseas (London School of Economics 1935 and 1936). Paul Sweezy (Colander and Landreth eds 1996, 79) remembered Arakie as ‘very prominent at the time but who committed suicide later’; he published an article on trade cycle theory in Economica in 1937. Marian Bowley, a graduate of a year earlier, was less involved in the seminar as she was registered as an ‘occasional’ research student while she held temporary assistant lectureships elsewhere. She wrote an important book (1937a) on the classical economist Nassau Senior (1790–1864) under Robbins’s supervision. In June 1936 she was hired by the newly established Oxford Economists’ Research Group to carry out an enquiry into the causes of fluctuations in the building industry (Bowley 1937b and 1945).8 Jashwantrai Jayantilal Anjaria, MSc(Econ) 1936, was a friend of Dasgupta’s and of Tarlok Singh, who was at LSE 1933–6 taking a BSc(Econ) degree in 1935 and the Indian Civil Service examination a 8

Bowley was appointed to a lectureship at Dundee in 1938. After the Second World War she moved to UCL where she was successively lecturer, reader and professor until she retired in 1975.

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year later while in the first year of the MSc. Anjaria became the principal economist of the Indian Ministry of Finance and the Planning Commission in the 1950s and Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India in the 1960s (Anjaria to LCR, 14 March 1969, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 A-F, RP; Singh 1984). George Shackle arrived at LSE in January 1935. He had obtained an external London BA in 1931 while working as a schoolteacher. After reading Keynes’s Treatise on Money and Hayek’s Prices and Production he decided to aim for an academic career in economics, and he published a paper in the first issue of the Review of Economic Studies. Encouraged by Lerner and Webb to apply to LSE, he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Studentship which enabled him to embark on a PhD, and he began his thesis, under Hayek’s supervision, on Austrian capital theory (Ford 1994, 4–6). He found himself ‘instantly immersed in a tide of new ideas, thrilling debate [and] the writing of new books’ (ms notes, Shackle 9/13/49 London School of Economics Centenary, CUL). Hayek was lecturing on capital theory, Hicks on dynamics and Brinley Thomas, who had just returned from two years in Germany and Sweden, on the recent work of the Swedish school, while Evan Durbin, in a course on Consumers’ Purchasing Power and Economic Equilibrium, ‘examine[d] in detail the controversies centring upon the work of Mr Keynes and Professor von Hayek’ (LSE Calendar 1934–5). Shackle changed his thesis topic after hearing Joan Robinson and Richard Kahn lecturing in Cambridge on Keynes’s work (Harcourt 1993, 85). His dissertation, completed in 1937, was published in 1938 when Shackle was at the Oxford Institute of Statistics. Michal Kalecki was a later visitor to the seminar from Cambridge, where he arrived from Poland on a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1936 (Robinson 1978, xvi). Lionel did not appreciate his presence in the seminar. Encountering him again ten years later, he wrote in his journal (Journal of a Visit to the United States July–August 1949, American Journals, RP): Kalecki is a Polish economist, short, angular, shrill-voiced, insensitive and aggressive. . . . he is ultra-disputatious by nature and can spoil a discussion devoted to pure abstraction just as easily as one devoted to practical policy. How well I remember his weekly behaviour in my seminar – the legs twined together, the hands tightly clasped, the face tortured as in a Flemish primitive painting, and then the burst of harsh, uncontrollable song, as it were, a flood of crabbed sentences overwhelming, drowning everything and putting a stop to all orderly discussion.

Robbins’s role in his seminar was superficially modest but crucial to the proceedings. His practice was to get the discussion underway, helping out especially when a graduate student was giving the paper, and then let it

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proceed with little intervention. A Canadian graduate student, Benjamin Higgins, who was at the School for a MSc(Econ) in 1933–5, described it (1992, 7): ‘Robbins was a master at getting the most out of a seminar, and surrounded by stars as he was, his “most” was a source of continual excitement. He had a remarkable talent for synthesis. He would listen to the discussion raging around him, slumping deeper and deeper into his chair, his long legs stretched out further and further in front of him, his long hair falling further and further over his face. Then suddenly he would sit up straight, toss his mane back from his face, and in a few trenchant sentences summarize the essence of the discussion and state his views on the truths to be derived from it.’ A very new graduate student in 1938/9, Philip Clarke, who had been an undergraduate at LSE the previous two years, found it ‘a daunting experience with all the luminaries of LSE and visitors sitting round in comfort and clouds of cigarette smoke – LR went through a packet of ten in a session – charging off in pursuit of the latest topic’. But when the student had to open the discussion, Robbins ‘took the strain early off me by unleashing the pack. He sat in a canvas chair at one end of the room lightly guiding the debate and enjoying each thrust. One felt he liked to win but liked more the excitement of argument.’9 Turning back to 1934, Robbins had taken advantage of Viner’s being in Geneva to have him invited to give the annual Cobden Lectures at LSE, which he did on 16, 22 and 23 February, spending the intervening weekend with the Robbinses. Lionel persuaded him to speak on commercial policy: ‘I would dearly like to hear you on Money, but we have had a lot of lectures on this subject recently and not nearly enough on Commercial Policy. It would be the best thing which could happen to many of our younger men if they could be brought into contact with your methods of tackling these very difficult problems.’ He had also consulted Viner on 31 October 1933 about an invitation he had received to go to the University of Denver for up to a year. Viner, who thought Robbins ‘would [not] be happy there for more than a fortnight, unless it were in mountain climbing, which can be done nearer home’, advised him on 3 November to wait for a better offer from a more distinguished university (Viner 22–14). Robbins was also invited to give a paper at the newly established Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales in Paris by its president Charles Rist. Rist asked him on 18 January 1934 (Letters from Economists, RP) if he could talk about the forecasting 9

Recollections of Lionel Robbins from Philip Clarke, undergraduate and graduate student 1936–9.

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methods used by the London and Cambridge Economic Service; Lionel duly obliged. He spoke in French, apologizing to his audience that it was now sixteen years since he had been accustomed to do so as a subaltern in Flanders (ts Les Problemes de Prevision en Matiere Economique, and ts The Problems of Economic Forecasting, Applied Non Monetary, RP). He took the opportunity to expatiate on the limitations of statistical analysis. The work on demand by Henry Schultz, for instance, could produce an estimate of the elasticity of demand for a commodity over some past time period, which was useful as ‘a convenient shorthand note of recording the events of past history’ and in itself implied nothing about the future. But he was not the complete sceptic that Morgenstern (1928) had become, since in ‘quiet times’, when habits are not changing, quantitative information concerning the immediate past could help to make limited forecasts about the immediate future. The economic theories derived by deduction could be used to make predictions, and since they characteristically state that ‘if certain things are present and if conditions do not otherwise change, then certain consequences may be expected to follow’, the function of statistical services like the LCES was ‘to keep us informed of what things are present’. To illustrate, he described the meetings of the editorial committee: It is all very informal. Half a dozen friends sitting round a table . . . We start by reading aloud the diagnosis and the forecast of the previous [month’s] bulletin. We then examine the available materials to see in what respect if any we went wrong and to what extent we indicated the most important movements. This usually serves to induce a frame of mind of suitable humility for the main business of the meeting. The next step is to scrutinise one by one the movements of our various series to discover reasons for the movements. . . . Here we find the quantitative methods of seasonal analysis very helpful. I do not remember ever using very seriously the analysis of trends. . . . Finally comes the task of preparing the short diagnosis and forecast . . . [when] the role played by considerations of general theory and the qualitative factors in the situation becomes much greater. One by one the members of the committee state what they consider to be the significant elements in the situation. Discussion takes place and the different opinions are then collated by the editor.

A draft bulletin was then circulated and usually revised before publication a few days later.10 10

The talk was published in French (Robbins 1938d) and in a translation by Denis O’Brien (1988, 170–8). The members of the LCES editorial committee included Keynes and Robertson from Cambridge and Hayek, Plant and Robbins from LSE: Paish, The London and Cambridge Economic Service, January 1937, LSE 241B.

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The London School of Economics is a peculiar university institution: although a recognized college in the University of London it is a limited liability company incorporated under the Companies Acts; the governors are the directors of the company. The School has no charter or constitution. In the 1930s, in spite of the introduction of the Professorial Council, the role and responsibilities of the director, who was not a governor but secretary of the Court, were not formally defined. Beveridge, who chaired all the School committees, ran the School as a benevolent autocrat, though naturally enough he denied this (Harris 1997, 295–7). By 1934 the academic staff had begun to doubt the benevolence and resent the autocracy. There had already been the dispute between the professoriate and the director over the resolutions on political activities in 1931–2; Plant and Robbins had crossed swords with Beveridge over the Department of Business Administration; the faculty also regarded Beveridge as having foisted on them the Chair of Social Biology, occupied by the zoologist Lancelot Hogben, who had little in common with the social scientists (Dahrendorf 1995, 249–63; Hogben and Hogben eds 1998, 129–30). On 28 February 1934 the Professorial Council discussed a motion put by H.A. Smith, Professor of International Law, ‘That in the opinion of the Council it is desirable that the constitution of the School should be contained in a Royal Charter and that the School should be administered under a body of statutes enacted in accordance with the provisions of such Royal Charter.’ The result was a Constitution Committee, of which Robbins was a member along with Laski, T.H. Marshall (Reader in Sociology since 1930), Hughes Parry, Plant, Smith and Charles Webster (who held the Stephenson Chair in International History). The work of this committee was dilatory in the first year of its existence but the issues at stake are captured by Robbins in his autobiography (1971a, 138): ‘What is this allegation that I do not consult?’ he [Beveridge] said one day to a committee. . . . ‘I never act without consultation.’ ‘Director,’ replied H.A. Smith, the very right-wing Professor of International Law, . . . ‘dictators always consult somebody. But what we are here to establish is not consultation by choice but consultation by rule.’

Lionel had an ambivalent attitude to Beveridge’s dictatorship, out of loyalty and out of respect for what he had done for the School. He did in the end join the reformers but in the first half of 1934 he was still inclined to support Beveridge. In January 1934 the Marxist Society, through the Students’ Union, sought permission from the director for a room in which to hold five lectures on Marxist theory. The Union protested at Beveridge’s negative response which imposed severe restrictions on the proposed lectures: they could not be

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called ‘lectures’ but only meetings with addresses, they could be attended only by LSE students, they could not be advertized, etc etc. The tone of Beveridge’s replies to subsequent letters from the President of the Students’ Union, Frank Meyer, an American graduate student in anthropology, was both patronizing and provocative (Beveridge et al. 1934). Meanwhile the Student Vanguard, a leftwing student newspaper, appeared with an article on alleged spying on Indian students at Oxford and Cambridge, with an editorial note that Coatman, who had been an Indian civil servant, ‘fulfil[led] the same function’ at LSE. Beveridge banned the sale of the paper on 27 February; Meyer and five other members of the Union defied the ban. Beveridge sent for them and told them that they were suspended from LSE. They responded with a written apology, and a special meeting of the Emergency Committee on 5 March rescinded the suspension for four of the students but not for Meyer and the chairman of the Marxist Society, H.J. Simons, a South African graduate student. The Union sent a deputation to appeal for clemency; the Emergency Committee on 22 March upheld its earlier decision except for allowing that Simons might be readmitted after a year. Simons was readmitted but Meyer was forced to leave the country (Dahrendorf 1995, 274–7). Robbins was not involved in this episode but he had strong views on it – and supported Beveridge. In a reply to an enquiry from Harrod, who had known Meyer as a student at Balliol, he denounced Meyer on 2 May 1934 (BL ADD 71188, ff125–8): The common impression seems to be that M. was expelled on political grounds or for indulging in political propaganda. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was expelled because, in defiance of two friendly warnings, he persisted in circulating a very foul libel on John Coatman. . . . He was warned by Beveridge first in writing & then in an interview. It was carefully explained to him that the prohibition of the circulation of the Student Vanguard was instituted solely because of this cruel & untrue statement. His reply was that until it had been proved to be untrue in the Courts the School had no right to stop him circulating it. Having regard to this and to the fact that he was a paid servant [sic] of the School under a special obligation to loyalty & good behaviour I can’t see that there was anything to do but to turn him out . . . What you say about Meyer’s character is interesting. . . . But the fact is that he’s now about as rank bad as you could imagine – and his influence on younger men . . . pernicious. . . . To anyone who has seen things from the inside at the School during the last few months that he should be regarded as a martyr for liberty & progess would be comic if it weren’t so disillusioning. You are one of the very few Liberals who have been canvassed on his behalf, who have troubled to make further enquiries and who have refrained from flying immediately to the conclusion that an institution where, whatever the differences of opinion, academic freedom has

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been pursued almost above everything, should have suddenly turned, overnight as it were, into a set of Fascist reactionaries persecuting a poor devil because he happened to believe in the socialization of the means of production distribution & exchange.

The so-called Laski episode is often linked to the Vanguard troubles but the connection is the timing since Laski, who brought the Vanguard article to Coatman’s attention, thought the students’ actions in defying the ban indefensible. In February 1934 Beveridge complained to Laski about his writing articles for the Daily Herald, and in April he accused him of violating the resolutions on political activity that Beveridge had had such difficulty getting through the Professorial Council in 1932. Laski wanted the Emergency Committee to rule on this; the governors had no wish to become involved but they had to in July 1934 when Laski’s lectures in Moscow were adversely reported in the press and questions asked in Parliament (Kramnick and Sheerman 1993, 323–9; Dahrendorf 1995, 278– 80). Five LSE professors wrote to The Times to defend Laski and academic freedom; Robbins was not among them. On seeing Webster’s draft (Webster 1/13, BLPES), which strongly objected to the suggestion in a letter from the vice-chancellor of the University of London that Laski’s utterances might be investigated by a university body, he contemplated writing a letter of his own and warned Webster on 14 July that he would probably reply to his (Letters from Economists, RP). However, when the letter signed by Chorley, Gregory, Power, Tawney and Webster was published, he wrote Webster again on 19 July (Webster 1/13), to tell him that he would not be writing a letter after all since the University had given assurances that no punitive action was intended, although he still found Webster’s position hard to understand. Suppose that the following paragraph were to appear in the press. Professor Webster speaking at Perugia University yesterday said that speaking as a professor of the University of London he hoped that the young generation of Italian students would form revolutionary cells in all the Fascist universities. Your view apparently is that the University ought not to do anything to ascertain whether you said this or not. I cannot for the life of me see the justification for this. . . . Is not my view right that it should inquire &, if it discovers that you only said that you hoped that Italian youth etc., it should realize that regard for the principle of academic freedom precludes it from going any further? The principle that a man may say what he likes so long as he does not explicitly invoke his status in an institution of which he is part (or commit criminal libel etc.) seems to me to be a principle one can fight on. But I simply cannot see any ground for the view that an institution may not inquire whether its authority has been invoked or whether misconduct such as libel etc. falling outside the limit of academic freedom has been committed. I’m sure you would lose all along the line there.

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However there is no need to worry about that now. The main legacy of your letter, I fancy, will be a disposition on the part of our governors to limit us in various ways. I hear dark rumours of this already. But on this point, thank God, I don’t expect we disagree.

On the same day the Emergency Committee did indeed rule against Laski, who agreed to cease writing for the Daily Herald at the end of the summer vacation (Dahrendorf 1995, 282). Robbins’s relations with Laski were complicated. Much has been made of their political differences by Laski’s biographers and others. In March 1934 Beatrice Webb was worried that the trouble at the School was bound to become worse in the next decade, with students and staff increasingly polarized between left and right, with the professor of political science (Laski) on one side and the professor of economics (Robbins) on the other (MacKenzie and MacKenzie eds 1985, 329–30). This did not happen. While Robbins may not have had much intellectual respect for his former undergraduate supervisor, they were often on the same side in School disputes and increasingly so in the next three years in the struggles with Beveridge over the LSE constitution. They made a powerful combination. The Summer term issue of Clare Market Review, which printed the correspondence between Beveridge and the Union, included a special supplement on the study of economics at LSE, with two anonymous articles expressing opposing points of view. The first defended the practices of the economics teachers: Let no student rashly decide to take Economics as his special Subject. Once he starts he will be swept along in the tide, and there is no turning back. He is being offered a dangerous drug in the form of one of the most fascinating and satisfying intellectual pursuits ever invented. At the end of his second year he will have his head stuffed full of structures of production, indifference curves and marginal rates of substitution, and he won’t know a thing about the actual world, . . . By the end of his third year, however, he will have acquired, if he is reasonably intelligent and industrious, a first class logical training, he will be thoroughly well grounded in economic theory, and probably exceptionally well read in comparison with the products of other Universities. There is no doubt in our minds that this is fundamentally the right method.

The second attacked ‘Mediaevalism at L.S.E.’: ‘L.S.E. economists are anachronisms. The chief example is Professor Robbins. It would be difficult to find anywhere in the country such a perfect representative of an earlier intellectual type – viz., the Schoolman of the Middle Ages. He is the re-incarnation of St. Thomas Aquinas, who in the 20th Century has deserted theology for economics.’ The criticism of Robbinsian economics,

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for absurd assumptions and irrelevance to the real world, extended over three double-columned pages. Perhaps the best student view of Robbins (and others) was that illustrated in the spoof ‘L.S.E. Almanack’ a few pages further on. I quote selectively: May 10. Professor Robbins’ course on ‘Some Disputed Problems in the Metholodogy of Economics’ postponed till next session. Miss X taken ill after lunch in the refectory. May 15. . . . Professor Robbins, speaking to the Marxist Study Group, announces that he and Wesley Mitchell have solved the Zurechnung problem. Gilt Edged steady. May 24. Course of lectures announced on ‘Our English Heritage’ by Professors Malinowski, Laski, Gregory, Postan and Mrs. Mair. May 25. Counter series of lectures by English Students Association prohibited. Motion of protest against the oppression of a minority carried in the Union, . . . May 27. It is forbidden to sleep in lectures. . . . June 3. . . . Lift not working. June 22. . . . Professor Laski regrets he is unable to lecture to-day, but will meet 500 students in his room at 5 o’clock. Oct. 8. Mr Y taken ill in the refectory. Nov. 6. Professor Robbins ill. Statement to the press: ‘I and economics are in a state of disequilibrium.’ Gilt Edged steady. Nov. 8. Dr. N. Kaldor arrives at Houghton Street at 9 o’clock. Porters strike. Lift not working. Dec. 1. Professor Webster taken ill after lunch in the refectory. Feb. 3. Professor Robbins, speaking in Hyde Park: ‘Trade Unions cannot raise wages.’ . . . Feb. 4. Motion in Union demanding Professor Robbins’ resignation. Carried with 17 dissentients. Feb. 11. Walter Citrine returns by air from Moscow to attend an extraordinary meeting of the General Council of the T.U.C. to consider Professor Robbins’ grave revelation. Feb. 17. Professor Robbins resigns on his appointment as economic adviser to the Albanian Government. Market rises.

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Feb. 21. It is forbidden to distribute Birth Control literature (etc.) in the School. April 1. H.M. Government invites Mr. Robbins to become Technical Adviser to the newly formed B.L.A.H. Recovery Board. Panic on ‘Change. Operations suspended.’ April 10. Lift not working.

Beveridge and Robbins continued to work together on behalf of academic refugees from the Nazis. But on one related matter they seriously disagreed. In June 1933 Beveridge had offered on behalf of the School to accept the library of the Frankfurt Institut f¨ur Sozialforschung, the academic home of the Marxist philosophers Theodor Adorno, Jurgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. The Emergency Committee had agreed on 8 June 1933 but the academic staff had not been informed, let alone consulted. The legal and other problems involved in getting the library out of Germany had not been resolved a year later when Lionel happened by chance to learn of Beveridge’s offer: I had strolled into the Director’s room for a talk about some minor departmental matter when he informed me with great satisfaction that he had virtually completed an agreement with a certain research organization whereby, in return for the deposit with us of its valuable library, it would be given accommodation at the School and authority to use it as its headquarters. I could scarcely believe my ears. The organization in question was well known as a stronghold of Marxism in Germany; and here was a proposal to bring about, without any consultation with the academic body what, in the eyes of the public at any rate, would be virtual amalgamation. . . . It might involve the introduction of something quite alien to the principles on which the School had been founded; and it certainly ran the danger of appearing to confirm all the ignorant misrepresentations to which we were always subject.

He protested that Beveridge could not proceed without taking advice, at least from those who knew more about the Institute than Beveridge did, and brought in Hayek to support him. Sidney Webb was called in and supported Robbins, as did several German academic refugees in London who were consulted (Robbins 1971a, 139–40). In his autobiography Robbins implied that this was the end of the matter; but, as Beveridge’s biographer and the historian of the School have both pointed out (Dahrendorf 1995, 292; Harris 1997, 290), it was Mrs Mair eight months later, a couple of days before a special meeting of the Emergency Committee on 18 March 1935, who finally convinced Beveridge that he was not legally or morally bound by his original offer to continue his efforts to get the library out of Germany. Beveridge had also by this time lost the support of most of the members of the Emergency Committee.

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In June 1934 Iris and Lionel Robbins saw Mises again in London. Batson’s translation of Mises’s Theory of Money was well advanced and would be published by Cape in the autumn. Cape offered to take over the publication of the translation of Socialism and Mises agreed with help and advice from Robbins. He hoped the Robbinses would spend their holidays in Austria again or at least in the Italian or Swiss alps (Mises to LCR, 1 June and 16 July 1934, Mises, RP). But the Robbinses did not go to Austria in 1934. In February the Viennese socialists had been crushed literally and bloodily by the Nazi-sympathizing government, the shelling of the workers’ flats, the Karl Marx Hof, witnessed by Gaitskell who was spending the academic year in Vienna (Williams 1982, 63); on 24 July the Nazis murdered the Chancellor Dolfuss. Hayek went to Austria but only briefly to Vienna. He was working on his volume, Collectivist Economic Planning (1935), with translations of the articles included provided by Batson, Solomon Adler and Iris’s younger brother Gilbert Gardiner, who also translated Brutzus’s Economic Planning in Soviet Russia (1935) for Hayek. The Robbinses went instead first to Pralognan La Vanoise in Savoy, in August, and then to Sidmouth in Devon in September. In Devon Lionel kept himself busy by writing a short account of British agricultural policy for the Revue d’Economie Politique and an article on agricultural planning for Lloyds Bank Review, enlisting his father’s help in sending him documents so that he could complete the first while he was away and asking him to look over it when it was finished (LCR to RRR, 9 and 19 September 1934). He also hoped to consult his father on the second article, since he intended to be strongly critical of the Ministry of Agriculture and of the marketing boards, for hops, potatoes, pigs and bacon, and milk, set up under the Agricultural Marketing Acts of 1931 and 1933 (Whetham 1978, 241–58). As he noted in the first article (1934c) the NFU had not been enthusiastic for such schemes until, with the advent of the National Government, it saw the prospect of import regulation: ‘The farmers had not suddenly become enamoured of the projects of the doctrinaires at the Ministry of Agriculture. But they thought that acceptance of these projects would be rewarded by tangible benefits in the shape of disguised protection’ – as indeed they were. The schemes were not ‘“planning” in the sense of a co-ordinated attempt to secure a proper distribution of factors of production between industries’ but simply devices to raise prices by restricting domestic supplies or reducing imports. As he noted in the second article (1934d), ‘by subsidy, by quota restriction, by market reorganization and (to a very small extent) tariffs, it has been the object of policy to maintain and even to raise the price of food and

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to keep in being a volume and type of agriculture which otherwise might have disappeared.’ The consequences were predictable: higher food prices, which bore most heavily on poorer consumers; restriction of the markets and hence the incomes of farmers in the Dominions; the more damaging effects on international trade, and hence on international relations, of quotas as compared with tariffs; and the inefficiencies inherent in monopolistic regulation of domestic food production. Unless one believed that increased domestic food production was desirable for aesthetic or military reasons, which Robbins did not believe, then the only benefit to set against these costs was the profits of the fortunate farmers. In a subsequent issue of Lloyds Bank Review, the general secretary of the NFU defended the farmers’ attitude to the current agricultural policy; Lionel was equally ready to defend his arguments against it (Robbins 1935b). In both holiday locations Lionel received many letters about his book on the world slump, which had been published as The Great Depression on 17 July. Its first three chapters closely followed the first three of his Royal Institution lectures, outlining the course of events since the war, ‘misconceptions’ ie theories which failed to explain the events of 1929–33, and his own preferred explanation of the downturn in terms of an Austrian-style monetary overinvestment theory. He tried not to claim too much for it (44): ‘Whatever be the ultimate truth with regard to the origin of this depression, one thing is certain, that no one explanation is capable of explaining all the different aspects.’ As he emphasized in the next chapter (IV), it was not inevitable that deflation accompanying the onset of depression should continue for long. In 1929–30, however, certain features of the postwar economic system and mistaken policies had intensified the deflation. The features included the unstable political situation, the agricultural depression and – as he had argued in the Committee of Economists (see Chapter 7) – reduced adaptability due to ‘the cartelisation of industry, the growth of the strength of trade unions [and] the multiplication of State controls’ (60). The policies included not just increased trade restrictions, most notably the US Hawley-Smoot tariff, but the lack of cost cutting, the attempts to maintain consumers’ purchasing power, and expansionary monetary policy, especially in the USA, which had postponed the liquidation of unsound businesses. In expanding his one lecture on the reasons for the severity of the depression into three chapters, chapter IV had focussed only on 1929–30; chapters V and VI expatiated on the many other factors that had precipitated the financial crises of 1931 and the international chaos which followed Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard. In this chaos, ‘tariffs, exchange

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restrictions, quotas, import prohibitions, barter trade agreements, central trade-clearing arrangements – all the fusty relics of mediaeval trade regulation . . . were dragged out of the lumber rooms and hailed as the products of the latest enlightenment.’ Tariffs were the least of the horrors (114–15). He left the historical narrative – which was illustrated with graphs and tables based on the figures in the extensive statistical appendix compiled by Stanley Tucker – at the World Economic Conference. He devoted a separate chapter (VII) to denouncing restrictionism and planning, using arguments he was to repeat many times – in popular articles (1935a, 1936b, c, d), memoranda (1936e, f) and another book (1937c) – in the following five years. His targets in 1934 included the US Agricultural Adjustment Act, socalled ‘orderly marketing’ schemes in other countries and state-aided monopolies – all of which restricted output to the benefit of producers and the detriment of consumers. As for planning (145): ‘ah! magic word – who would not plan? We may not all be socialists now, but we are certainly (nearly) all planners. Yet, if planning is not a polite name for giving sectional advantage to particular industries, what does it denote but socialism – central control of the means of production?’ His account of the practical difficulties of planning used Mises’s arguments against socialism. In his last two chapters he looked ahead: his conditions for recovery included the restoration of confidence, which would require at least a provisional stabilization of exchanges, the restoration of a properly functioning international gold standard and the removal of at least ‘the grosser obstacles to trade’ such as import licences, exchange controls and quota restrictions (173–85). He argued against a gold standard with movable parities, which could not fully insulate national economies from external shocks and would provide incentives for speculation on anticipated changes in parities. He also put in a plea for the elimination of all kinds of inflexibilities in domestic economies. As for the prospects, which were ‘not bright’, he was already worried that there would be another major war given the rise of the Nazis in Germany (195–6). His friends’ recorded reactions to his book (in Letters on GD, RP) depended on which part of the book they chose to comment on. Viner hit the nail on the head when he commented on 23 October, ‘If I have a major criticism to offer, it is that throughout you treat sufficient causes as necessary ones.’ He thought it was ‘extremely difficult to build up a convincing case for the over-investment theory of a boom generating a depression for the United States from 1925 to 1929 on the basis of the available statistical information’, a view shared by several reviewers of the book. Like other

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commentators Viner found the book ‘very stimulating’ with the ‘vigor and force of your style mak[ing] it exciting reading’. Robertson told Lionel on 1 October that he had ‘devoured it at once’ and contemplated writing a commentary, ‘a so-to-speak private review’, but ‘you know (or at any rate know as well as I do myself!) how far I agree and how far I differ. It is an enormous service to have that point of view so coherently and persuasively set forth.’ When he reviewed it for Economica (1935) he expressed the same doubts as Viner about the Austrian analysis. Dalton was characteristically generous on 24 July: ‘It is a fine piece of exposition. It is written, in large part, with considerable distinction. It has fewer long clumsy words, and more short sharp sentences, than your Essay on the Nature & Significance – It will add much to your reputation. On all these grounds I rejoice.’ On detailed points he was, for instance, glad to read (on page 9) that the parity at which Britain returned to gold in 1925 was ‘almost certainly too high’ and particularly ‘like[d] p 57’, Lionel’s description of the dreadful political situation in Germany in 1929–32. But he thought Lionel’s analytical standards had slipped in chapter VII: ‘You treat Planning as a Socialist journalist might treat capitalism, with the addition of an occasional pinch of academic snuff from Mises’, whose arguments about the impossibility of socialist pricing he found unconvincing. He wished Lionel would ‘do some straight economic analysis on these problems, unmixed, since you are not a politician, with political speculation’. Wilfrid Eady, a senior civil servant with the Ministry of Labour, also thought (on 22 October) that in this chapter ‘your angry contempt get[s] the better of your irony . . . in some ways this is the least satisfactory chapter, both in manner and matter’. R.H. Brand of Lazards the merchant bankers, on the other hand, wrote on 2 October specifically to say ‘how admirable is, in my opinion, the chapter . . . on Restrictionism and Planning.’ To Haberler it seemed ‘a masterly exposition of the liberal point of view, the monetary theory of the business cycle etc’, which he hoped might be read and understood by ‘practical men’. Mises admired the ‘clarity, acuity and conciseness of the reasoning’ (30 August 1934, Mises, RP). R¨opke admired especially the parts of the book dealing with the gold standard and wondered whether a German translation would be feasible. Machlup ‘liked best the last chapter’: he was ‘deeply impressed’ by Robbins’s final point that it was worth trying to change things by argument and reason: ‘In the short run, it is true, ideas are unimportant and ineffective, but in the long run they can rule the world.’ The same pages made Einaudi ‘despondent’. Rueff wanted to arrange for a French translation to be published by Payot – which he did,

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and wrote a preface; Einaudi arranged for an Italian translation and wrote its preface.11 Two letters, both dated 2 August, came from Ezra Pound (Letters on GD, RP). Pound was still a fervent advocate of Major Douglas’s social credit ideas; he was also now a Fascist, a great admirer of Mussolini, and an anti-semite. He wrote in his characteristic epistolatory style: Sir Yr/ Depression comes to me in my humble role of reviewer/ Do you people ever FACE facts ? Is there anyone on yr/ faculty that dares answer a few straight questions re/ monetary system ? or dares include mention of contemporary facts and processes that prefoessors werent PAID and hired to talk about in 1890? For 20 years my contempt of English mental cowardice has been growing, slowly, mildly, but steadily. The exclusion of certain topics from University curricula arouses more and more contempt as time passes. Nobody expects professors to risk their jobs or annoy their employers. But is such complete silence necessary? I mean, are you just ignorant (and being a professional afraid to admit it) or are you just a coward who dares not mention what he knows? enquiringly yrs Ezra Pound If too tactful to answer questions, can you name ANY member of the orthodox econ/gang who has the courage to do so?

In his ‘second epistle’ he claimed, with respect to Robbins’s comment on page 134 of his book that there had to be a reshuffling of the labour force from, for instance, agricultural into other occupations, that ‘Any man who now (1934) goes on talking about reshuffle of labour is either a god damnded crook / or he is so mentally decrepit and dead that his acceptance of a salary for teaching others is fraud.’ . . . It is incredible that any man can have the crust to go on mumbling such rubbish. you can either distribute work/ or you can distribute purchasing power / are you over 80 and paralyzed, or are you just another god damnd English mutton?

Lionel promptly replied on 6 August (Pound Collection, Beinecke Library). It was a letter he clearly enjoyed writing. 11

Letters from R¨opke, Machlup, Einaudi and Rueff in Letters on GD, RP; LCR to Einaudi, 17 October [1934], Einaudi to LCR, 7 July, and LCR to Einaudi, 16 July 1935, Einaudi Papers; Robbins (1935h, i).

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Dear Sir I am neither over 80 and paralysed nor a God damned English mutton. I am a type you have not encountered recently – a man who can think logically and without prepossession. Put your questions by all means. There is a large sum of money for the charities of Rapallo if I am worsted. But don’t think I dont know you already – a damned good poet led up the garden path by a set of second rate moth-eaten currency cranks. Don’t you realize that I’m as good a specialist on money as you are on poetry? What would you say if Mr Selfridge came and tried to tell you how to write verse? Well you see I’m more tolerant to you. Come and feed with me next time you’re in London instead of seeing that dull dog Douglas. You shall have some good wine and a completely painless extraction of all your fallacies. Extract from a future history of poetry In the year 1934 the economist Robbins persuaded Pound that he was making a fool of himself about Douglas. Thank Gawd! After that he wrote good verse again.

He added a postscript suggesting that if Pound wanted to know more about him he could ask Basil Bunting. Pound did ask Bunting; he also sent Robbins’s letter to Orage, who was hurt by it and who forwarded it to Douglas (Surette 1999, 122). (It came back to Pound without any record of Douglas’s reaction.) But before receiving Bunting’s reply Pound sent ‘Doc Robbins’ a couple more letters and a postcard on 10 August (Letters on GD, RP), replete with aggressive questions but quite amiable (for Pound), and then a printed (and polite) questionnaire, entitled ‘Volitionist economics’, which he was to send to numerous bankers, politicians and writers in Britain, the USA and other parts of the world. Lionel also enjoyed composing his answers to Pound’s questionnaire (reproduced in appendix at end of chapter). Unsurprisingly, Pound was unimpressed with the answers. He sent further missives, which became increasingly rude, repeatedly requesting Robbins to read his own ABC of Economics (1933) or Jeffrey Mark’s The Modern Idolatry (1934) (Letters on GD, RP). When he sent another copy of his questionnaire, Lionel did not reply. A few weeks later Orage and Robbins were two of twelve people asked to give talks in a BBC radio series on the problem of ‘Poverty in Plenty’. The others included Brand, Dalton, Henderson, J.A. Hobson, Keynes, Salter and Barbara Wootton: their contributions were as various as their intellectual and political backgrounds. Orage died suddenly the day after giving his talk on 5 November, a talk on social credit which ‘stands out as amateurish and opaque besides the other contributions’ (Surette 1999, 121).

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Lionel spoke on 3 December on ‘Restrictionism and Intervention’ (a title changed to ‘Inflationism and Intervention’ when the talks, except Keynes’s, were published as a book) (ts in Speeches & Lectures & Articles on Public Affairs pre 1946, RP; Hutton ed 1935, 103–17). He explained that the world slump – ‘the aftermath of the collapse of the boom like so many slumps in the past . . . but [which] unlike the slumps of the past . . . has been an abnormally long time disappearing, and its devastation . . . more widespread than anything known to history’ – had been initiated by inflationary policies before 1929 and aggravated by restrictionist government interventions since. On the general topic of the series, ‘when on all sides you see the multiplication of restrictions on trade and investment, the erection of state-aided monopolies, and the limitation of free enterprise, then I submit you do not need to ask further why the phenomenon of poverty in the midst of plenty persists or why, on any clear view of the future, it is likely to continue to persist.’ The first printing (1500) of The Great Depression was nearly sold out by the middle of September 1934, when Daniel Macmillan asked for corrections for the reprinting (Letters on GD, RP). The book had received uniformly excellent reviews in newspapers and magazines around the world, including from many reviewers who disagreed with Robbins’s diagnosis or prescriptions (it is possible to accept the former but not the latter and vice versa). Some reviewers noted his debt to Hayek’s trade cycle theory, which led him to draft a letter to point out that the view that the cause of a slump was the preceding boom was not peculiarly Austrian, being held by, notably, the English economist D.H. Robertson (clippings and ms draft letter, Great Depression, RP). The book was apparently selling well in Australia, although not in New Zealand where one correspondent had urged it should be distributed to counter the spread of Douglas social credit ideas: Macmillan had been doubtful (Sir Hal Colebatch to LCR, 9 August, W.T. Morrell to LCR, 11 September, and Daniel Macmillan to LCR, 21 September 1934, Letters on GD, RP). It was a reviewer in The Madras Mail on 1 September who noted that Robbins had appropriated the term, the ‘great depression’, which had hitherto been used to refer to the period of falling prices from 1873 to 1896. The reviewer approved of the shift and he ‘hoped that this nomenclature will be kept up till a greater depression occurs (which God forbid)’. So far it has. Understanding the causes of the Great Depression of the 1930s is still ‘the Holy Grail of macroeconomics’ (Bernanke 2000, 5). On 20 November Daniel Macmillan reported that the American Macmillan company, which had been prepared in June only to buy 250 copies from Macmillan in London, now wanted to produce an American edition (Letters on GD, RP). The windfall helped Lionel and Iris to purchase a grand

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piano, which contributed greatly to social life at Meadway Close (LCR to Viner, 18 December 1934, Viner 22–14). Iris particularly remembered musical parties with Peter Gellhorn (piano) and Maria Lidka (violin). Gellhorn was a refugee from Nazi Germany: with Philip Loretz, the brother of Iris’s schoolfriend Marjorie Loretz, Lionel and Iris helped him to live and work at Toynbee Hall.12 Nature and Significance had also sold out by 1934. During the academic year 1934–5 Robbins prepared a second edition. In the preface, dated May 1935, he explained that he was not going to change the chapter (VI), which had been the target of most attacks on account of his denial of the scientific legitimacy of interpersonal comparisons of utility, and he defended himself against the common and inaccurate charge that he had recommended economists abstain from involvement in policy debates. But he had rewritten the methodological chapter (IV) and much of the following one and hoped the changes would be acceptable to his friends Hayek, Rosenstein-Rodan and Alfred Stonier (Robbins 1935g, xxxviii). Stonier, a colleague of Rosenstein’s at UCL, had, after PPE at Christ Church Oxford, gone to Heidelberg for his PhD (Stonier 1935) and spent time in Vienna, where he attended Mises’s seminar (Haberler 1981) and reviewed Nature and Significance for the Zeitschrift f¨ur National¨okonomie (1933). Lionel told Machlup on 25 March 1935 (Machlup 61–1) that he was ‘quite sure now that certain statements in the fourth chapter of my book were couched in terms which . . . were certainly very liable to give rise to misapprehension’ and that he ‘owe[d] much more to conversations with you and Haberler on this matter than to anything which has so far been published in any journal’ – though a ‘very good note’ in the latest Review of Economic Studies ‘got completely home so far as my use of the term “tautology” was concerned’.13 In his January 1934 letter to Machlup he had referred to their conversations in Austria the previous summer and commented that he thought he could ‘meet Haberler & Kaufmann without sacrificing anything fundamental’. Haberler himself had written to Lionel in the spring of 1934 that he was ‘sure that we shall easily reach an argument in the already overworked controversy about the tautological character of certain marginal 12

13

At Toynbee Hall Gellhorn lectured on opera, conducted the chorus and presented chamber concerts and piano recitals; after internment as an enemy alien in 1940–1 he made his career as a conductor and chorus director at Sadler’s Wells Opera, the Royal Opera House, Glyndebourne and the BBC. The note was by Terence Hutchison (1935) who spent 1934/5 at LSE after graduating at Cambridge the previous summer. In 1935 he took a post at the University of Bonn, where he wrote his classic, The Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory (1938).

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utility theories[: e]xcept with Mises, with almost everybody I have come to an agreement about this’ and encouraged Lionel to talk to Stonier about the methodological discussions in Mises’s seminar (Letters from Economists, RP). Kaufmann was a member of the Vienna Circle as well as of the Mises seminar (Richardson and Uebel eds 2007, 255–8). The Vienna Circle took a hard line on epistemology, and on the demarcation between mathematics and science on the one hand and non-science (or metaphysics) on the other. The propositions of logic and mathematics are necessarily true, true by definition of the terms and hence tautologous, because they are irrefutable: no facts can possibly contradict them. They are analytic a priori in Kant’s terminology. All other propositions may be true or false, and if such propositions are to be scientific they must be capable of confirmation or refutation by empirical facts. Such propositions are synthetic a posteriori statements. The implication is that there can be no synthetic a priori statements in a science, because such statements are neither analytic nor verifiable.14 Haberler, Hutchison, Kaufmann and Stonier all spotted that Mises’s conception of economics ran into the problem that insofar as it was purely analytical and hence a priori true, it could not also be an empirical science; Haberler and Machlup were both critical of a priorism in economics. In the rewritten chapters Lionel referred to his conversations with Machlup and also to Joan Robinson’s Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933) and her pamphlet, Economics Is a Serious Subject (l932), since he largely agreed with her on the fruitfulness of abstract economic theory. As Robbins pointed out in an appendix which he did not use, ‘In the body of the book it will be noticed that I have made little or no allusion to recent controversial discussions of the ultimate status of economic generalizations. Indeed the careful reader, prying behind the actual structure of my sentences, may even detect a deliberate avoidance of terms which commit me to one view or the other. Such an inference would be perfectly legitimate.’ He explained that one reason for this was his philosophical incompetence; another was that he had come to believe economists were capable of agreeing on what the core of their discipline is (ts APPENDIX On certain recent discussions of The Ultimate Status of Economic Laws, N & S Letters, RP). A draft ‘Preface to the Second Edition’ (N & S Letters, RP), which he thought better of publishing, also gives a good indication of his state of mind in preparing a second edition. 14

For Kaufmann’s work in English in the 1930s see his 1933, 1934 and 1937. LCR cited his earlier work in German on the role of mathematics in economics (1930) in his Essay (1932a, 65, 81).

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The object of this little book as explained in the preface to the First Edition was to make clear certain implications of the procedure of modern economic science. Little did I think as I ventured on this humble task what remarkable emotions I should arouse in the breasts of certain of my English & American colleagues. Yet such has been the case. It is hard to recollect in recent years a work which has been greeted with a more vociferous outburst of deepseated moral indignation. My critics have fallen over each other in their eagerness to demonstrate not so much their disagreement with my propositions – their arguments here have not been very stimulating – but their horror and disgust at the attitude from which – so they allege – these propositions spring. I have also been reproached for alluding to foreign authors. I am afraid my withers are quite unwrung by all these strictures – I say my withers – But to be perfectly frank I find it hard to take these criticisms as personally as all that. For I still believe my propositions in the main to be completely unoriginal and to spring directly from the work of the best modern writers on these subjects. I am very far from believing that the last word has been said on any of the more important problems of Economic Science. But I do believe that some work has been done and something achieved & that if one is to challenge existing theory here one must at least have a knowledge of the literature on which it rests. I confess that when I find the most elementary postulates of the mathematical theory of equilibrium singled out as glaring paradox labelled ‘Robbinsian Economics’ and pilloried as a personal heresy on my part, my feelings are not feelings of guilt but feelings of sheer bewilderment. What is one to do in such circumstances? Surely get on with one’s job and leave such critics to their own devices. There is however a certain moral not without its bearing on contemporary affairs which I will permit myself to draw in this connection. With very few exceptions my critics have fastened not upon my analytical propositions but upon my denial of normative weight to analytical propositions. They have been moved to wrath by my delimitation of propositions concerning existence from propositions concerning the value of existence. They seem to think that a man who knows Economics is precluded from taking part in a political controversy or even from behaving properly if he admits – as I admit – that the rules of morality do not spring from the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. All this is very childish but it is clearly a manifestation – although no doubt a very minor manifestation – of that wave of revolt against the rational which in the shape of Hitlerism Fascism Buchmanism etc is sweeping over the civilized world today. My critics are no doubt decent men who have never kicked a Jew to death in their lives. No doubt they would be very disquieted, if overcoming their repugnance to anything in a foreign language, they were to open some contemporary German periodical and to discover the similarity between their own complaint against an instrument which does not ‘tell people how to be happy’ or ‘better off ’ and the ubiquitous proclamations on the part of the academic apes who call themselves aryans of an intention to build up a new ‘lebendige socialwissenschaft’, free from the ‘bloodless abstraction of mere reason’, ‘an integral part of a total social life’ & so on & so forth. But so it is. This unwillingness to separate out what can be & what cannot be tested by scientific analysis, this refusal of all value to any science which cannot be used to give a show of respectability to

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dictatorial edicts, this frenetic revulsion against ‘the intellect – the Jewish intellect – which divides,’ this apotheosis of action as such – these are all part & parcel of the same thing – revolt against the intellect itself – the ultimate Trahison des clercs. The fact that even in this country such voices can be heard is only one more proof if proof were still needed of how far reaching the victory of the authors of historismus and romantic sociology has been – even over those do not know their works. I am really not a bit repentant to find myself outside this gallery. Hence in preparing a second edition I have not felt called upon to make any modification of my main propositions. Chapter six which has been the chief target of attack stands without any alteration of substance. I have corrected a number of misprints & I have availed myself of the opportunity to rewrite a few passages where further reflection has suggest[ed] a better mode of treatment. In particular the first part of chapter four has been revised & extended. I am afraid the revision will not make it any more acceptable to the critics I have referred to for the net effect is to make the aspect of Economics there treated more abstract & formalistic than ever. But I hope it will do something to meet the suggestions of my friends Dr Gottfried Haberler & Mr A.W. Stonier with whom I have had many instructive conversations on these matters.

The most obvious and extensive change in chapter IV is the use of the Hicks–Allen innovations to illustrate the nature of the propositions of economic theory (1935g, 75): ‘the foundation of the theory of value is the assumption that the different things that the individual wants to do have a different importance to him, and can be arranged therefore in a certain order. This notion can be expressed in various ways and with varying degrees of precision, from the simple want systems of Menger and the early Austrians to the more refined scales of relative valuations of Wicksteed and Sch¨onfeld and the indifference systems of Pareto and Messrs. Hicks and Allen. But in the last analysis it reduces to this, that we can judge whether different possible experiences are of equivalent or greater or lesser importance to us.’ Similarly (79), ‘The main postulate of the theory of production is the fact that there are more than one factor of production. The main postulate of the theory of dynamics is the fact that we are not certain regarding future scarcities.’ Such tautologous statements are true a priori and need no empirical justification – although subsidiary hypotheses used to make predictions in particular situations do. Hence (99–100), ‘the nature of economic analysis . . . consists of deductions from a series of postulates, the chief of which are almost universal facts of experience present whenever human activity has an economic aspect, the rest being assumptions of a more limited nature based upon the general features of particular situations or types of situations which the theory is to be used to explain.’ But at the beginning of the following chapter he baldly stated (104): ‘It is a

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characteristic of scientific generalisations that they refer to reality. Whether they are cast in hypothetical or categorical form, they are distinguished from the propositions of pure logic and mathematics by the fact that in some sense their reference is to that which exists, or that which may exist, rather than to purely formal relations. In this respect . . . the propositions of Economics are on all fours with the proposition[s] of all other sciences.’ When Haberler read the second edition, he told Lionel in January 1936 (Correspondence, RP) that he had ‘studied the book very carefully and like it more and more the more I read it. I am still unconvinced by what you say about the logical nature of economic generalizations, but it seems to me that the point of disagreement is pushed back so far as to be of practically no importance in the practice of theory.’ Mises was more critical on 10 December (N & S Letters, RP), for the opposite reason, for he did not share Robbins’s desire to establish that economics was an empirical science (Caldwell 2004, 192–6). In 1935 Lionel and Iris travelled a good deal. They began the year with a holiday at St Anton am Arlberg in the Austrian Tyrol where they tried skiing for the first time. Lionel thoroughly enjoyed it, telling his father on 3 January: ‘This form of movement altogether surpasses our expectations. . . . We have had plentiful snow and what with the tonic air and the very hard exercise our appetites have doubled. One of our party was sick yesterday so I had 2 lunches & 2 dinners.’ They also spent an evening with the Haberlers, Hayek having warned Haberler that the Robbinses would be in Austria (Hayek to Haberler, 19 December 1934, LCR to Haberler, 18 January 1935, Haberler 67). At the end of March and beginning of April they were in Lugano, Switzerland, for a few days, where they hoped John Polimeni, who was living in Milan, would come and visit them, but he was on the point of making a trip to America (LCR to Luigi Einaudi, 15 March 1935, Einaudi Papers; Polimeni to LCR, 29 March 1935, RP). Lionel’s postcard to his father on 2 April was more cryptic than usual: ‘This a very lovely spot – I forget whether you have visited it on any of your Italian tours. My business went off very successfully – it was a great pleasure to meet one who has held high responsibility whom one can sincerely admire. I shall have many interesting things to relate on our return. We eventually decided to stay on here for a few days rather than go on south. Back on Wednesday.’ The statesman he met was the exiled former German Chancellor Heinrich Br¨uning, who was staying in Melide on the other side of the lake from Lugano. The business was an invitation to contribute to a series of articles on the question of the stabilization of the leading currencies in Lloyds Bank Review which would be

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‘prepared by writers of different nationalities and expressing various points of view.’ The series opened in April with an article by Robbins which he wrote before he and Iris went to Lugano (1935d). When Br¨uning visited London later in April he and Robbins completed a joint anonymous article, ‘A dialogue between a foreign statesman and an English student of affairs’, for the May issue (Robbins 1935e; Nix ed 1974, 68–9). They were followed by, among others, Benjamin Anderson of the Chase National Bank of New York, Henderson, Charles Rist, Keynes and Brand, who summed up. Lionel (1935d) advocated a de facto stabilization of the pound sterling as a prelude to an eventual return to the gold standard. He admitted the cheap money policy pursued since 1932 had led to a revival in housebuilding in Britain, but he did not believe British recovery could go much further without a revival of exports and hence without a revival of the international economy. Stabilization was also advocated by Anderson and the ‘foreign statesman’; Rist wanted an immediate return to fixed gold parities. Henderson (1935b), who had already argued against Lionel’s advocacy of the gold standard in his review of The Great Depression (1935a), ‘deprecate[d] this policy’ of early stabilization as ‘the most dangerous blunder’ which could be made: it would jeopardize the bird in the hand of the existing domestic recovery for two elusive birds in the bush, namely a revival of international investment and a reduction in barriers to trade, both eagerly sought by Robbins. As he wrote, the improbability of the latter was well expressed in the ‘Dialogue’. ‘I would stabilise,’ says the English Student of Affairs. ‘I would work for an immediate removal of the worst obstacles to trade. I would work for an international agreement that tariff barriers would not be raised any further. And in due course I should hope that they would actually be diminished. These may sound very modest hopes beside the specious claims of isolationist “recovery programmes.” . . . But I see no other remedy.’ The Foreign Statesman replies:‘Your hopes may be modest. But they are likely, nevertheless, to be very difficult to achieve. I agree with your diagnosis and I agree with your remedies. But if we are to be realists we must recognise that we live in a world which, for good reasons or bad, has deliberately rejected the ends you have in mind and is marching rapidly in the opposite direction.’

Keynes (1935) was also reluctant to forgo the advantages of flexible exchange rates. The shrewd banker Brand (1935) suggested the wisest course might be to put aside thoughts of returning to gold and to continue with present policies. In the years to come Lionel remained an optimistic internationalist,

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while Henderson became increasingly pessimistic about the future of the British economy (Clay ed 1955, 236–95). Lionel was soon in Switzerland again, having been invited to lecture at the Graduate Institute of International Studies when Rappard was visiting the School a year earlier. He had offered ‘The possibilities of international economic planning’ as a topic and agreed to give five lectures in the first week of June 1935; before he gave them he changed the title to the more accurate ‘International aspects of collective economic planning’ (Rappard to LCR, 6 February and 6 March, LCR to Rappard, 8 March 1934, LCR to Andr´e Mussard, 11 May 1935, GIIS Archives). He saw the lectures as his major contribution to the economic planning debate of the mid-1930s (Robbins 1971a, 159): they developed the ideas he had been expressing in articles and memoranda in the previous couple of years and the resulting book incorporated some of the talks he gave in the next two years. Before he travelled to Geneva Mises, with whom he was going to stay, told him on 18 May what to expect (Mises, RP my translation): his mixed audience would be drawn from ‘the teachers and students of the Institute, of whom the majority are pursuing not economic but international relations and historical studies, from officials of the League of N[ations], the I.L.O. and the private international organizations, from the teachers and students of the University of Geneva (mostly socialists) and from a bourgeois circle, in which are found also individuals more friendly than critical opponents of socialism. Your programme seems to me (and also Rappard, to whom I showed it) thoroughly suitable.’ A dinner jacket would not be needed but Mises suggested Robbins bring ‘mountain kit’ so that they could hike in the mountains above Chamonix. When Rappard wrote with instructions about the lectures, Robbins assured him on 19 May (Rappard Papers v.I 149 1955/135/41, Federal Archives, Bern) that he would keep to the time limit and not read from his notes: ‘I never prepare lectures that way nowadays. But I like to get the sort of skeleton which keeps me within certain limits. And it began to seem as if the skeleton I was preparing was rather big for the time allowed. However I think it should be possible to detach a few floating ribs without damage to the general structure.’ The surviving notes (PE & WE drafts, RP) are rather more than a skeleton. On them and the book, which Lionel dedicated to Edwin Cannan who died, aged seventy-four, on 8 April 1935, see the next chapter. Before Robbins went to Switzerland he heard Costantino BrescianiTurroni of the University of Milan give two University Advanced Lectures in Economics at LSE on the theory of saving and investment (BrescianiTurroni 1936). A liberal, Bresciani-Turroni had managed to absent himself

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from fascist Italy by also holding an appointment at the University of Cairo; he is best known for his study of the German hyperinflation of the 1920s, which Lionel thought was ‘one of the most admirable pieces of Applied Economics I have ever read’ and whose translation into English (1937) he had already begun to arrange (LCR to Alexander Loveday, 22 April 1936, Loveday Letterbook 1936–38, LoN). Before and after his trip Lionel was active as secretary of the Academic Freedom Committee. Having heard from Kaufmann that Fink’s grant had been stopped, he arranged to pay the money authorized to Fink in October 1933, and, with the help of Georg Tugendhat, at the most favourable exchange rate.15 Haberler asked if the LSE fund could assist Karl Bode, a student of Schumpeter’s in Bonn who was now a refugee in Bern. When Schumpeter turned up at LSE in June 1935 (Robbins 1955b, 22) Lionel consulted him about the possibilities for both Bode and Herbert Zassenhaus, another student of Schumpeter’s who was already a graduate student at LSE. On 9 July the committee agreed to contribute to the support of both men. Bode then received a scholarship at St John’s College Cambridge; Robbins and Keynes ensured it was supplemented so that Bode would have enough to live on in Cambridge. When the committee agreed a year later (9 June 1936) to continue to support Zassenhaus, Schumpeter himself contributed to the cost of keeping Zassenhaus and his wife in London until Zassenhaus completed his PhD.16 By this time the Academic Freedom Committee had raised £2850 and committed itself to spend £2550. It decided not to ask for further subscriptions and to hand over any balance remaining after eighteen months to the Academic Assistance Council. But it rescinded its decision when Hitler marched into Vienna and incorporated Austria into the Third Reich in March 1938: within weeks it was offering grants to assist in the emigration of two Austrian academic refugees who had reached Switzerland. One was the dismissed professor of political science in Vienna, Eric V¨ogelin, who reached Switzerland in June and managed to emigrate to the USA in September (LCR ms note of meeting on 13 July 1938, COLL MISC 683/1; Strauss and R¨oder eds 1980–3, 1193). Mises recommended the location for the Robbins summer holiday in 1935, Thumersbach, across the lake from Zell am See, which he thought 15

16

Bruzina (2004, 47–8 and 550); LCR, Academic Freedom Committee, 22 May, and LCR to Kaufmann, 22 and 29 May and 8 July, LCR to Dr Simmonds, 9 July, and LCR to Fink, 1 August 1935, COLL MISC 683/3. Haberler to LCR, 7 June, Schumpeter to LCR, 9 July, LCR to Schumpeter and LCR to Haberler, 15 July, LCR to Parry, 10 December 1935, COLL MISC 683/3; Schumpeter to LCR, 10 March, 7 May, 9 and 23 November 1936, Schumpeter HUG(FP)4.8 Box 1. Bode and the Zassenhauses stayed in England until 1937, when they migrated to the USA.

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was very beautifully situated, even better than the hotel in St Gilgen where he had visited the Robbinses in 1933 (Mises to LCR, 18 May 1935, Mises, RP). The Robbinses drove to Austria through northern France and Germany. Lionel described the experience to his father on 24 August. We left early on Sunday morning [4 August], crossed [the English Channel] at midday and by driving hard reached Laon by the evening. I do not like this part of the journey: it lies through those depressing lowlands where the fighting took place and over and again one is reminded of the fact by those tragic cemeteries with their hundreds of dead men lying side by side & the thick crop of white crosses covering the ground like a crop of some unbending vegetable. The next day we reached Strassburg [sic]. The latter part of this run is much more interesting. The Vosges are nothing sensational but their quiet undulations are a relief after the hard lines of the plain. . . . We reached Augsburg [the next] day travelling via Freudenstadt Tubingen & Ulm. The Black Forest was delightful & Augsburg in the evening clean hospitable & friendly. But I am more than ever convinced that we are dealing with an exhibition of mass hysteria to parallel which one has to go back to the ages of unreason, the foundation of Mohammedanism etc. Tiny children greet one wherever one goes, with the Heil Hitler. (It has been announced officially that Hitler himself uses this salutation!) The hotels & shops are full of photographs of this demigod with the Charlie Chaplin moustache and it seems quite impossible to escape evidences of the aggressive and hysterical nature of the regime. . . . Augsburg was plastered with placards warning the population to beware of clergymen who were endeavouring to subvert the constitution ‘German People beware! Wolves in Sheeps Clothing’ – We passed a labour camp. Outside like a statue stood a fine upstanding youth on sentry, his weapon a finely burnished spade carried over the shoulder like a rifle! . . . We passed through smiling Bavarian villages where you would have thought not a ripple of these political convulsions would have penetrated. Over the entrance streamed great banners – Juden nich erw¨unscht (Jews not wanted here) and a little further on Hitler wir gr¨ussen dir (Hitler we greet thee). The problem, as I see it, is not whether the spirit is general, – that is proven up to the hilt – but how long it can last in the unlikely event of its not leading almost immediately (i.e. in the next five years) to a war. It seems impossible to believe that human beings can remain at this degree of taut emotion for long. But if it were to collapse it is difficult to believe that anything very admirable would follow. The fact is that the great German civilization is destroyed. The factories are there, h. & c. in all the bedrooms & excellent asphalt in the streets. But the spiritual side of the civilization has just gone. I cannot think that the Thirty Years War can have wrought such devastation.

When they reached Zell they found there had been a mistake in the booking and their rooms were not ready. And since the new Alpine road, the Grossglocknerstrasse, had just been opened, they could not find alternative accommodation in Zell. Eventually they found a single room in a peasant’s cottage in a village five miles away, where they stayed for three days.

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Since then our only trouble has been the weather. It was very beautiful for five days after our arrival. But then a bad spell set in an[d] for eight days it was very depressing. It began to clear, however, at the beginning of this week [Monday 19 August] & we have had the most wonderful excursions. We have made the trip over the Gross Glocknere Strasse . . . climbed mountains & explored the countryside. The hotel is on the side of the lake – I am writing this looking out over the water towards the Kitzsteinhorn & the Glockner massif – so we can take our choice between the ardours of climbing or bathing & lying in the sun. A whole succession of our Viennese friends have visited us. At present Mises is spending a week in our company. As he knows the countryside very well and is a very entertaining companion this considerably enhances the pleasures of the holiday. Later on we hope to run up to Salzburg to see Mrs Bonn & then we shall move back as it were to the Voralberg – the first stage on our homeword journey – where the Hayeks are staying with their people & where we shall thus be able to leave the children while we make more extensive trips in the high mountains. All being well we shall be back somewhere round about the 16th September. I’m not quite sure exactly when it will be as we have not yet decided on the route. I want to come back via Germany again partly because it is much cheaper than Switzerland, partly in order to study further the queer habits of the people – if it were not so menacing it would be the most fascinating case material for social psychiatry. And then I want to go further north so as to avoid France which is expensive altogether except in the very last stage & come back through Belgium which is again very cheap. Is it not an extraordinary thing that every year since the war it has been possible to get a luxurious holiday cheap somewhere because of the folly of monetary policy?

There were changes in the Economics Department at LSE in the autumn of 1935. Abba Lerner and Ursula Webb joined the staff as temporary assistant lecturers in economics, Ronald Coase, who had taught at Dundee and Liverpool since leaving LSE in 1931, and Ronald Edwards, another BCom graduate, as assistant lecturers in commerce (Professorial Council 30 September 1935; Coase 1994, 208). Before Nicky Kaldor went to the USA for the year, he proposed to Clarisse Goldschmidt by asking if she would like to come to America; she also recalled that Lionel agreed to speak on Nicky’s behalf to her father, who was ‘rather dubious’ about the engagement. Her father expected to meet an elderly professor with a beard, Lionel a Jew with kaftan; they were both surprised and got on very well together. Dr Goldschmidt agreed to the engagement and the wedding took place in December 1934. Batson left for a professorship at the University of Cape Town and Hicks for a university lecturership at Cambridge and a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College. Robbins’s remark (1971a, 129) that Hicks ‘owing to Beveridge’s insensate hostility to pure theory . . . had eventually to go elsewhere to get the advancement that was his due’ has been used to claim that Hicks had to leave because Beveridge refused to renew his contract (McCormick 1992,

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24, 168), but his statement is misleading. In January and February 1935 the Appointments Committee had persuaded Beveridge – with the help of a reference from Schumpeter among others (LCR to Schumpeter, 5 December 1934, Schumpeter HUG (FP)4.7 Box 1) – to recommend to the governors that Hicks be promoted to reader and Durbin to lecturer, but, as Beveridge also reported, Hicks had just been invited to apply for a lectureship at Cambridge (Agenda for Emergency Committee 14 February 1935; Hamouda 1993, 19). On 6 March it was reported at the Professorial Council that the governors had accepted the recommendations and that Hicks had accepted the Cambridge position. Robbins told Machlup on 25 March (Machlup 61–1) it was ‘a severe blow’: ‘It is, of course, a very satisfactory thing for economics in general in this country that relations of this sort should exist between London and Cambridge, and it should do much to dispose of the absurd myth that, Keynes and Kahn apart, there has ever been any animosity between the two centres, but there is no doubt that it will be a very severe loss, and for the time being at any rate, we shall all have to work very much harder if the Seminar is not to lose some of its usual quality. We did our best to keep him, but the amenities of a non-residential university for a man who is not married are not great, and there was never very much hope.’ Ironically, just before Hicks moved to Cambridge in September 1935 he and Ursula Webb became engaged – to the surprise of most of their fellow economists – and she moved to Cambridge once they married in December. In the reallocation of teaching duties for 1935/6 Benham took over Robbins’s introductory Elements course. Lionel continued to lecture on Principles to senior undergraduates, to run the seminar and, of course, the Department. He and Hayek offered a pair of complementary graduate courses on Select Problems of Advanced Economics, Lionel’s ten lectures in the Lent term concentrating on ‘certain controversial issues in the theory of value and distribution . . . [covering] the chief lines of development of pure economics since 1870’. He contributed to a course with Gregory on Modern English Economic Thought and Practice – from John Stuart Mill to Edwin Cannan – also in the Lent term 1936. Before the Michaelmas term he took part in a conference organized by the Institute of Sociology on the Social Sciences: Their Relations in Theory and in Teaching, at which he agreed to chair the Sunday morning session on ‘Economics and the social sciences’ (programme in Beveridge IIb34). The other speakers were to be Hicks, Sargent Florence and Gerald Shove. On the day Florence and Shove were both ill and Lionel found himself commenting on all three papers and on some of those by sociologists. He disagreed with Tom Marshall in preferring that undergraduates study a particular social science along with subjects such as

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history and political philosophy rather than a mixture of the social sciences, and he was more sceptical than Morris Ginsberg or Hicks that collaborative research collaboration between economists and sociologists could be fruitful (LCR, ts Sunday Morning, 29th September, Articles & Notes, RP). The term was enlivened by a visit from the Haberlers who came from Geneva for two weeks. He lectured on business cycle research on 14–17 October: according to Ursula Webb, his first lecture was ‘the usual continental methodological introduction, quite well done but of course nothing new’ before he moved on to savings and investment and interest rate theories of business cycles and the underconsumptionist approach (Marcuzzo and Sanfilippo eds 2005, 23, 28–9). He greatly enjoyed his visit, especially evenings at Meadway Close and the ‘many discussions’ at the School, as he told Lionel on 6 December (Letters from Economists, RP). Machlup also visited in October. His Rockefeller Fellowship had been renewed for a second year – Lionel had written the necessary supporting letter – and by the beginning of 1935 he had decided to seek an academic job in the USA (Machlup to LCR, 26 April, and LCR to Machlup, 23 May 1934, Machlup 61–1; Hayek to Machlup, January 1935, Machlup 43–15). He returned to Vienna in June 1935 to wind up his business interests and spent several weeks in England in the autumn before taking up an appointment at the University of Buffalo in January 1936. Lionel himself went to the Netherlands before the end of term to give two lectures (The problem of stabilisation, Amsterdam 29.11.35, PE & WE drafts; The British Financial Crisis and After, Rotterdam 2nd Dec 35, Speeches & Lectures & Articles on Public Affairs pre 1946, RP). Writing to his stepmother from Amsterdam on 29 November to thank her for his birthday present, he admitted he was so ‘distracted & overworked’ that he had come away without his passport. He was about to lecture to the Industrial Club, ‘a body composed of the leading industrialists & bankers of the country’, and then at the University in Rotterdam on 2 December. He was staying in a ‘most luxurious hotel’ and being generously entertained: he had just met the President of the Netherlands Bank and was hoping to enjoy a private view of the Rijksmuseum the next day. In his lectures, according to his report to Ursula Webb (Marcuzzo and Sanfilippo eds 2005, 88), ‘he told them . . . that everything but a pukka gold standard was no use, and they loved him.’ Kaldor had completed three years of his four-year apppointment as an assistant lecturer; while he was in the USA the Appointments Committee recommended his contract should be extended for the year after he returned. The committee also postponed a decision on promotion to lecturer for Brinley Thomas until his book on Swedish economic policy (1936) appeared. It also thought Lerner should be given a regular four-year appointment as

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assistant lecturer. Beveridge managed to hold up this recommendation for a month: when he did put it to the governors he admitted ‘he himself had been doubtful whether this particular appointment represented the most desirable development of economic teaching and study in the School’ but ‘the Professor of Economics had pressed for the appointment very strongly and had been supported by other members of the Appointments Committee’ (Emergency Committee 26 March and 30 April 1936). It is likely that Beveridge also held up Kaldor’s promotion to lecturer, which took place, on Robbins’s recommendation, after Beveridge had left (Agenda for Standing Committee 28 April 1938).17 Lionel’s relations with Beveridge were seriously deteriorating. In June 1935 the Constitution Committee had made an interim report to the Professorial Council, which rejected it at an extraordinary meeting and referred the whole matter back to an enlarged committee (Agenda and Minutes of Constitution Sub-Committee 30 October 1935).18 In November Beveridge circulated to the new committee some ‘Reflections on the School of Economics’. This provoked an outburst from Lionel, who took particular exception to two comments (‘A note on the Director’s reflections’): The Director says ‘The academic developments of the School within the range of my special interests have not been those which I myself should have favoured. In so far as I am an economist, my interest has not been in those theoretical and mathematical developments which have become characteristic of the School of Economics. . . . ’ In another place he says ‘The School is not to be blamed for having fallen behind other institutions in developing the direct statistical study of social conditions and training people for this study. The School is to be blamed, if at all, for not having led the academic world in this direction. . . . ’

In rebutting the implication that economics at LSE was almost exclusively focussed on theoretical analysis, Lionel ‘propose[d] to rely on the method recommended by the Director, namely, observation and measurement’. 17

18

McCormick (1992, 45–6) claimed that ‘When a vacant lectureship arose, Robbins opted for Kaldor whereas Hayek preferred Lerner, Kaldor was appointed and Lerner left for the United States.’ In fact however, Lerner went to the United States on a Rockefeller Travelling Fellowship in December 1937. He was about to return when war broke out and the director (Carr-Saunders) advised him to stay (Agenda for Standing Committee 29 January 1940). The minutes and papers of the Constitution Committee are in LSE MINUTES 17/12. The report had recommended that the governors consider the desirability of changing the form of incorporation of the School and that in the meantime a Professorial Council consisting only of professors and heads of departments and an Academic Board including all the regular teaching staff should replace the existing large Council. The new committee consisted of the director, Professors Laski, Parry, Plant, Robbins and Webster, and Beales, Judges, Marshall and Robinson. On its revised report see the next chapter.

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Comparing the lectures he listened to as an undergraduate with the current offerings, he found a decrease in the ratio of theory to applied from 80:20 to 40:60; most of the studies published in the School series of publications were applied; and when it came to the actual work of the faculty in economics: I do not think that Messrs. Bowley, Gregory, Plant, Bonn, Whale and Benham, to take only a few names, would regard the description ‘theoretical and mathematical’ as applicable to the bulk of their [published] work. . . . Judged by the same criterion of published work I would plead that, in spite of the fact that I happen to lecture on General Analysis, even my own preoccupations are not of a very high degree of purity. . . . The plain fact is that until this year in the departments included under Economics by the Director, we have had precisely three teachers who could be regarded as being predominantly ‘pure’ – Professor Hayek, Dr Hicks and Mr Kaldor.

However, ‘where there’s smoke there must be fire – even if it’s not a large affair. What really is at the bottom of the belief, so widespread that it is even shared by the Director, that the whole School of Economics has gone theoretical and mathematical?’ It was, of course, partly due to the major contributions to the subject of Hayek and Hicks – ‘It is well known that in recent years in international literature the frequency with which these two names have been mentioned is surpassed only by Mr. Keynes’ – but Robbins also attributed it to the research students, especially those who had founded and edited the Review of Economic Studies. The last ten years have been years of the most astonishing activity in theoretical economics. Not only in London but also in Cambridge, in Chicago, in Harvard, in Stockholm and in Vienna there has been a ferment of ideas only comparable, as Keynes says, to the intellectual revolution which gave birth to Classical Economics. Can these people at the School be blamed if they have been infected by this enthusiasm – if in their excitement at seeing Keynes and Hayek, Robertson and Knight, walk through places where previously there seemed unsurmountable barriers, they should have become a little one-sided in their interests? And do we really regret it?

He himself did not: ‘I should have been sorry if it had left us all unmoved . . . if to this refreshing stream of new thought, which will provide work for empirical studies for the next fifty years, the School of Economics, the greatest centre of all, had made no significant contribution. Does the Director really feel differently?’ Beveridge circulated Lionel’s memorandum on 25 November with a feeble covering note which did not answer Robbins’s question. Beveridge had continued to pursue his own agenda for the School without consulting his professors or even letting them know what he was plotting. An example was his negotiations with the Rockefeller Foundation. By the autumn of 1934 several groups in Britain had become seriously intereted in

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setting up a national institute of economic research. These included potential donors such as the Halley Stewart, Leverhulme and Pilgrim Trusts, as well as individuals such as Stamp, then vice-chairman of the LSE governors (he succeeded Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland as chairman in 1935), Noel Hall of the Department of Political Economy at UCL, Carr-Saunders at Liverpool, Clay, Henderson and Beveridge (Jones 1998, 1). In 1929 Stamp had been asked by the Rockefeller Foundation to chair a selection committee for Rockefeller Fellowships in the Social Sciences and had persuaded Hall to be the secretary. When Tracy Kittredge (in charge of the social sciences in the Paris office of the Rockefeller Foundation) came to London on 20–21 November 1934 to talk to Hall and others, Hall was astonished to learn that Beveridge had proposed to the foundation that it support a research institute at LSE of which he would be the director (and Mrs Mair the secretary) and thus be able to give up the directorship of LSE (Hall, The origins and pre-war development of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, RP). At the School Beveridge had informed only Stamp and Steel-Maitland of his project. He had made no mention of it to the Rockefeller Research Fund Committee, which had met only a fortnight earlier on 7 November to prepare an application for renewal of the current research grant due to end in 1935. When it was suggested that separate applications might be made for specific schemes of research, Lionel told the committee that he would be glad to make ‘an application for establishment of an Institute of Economic Statistics at the School’. Lionel showed his proposal to Hall when they dined at the Reform Club a few days later. Unfortunately for their future relationship Hall did not tell him that he did not think his proposal had been forwarded to the Rockefeller Foundation. Lionel’s proposal was modest. The function of the institute would be threefold: ‘(i) it would undertake a series of special enquiries involving the active collection of economic statistics not otherwise available. . . . (ii) . . . it would co-ordinate and analyse existing statistical material in such a way as to render it available for future economic enquiry. . . . (iii) It would provide an archive for the collection of such subjects of current economic interest as it seemed desirable to the directorate to investigate continuously.’ The ‘directorate’ would be a committee of the director of the School and the heads of the relevant departments, on the model of the editorial board of Economica. Beveridge’s scheme, on the other hand, ‘provides in substance for the creation of a Department of Applied Economics at the London School of which he, as Research Professor, would be the Chairman . . . [with] Robbins and the new Professor of Mathematical Statistics . . . in substance as his chief collaborators and Assistants’, according to Kittredge when he reported

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to New York on his conversations in London. Although Stamp and SteelMaitland were reported to be in favour of Beveridge’s scheme, Kittredge noted the ‘obvious psychological disadvantages’ for a new director if Beveridge remained at the School as a professor. A new research institute should be independent of the School (LCR, Proposal to establish an institute of economic statistics, 12 November, and Kittredge to Day, Proposed development of Center for Research in Applied Economics, London, 22 November 1934, Rockefeller Foundation RG1.1/401/71/940). Hall wrote Kittredge in Paris on 13 December, after conversations with Carr-Saunders, Clay, Stamp and others, supporting the idea of an independent institute and pointing out that Robbins’s ‘sensible and valuable’ proposal was not incompatible with such an institute (Rockefeller Foundation RG1.1/401/71/941). The Rockefeller Foundation did not take Beveridge’s proposal seriously; the Robbins proposal fell by the wayside (Dahrendorf 1995, 312–13). A year later John Van Sickle of the Rockefeller Foundation came from New York to discuss the proposed national institute of economic research. He met Gregory, Hayek, Plant and Robbins in London on 12 November 1935. They, he reported on 14 November, ‘make the situation really delicate’: they wanted to know more about the foundation’s new policies, especially in relation to business cycle research; Robbins wanted to know whether his year-old memorandum on an institute of economic statistics had ever been received; and with respect to the proposed national institute, why could not the London and Cambridge Economic Service be supported and strengthened instead? ‘Robbins let it be known that he and his colleagues were somewhat mystified regarding the nature of the proposed British Institute. He claimed that none of them had been approached, . . . the secrecy surrounding the matter made them feel that the Institute must be aimed at the School; that it was an expression of a want of confidence. They were fearful that they were now being invited to attend an organizing meeting where they would be confronted with a fait accompli’ (Proposed British Institute of Economic Research, Rockefeller Foundation RG1.1/401/67/883).19 When the organizing meeting took place two days later the representatives from LSE (Gregory representing the economists and Bowley the LCES) made it quite clear that they thought the LCES was being slighted. Hall in his later account of that meeting implies that Robbins was also present, which is perhaps not surprising since as far as Hall was concerned the outcome of the meeting had been ‘a rather bitter personal quarrel between Robbins and 19

Dahrendorf (1995, 314) states that Van Sickle’s meeting with the LSE professors was on 14 September in Paris, but it was Van Sickle’s report that was made in Paris on the 14th.

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myself’ which ‘affected me . . . deeply . . . as my alliance and friendship with Robbins had been a very important part of my mental and practical scheme of things’ (Excerpt from letter from N.F. Hall to J. Van Sickle, Rockefeller Foundation RG1.1/401/67/883). Lionel must have been incensed that Hall had never told him his proposal had not been considered by the foundation. Before Hall admitted the existence of the quarrel to Van Sickle in April 1936 (without giving any details), Kittredge had reported from Paris after a telephone conversation with Hall in December that at one of the meetings of the organizing committee there had been ‘a very violent discussion in which the professors in the School contended that the plan for the formation of an institute was in reality a manoeuver directed against the School. . . . [Robbins and Gregory suspected] that if it had not been for the institute project the Foundation would have been prepared to provide an appropriation for the development of similar institute in the L.S.E. or alternatively to enlarge the existing program and activities of the London and Cambridge Economic Service. . . . Hall [was] looked upon as the instigator of the institute project and hence as the leader of an anti-School group’ (Plans for an Institute of Economic Research in Great Britain, 20 December 1935, Rockefeller Foundation RG1.1/401/67/883). By the new year the quarrel had blown over but Robbins never trusted Hall again. The Lent term 1936 had been as busy as the previous term. At the Professorial Council meeting on 22 January Lionel suggested a shortening of university terms. Asked to put his views in writing, his case was ‘very simple’, namely that faculty research was suffering from the demands of teaching. Since the School could not afford to hire more faculty or to abandon evening teaching, the only thing to be done was to shorten the teaching terms to the eight weeks of Oxford and Cambridge: ‘even this would involve the addition of at least a month to those precious days when one can chase the thought as it flies, “waste time” on exactitude, and let the clock and the telephone do their damnedest’ (Memorandum on the Length of Term, February 1936). His advice was not taken: a special committee set up to consider it came to the conclusion that it could not be done without the agreement of the other colleges of the University of London (Professorial Council 4 March and 10 June 1936). Lionel was in fact seriously overworking and had begun to suffer from the migraines that were to trouble him for the next twentyfive years. His graduate student Ben Higgins (1992, 7) remembers that he found badminton, ‘which he played very well’, a good cure. The School had a badminton court in the basement and ‘when Robbins felt a migraine coming on he would come and dig me out of my cubicle, and down we would go to play fast and furious badminton for an hour or so.’

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Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in February 1936. He sent copies to some eighty professional economists, including Hayek and Robbins. Their first responses were brief. Writing to Keynes on 6 February (Keynes EJ/13 ) to see if the Royal Economic Society would be prepared to subsidize the publication of a manuscript by Nassau Senior that Marian Bowley had discovered, Robbins added a postscript: ‘Thank you so much for sending me a copy of your book. I am eagerly looking forward to reading it thoroughly during the vacation. This wretched place does not permit of serious work at this time in the term. But the peeps I have permitted myself have been most exciting.’ Hayek thanked Keynes on 2 February in the course of a letter sending proofs of an article for the EJ (JMK 29, 207–8): he had started reading it but had not got very far. On 15 February he admitted to Haberler that he was ‘hopelessly stuck’ in chapter 6 (Haberler 67, my translation). At the same time he was trying to concentrate exclusively on his own book on capital theory and hoped to complete the first draft in the Easter vacation. Lionel meanwhile was preparing a talk to the Manchester Statistical Society on 27 February to commemorate (a few weeks late) the centenary of William Stanley Jevons (1835–82) (1936a) as well as completing a memorandum on protectionism (1936e). He concentrated on describing Jevons’s work in pure theory for it was there, he thought, that his work had ‘greatest contemporary interest and significance’; on the other hand he could not ignore his work in applied economics for ‘there was no field in which his touch showed greater evidence of sheer genius than in his capacity for handling facts, for marshalling large bodes of statistical evidence in a clear and succinct manner, and in extracting the utmost significance from them.’ When the term was drawing to its end Hayek wrote to Haberler again on 14 March (Haberler 67). He was going to Austria next week and Robbins was leaving the next day, a week before the end of term, for a long lecturing and skiing trip to Finland and Scandinavia. The next day an article by Haberler on the multiplier arrived for Economica. Robbins on the point of departure handed it to Hayek, who returned it to Haberler on 15 March, telling him there were difficulties (Haberler 67). They had asked Pigou to review the General Theory, his review had come in and was very critical, and in these circumstances they wanted to avoid anything which could give the impression of a planned campaign against Keynes. He himself had for that reason determined to submit a note to the EJ which Keynes could not very well refuse. He recommended Haberler to send his note there too. ‘I hope you will really understand our difficulties’, he went on (my translation). ‘The

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chance exists just now to isolate Keynes and to bring to a stand a common front of other Cambridge and London [economists]. These possibilities we would not jeopardize by putting Economica in the forefront of the attack. Pigou’s article will cause enough sensation.’20 It is unlikely that Lionel read much of Keynes’s book in the Easter vacation. His trip took him first to Finland, via Hamburg and Stockholm, where, as he wrote his father on 7 April, ‘excitement began. We hadn’t steamed a mile out of the harbour before we ran into ice. Great fields of dirty greeny grey floes which heaved and groaned & cracked as we forced our way through. All night long the ship was loud with the breaking of ice at the bow & in the morning as we neared Abo [Turku] & it became thicker & more snow bound, it was as if we were pioneers, crashing our way with steam & steel into a still uninhabited world.’ In a fortnight he lectured in Helsinki, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Copenhagen. It was an exhausting schedule – ‘one ceaseless round of parties, visits to factories, buildings, Bankers & Industrialists etc’ – but ‘after all these months of storm & stress at the School’ the friendliness of all he met was a relief. He discovered Stockholm was one of the most beautiful cities he had seen and enjoyed a day exploring it with the undersecretary of the treasury, Dag Hammarskjold, whom he had met in London. To his great surprise he also met the Crown Prince, who asked to see him when he could not attend his lecture (on the economic effects of government expenditure: see pp. 312–13): ‘H.R.H. proved not merely to be friendly & charming but also (mirabile dictu) really interested in Economics. . . . – I came away more convinced than ever of the desirability of constitutional monarchy as a safeguard against Nazidom Fascism & other evils. . . . I met some of the socialists afterwards & found that they shared my views.’ At the end of the fortnight, suffering from a migraine headache, he travelled to Bergen to meet Iris for two weeks’ skiing in Geilo – a mountain village halfway between Oslo and Bergen and a well-established ski resort thanks to the railway. Iris unfortunately twisted her ankle skating a few days before she left England and hardpacked icy snow was difficult for relative beginners. Lionel had, however, an article to write for Lloyds Bank Review (1936c) and by the time he had finished it there was a fresh fall of snow, which made the going slower and safer. After two more days in Bergen they sailed for home and arrived in London just before the start of the Summer term. 20

Hayek did not in fact submit anything to the EJ (Howson 2001, 372–3). Haberler sent his note to Keynes, who admitted the awkward position he was in as editor (JMK 29, 248–54), and Haberler published it in the Zeitschrift f¨ur National¨okonomie (1936).

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Hayek’s letters to Haberler in the Summer term commented on his reading of the General Theory – but not, unfortunately, on Robbins’s reaction to the book – and on activities at the School. In June a young Viennese philosopher of science, Karl Popper, was there to give a paper in Hayek’s seminar; his first book, Logik der Forschung, had been published eighteen months earlier; at LSE he talked on ‘The poverty of historicism’ (Popper 1974, 86; Hacohen 2000, 315–16). Hayek was impressed with the paper (and so he thought was Lionel), as he told Haberler on 22 June (Haberler 67); he wished he could have Popper, who was looking for a job outside Austria, as a colleague but saw no prospect of being able to arrange it. Rosenstein-Rodan also wrote to Kaldor on 7 April (Kaldor NK/3/97/59–65, my translation) about life in London: ‘On the whole it is rather dull . . . as one could foresee. At the School Lionel . . . has ever more administrative and political jobs – because of this is a feeling of aimlessness . . . everyone lives for himself and the atmosphere of a common centre gets lost.’ The seminar was devoted to international trade and ‘the man in the Seminar, as in the School generally, is Lerner’, who had ‘developed astonishingly’ into a ‘first class man’. Lionel himself wrote more cheerfully to Kaldor on 29 May (Kaldor NK/3/97/67), assuring him he could have his course on production back from Lerner on his return to LSE and discouraging him from trying to renew his Rockefeller Fellowship for another year: ‘Life in the Department proceeds very satisfactorily just now. We have [J.G.] Koopmans from Holland, and [Ingvar] Svennilson from Stockholm with us in the Seminar this term, and the discussions have been of a very high quality. [Campbell] Secord has been appointed to be [Richard] Sayers’ successor [Sayers having been appointed to a fellowship at Pembroke College Oxford] on Gregory’s side [ie currency and banking], and we are hoping to have [Gunnar] Myrdal for a couple of lectures next session. Hayek has finished the first draft of his book on capital. Lerner has prepared a multiplicity of most interesting and illuminating articles. I am in the midst of a struggle against the scarcity of time and the difficulty of composition in the attempt to make some sort of a book out of my Geneva lectures.’

APPENDIX: ROBBINS’S ANSWERS TO POUND’S QUESTIONNAIRE SEPTEMBER 1934 The questionnaire was in the form of statements to which the respondent was to reply whether he agreed.

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‘Dear E.P. After those preliminary salvoes – discharged to rid the air of a slightly non comformist flavour, let us get down to work. Your examination paper isn’t really much help since – as you will see in a minute – it is really very difficult to give any pat short answers, and what we want if we’re ever to understand each other is a long talk in which we can start right from the beginning and work up to these more difficult issues. However for what it’s worth here goes. Q.1 [It is an outrage that the state shd. run into debt to individuals by the act and in the act of creating real wealth.] Why should it be an outrage that the state should run into debt to individuals by the act of creating wealth? If I want to write an epic poem (real wealth) but I haven’t got the cash to keep going until it is finished it is not an outrage that [I] should be permitted to borrow from you the wherewithal to do it. Of course it would be nicer if you gave me the cash but if you don’t know me why should you. You have to go without the opportunity of spending the money while I have it. Now states usually get their money other ways by taxing or by printing it. But if they do borrow from individuals I cannot see why it is an outrage. Suppose a State decides to build a road. To do this it has to advance wages to the road makers. Where are these to come from? Taxes? If you like. But why not borrow from people who by not spending thus release real wages to the desired amount. Ridiculous naivety you reply. If they borrow, they borrow from the Banks & the Banks don’t go without anything. They create the money. Well the answer to that, dear E/P, is that if the Banks do do this, it’s inflation just as much as it would be if the State put the printing presses in motion. And from my point of view that is an outrage. Because speaking broadly any net increase in the volume of money in the widest sense tends to lower the purchasing power of the money already outstanding. There are cases where this is not so but as against your attitude, this is the proposition I would underline. As between inflation via notes & via bank credit I don’t see much to choose. Without knowing the specific circumstances I’m agin both. They cause crises. Q.2 [Several nations recognize the necessity of distributing purchasing power. . . . ] I don’t recognize the necessity for distributing purchasing power. The quantity already existing will do for me (plus perhaps a small annual increase to keep pace with population). Why don’t you want prices ever to fall?

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(E/P – Because falling prices cause depression. L/R – No they don’t if they are due to increased productivity. They’re only depressing if they are due to deflation. Naturally I am as opposed to this as to inflation. Read my book.) Hence I shan’t answer the rest of the question [as to whom purchasing power should be distributed]. Q.3. [A country CAN have one currency for internal use, and another good both for home and foreign use.] It can but it will get into a mess if it does so. If the domestic money starts depreciating (as you people would like) then everyone would start keeping accounts in the international unit. See Germany under the mark. Q.4. [If money is regarded as a certificate of work done, taxes are no longer necessary.] I think this is sheer rot. Money isn’t a certificate of work done & if you substitute certificates of this sort for what we have as money, you have abolished money. That’s all. And a filthy mess you’d get into too. Why try to resuscitate this early Victorian ghost of the Labour Theory of Value. Q.5) [It is possible to concentrate all taxation onto the actual paper money of a country (or onto one sort of its money).] Yes it’s been done more or less in Germany, Austria & elsewhere. If you like it go & live there next time they do it. See my answer to Q.1. Q.6) [You can issue valid paper money against any commodity UP TO the amount of that commodity that people WANT.] Now what does this mean? Supposing people want one million loaves of bread – we’ll leave out of account what want means here – how many units of currency can you issue. Suppose bread is the only commodity they want. Then the whole of the money will exchange for the whole of the bread. The price of bread will adjust itself according to the quantity of money. What follows? Q.7. [Some of the commonest failures of clarity among economists are due to using one word to signify two or more different concepts: such as, DEMAND, meaning sometimes WANT and sometimes power to buy; authoritative, meaning also responsible.] I should think so. (See Economic Works of E/P passim.) Q.8. [It is an outrage that the owner of one commodity can not exchange it with someone possessing another, without being impeded or taxed by a third party holding a monopoly over some third substance or controlling some convention, regardless of what it be called.] Clearly. But not for the reason you think. Not a bit satisfactory is it. Yet I must confess I would like to have a serious argument with you. I can’t take your stuff as seriously as you think I should because I’ve been through it all so many times. Bunting or a dozen people

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whose good faith you wouldn’t question would tell you that I went into Economics after the war because I was convinced that Douglas had found the orthodox economists out & I wanted to learn their jargon so as to put things right. But he’s wrong, dear E/P, there’s no burking it, if you go into it as much as I have done, just simply wrong – as a man would be who wrote (x + y)2 = x2 +y2 and the tragedy of the world won’t just vanish by the application of his abracadabra any more than it would in the times of Rihaku or Vidal – nor the muddle either. You say why don’t you have a go at Orage. Why should I? I published an Essay [1932h] a few years ago in which I showed the fallacy of Douglas’s analysis of the deficiency of purchasing power. I did it because, remembering my own bewildered youth, I thought that professional economists hadn’t been courteous to Douglas. The man is sincere: why not reply even if he is obviously wrong. The next thing that happened was that Orage had an article [1932] in his journal suggesting that I was in the pay of the Banks – which is just silly. I don’t feel any enmity – I got too much entertainment out of Orage’s journalism in the old days for that. But what waste of time to go on on such a basis. And why do I write to you? Sheer intellectual love of God & his poets. It seems so grotesque that the author of Quia Pauper Amavi should be spending his valuable time and enthusiasm chasing a pure logical fallacy. Won’t you come and see me when you’re in London. If we each appeared to the other horribly pig headed on this point we could talk about something else. Yours L.R. P.S. A good book on Money is L. von Mises Theorie des Geldes. I’m having it translated but you’d enjoy the German better – if you enjoy it at all.’ (LCR to Pound, 18 September 1934, Pound Collection, Beinecke Library)

TEN

The Approach of War

The rise of Hitler in Germany eventually led the National Government to announce in March 1935 a policy of rearmament which went slowly into effect in 1936. In June 1935 Stanley Baldwin replaced MacDonald as Prime Minister; in November he called a general election which returned his government and gave it a mandate for rearmament. Meanwhile Mussolini had decided to attack Abyssinia: economic sanctions imposed by the League of Nations failed to stop him and were withdrawn in June 1936. Three months earlier Hitler had sent German troops into the Rhineland; neither France nor Britain was prepared to act, the latter only offering France and Belgium a guarantee against future aggression. And in the summer of 1936 there came the Spanish civil war when the Spanish generals led by Francisco Franco rebelled against the elected republican government. Lionel accepted public opinion would not permit British action over the Rhineland. Although, as he told his sister on 9 April, he was ‘not averse to fighting them . . . there would be a moral disadvantage in fighting on an issue about which 50% of the population at home took the German view. But I would arm & refuse to negotiate.’ As he told his father two days earlier, there was no point in negotiating with a ‘blackguard’ whereas rearmament might mean that ‘if we call his bluff now we can avoid bloodshed which otherwise is inevitable if not in my time at any rate in Richard’s’. With respect to Spain he thought his father would feel as he did in August that ‘the government here [in Britain] has done well to keep us out of it. “A plague on both their houses” say I. . . . I can see no outcome which can be regarded as good.’ He was beginning to despair of the League of Nations: ‘I am as much a believer in the necessity of a super-national authority as ever. But I don’t want to be dragged into these totally unsympathetic quarrels of the right & left in faction ridden Europe & I don’t want a League which is a disguise for a Triple Entente & now that the attempt to save Abyssinia 294

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has broken down completely, I feel more & more that a greater detachment from Europe is the best we can hope for at the moment. Of course the situation might change any moment so as to offer more hope. But I am not optimistic.’ The international economic situation was only slightly less worrying than the political situation. The British economy had been recovering since 1932, but there were fears, which Lionel shared, that the housebuilding boom and hence the recovery could not continue much longer. Long-term unemployment remained high in the old industrial areas in the North of England, but as usual Lionel was more concerned about developments overseas. The primary-produce-exporting Dominions of the British Empire had made a good recovery since their currencies had depreciated with sterling. In the United States, which had returned to gold at $35 an ounce in January 1934, conditions were improving. The economies of the European countries still clinging to the gold standard were, however, seriously deteriorating; few observers thought they could hang on much longer and many feared the chaos that would ensue when they gave up. In January 1935 Lionel, writing of the prospects for the year in the New York Times Annalist, had been apprehensive, noting the danger of war in Europe, the difficulties of the gold bloc and the uncertainty of continued recovery in Britain and America. A year later he thought his apprehensions justified with respect to Europe: politically ‘the gangster principles of the anti-Democratic States are being translated into practice’; economically Belgium had abandoned the old gold parity and devalued its currency. Admitting he had been too gloomy about the rest of the world, he still viewed the prospects for 1936 with ‘grave misgiving’ for the same reasons as in 1935. (His views of the prospects in the following years were even less cheerful (tss and clippings in War Memoranda, RP).) In May 1936 a Socialist government under Leon Blum was elected in France and immediately faced with a flight of capital. On 25 September 1936 the French finally devalued the franc, but thanks to negotiations between the American, British and French Treasuries during the summer they could also announce a ‘Tripartite Agreement’ in which the three governments declared their intention to cooperate in exchange rate policy in future. Robbins and Hayek were among the ‘eminent economists’ whose opinions were sought by the Evening Standard newspaper: all welcomed the long delayed inevitable devaluation (clipping, ‘Economists welcome franc decision’, Evening Standard, September 28, 1936, War Memoranda, RP). Against this background the economics profession continued to investigate the causes of cyclical fluctuations. At the League of Nations Haberler had begun his study of business cycles (1937) by preparing a comprehensive

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critical survey of the many different theories, which he circulated for comment to a large number of economists, including Robbins, in August 1934. In the next eighteen months he revised the memorandum to take account of the comments and prepared a second report attempting to produce a synthesis of the theories he had found plausible explanations of the phases of cycles. Alexander Loveday invited a number of economists to come to Geneva at the end of June 1936 to discuss Haberler’s second report. Several were heads of business cycle research institutes: Oskar Anderson, Leon Dupriez, Wesley Mitchell (who did not attend) and Oskar Morgenstern. The others who attended included John Maurice Clark, Alvin Hansen, Bertil Ohlin, Robbins, Robertson, R¨opke and Jan Tinbergen.1 Lionel received his invitation while he was in Norway and promptly accepted – rather to the disappointment of Hayek, who had told Haberler on 15 February that he thought his overworked friend might decline and then he might be invited instead (Haberler 67). Loveday told Rappard on 29 April that he had wanted to include economists from different ‘schools’ of business cycle theory and deliberately not invited Mises in order not to have too many Austrians (Loveday P17(1), LoN). At the same time the Rockefeller Foundation was contemplating a conference of economists to advise it on ways of encouraging international economic research; after learning of the Haberler conference the Rockefeller people decided to hold their conference immediately afterwards at Annecy, France, 45 kilometres from Geneva, and to invite the same economists plus one or two others. The others included J.B. Condliffe of the Financial Section of the League, who chaired the conference, Mises and Rappard.2 The business cycle discussions opened in the newly built League of Nations headquarters on 29 June and continued until 2 July; the Rockefeller conference began the next day at the Imperial Palace Hotel in Annecy and lasted over the weekend. Detailed records were kept of both sets of discussions but for the Haberler meetings ‘the transcription was really most inaccurate – in many cases making one say exactly the opposite of what one intended to say & what one must actually have said if one’s colleagues did not then & there call one’s whole statement in question’; Lionel also 1

2

The first report (‘Systematic Analysis of the Theories of the Business Cycle’), the distribution list and the replies received (none from LCR) are in LoN 10B/12653/12653. Haberler’s second report (‘Synthetic exposition of the nature and causes of business cycles’) together with a ‘Proposal for the further programme and termination of my work on the causes of the recurrence of economic depressions’, Loveday’s letters of invitation and the replies are in LoN 10B/21852/12653. Van Sickle to Loveday, 30 October 1935, Haberler and Condliffe to Loveday, 25 May 1936, and Draft Agenda for Conference in LoN 10B/21852/12653.

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pointed out to Haberler in September that some of his arguments had been attributed to R¨opke and that they were frequent confusions between himself and Robertson (LoN 10B/21852/12653). Judging from the only surviving copy of the transcript in the Ohlin Papers, one such confusion occurred during the second session, when the role of the accelerator principle of investment had been emphasized and was attributed to Robbins instead of Robertson (Boianovsky and Trautwein 2006, 65). Aware that his fellow economists were more likely to agree on the forces which sustained upswings or downswings than on the causes of the turning points, Haberler suggested they discuss the four phases of the cycle in separate sessions. His own views were eclectic and he was now disenchanted with the Austrian cycle theory especially as an explanation of the upper turning point. Lionel had not yet followed him in this and also disagreed with many others present as to possible policies in response to a downturn. He apparently argued that ‘some rather abrupt reduction in the rate of saving’ was the plausible cause of the crises of 1907 and 1929. Ohlin retorted that oversaving was an equally plausible cause. ‘Robertson and Robbins argued, against Ohlin, that historically an excess of saving over investment seldom comes before the breakdown, but only after the turn caused by over-investment.’ Lionel criticized Ohlin’s suggestion that the rate of interest should be reduced immediately after a downturn (ibid., 69–70). In the final session there was ‘a lively discussion’ on the effect of wage reductions on employment (ibid., 73): ‘Robbins disagreed with what he called Ohlin’s “scepticism” and “intellectual nihilism.” . . . According to Robbins, who received qualified support from Robertson, R¨opke, and others, wage reductions at the beginning of the depression may contribute to the recovery, especially if there was some wage rigidity at the end of the boom.’ Two sessions discussed the statistical testing of business cycle theories which was to be carried out by Tinbergen once Haberler went to Harvard. Lionel had been consulted on Haberler’s successor. He told Loveday on 22 April 1936 that he did not think there was an obvious candidate: Anderson, ‘the most distinguished of continental Analytical Statisticians’, was too old; Tinbergen was ‘one of the best of the younger group of the Econometric Society and certainly a very charming person’ but he was not as mature as Haberler; Bresciani-Turroni might be considered but he was probably an older man than Loveday wanted (Loveday P17(1), LoN). In appointing Tinbergen Loveday appointed Robertson as a consultant to supervise Tinbergen’s work. Lionel was one of twenty economists to whom Tinbergen’s first report was sent for comment a year later: he was also one of the ten who

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had not responded by December 1937 (Loveday to Anderson and others, 7 December 1937, LoN 10B/26666/12653). He was not involved in either of the meetings of experts held in September 1937 and July 1938. Nor did he attend the European meeting of the Econometric Society held in Oxford on 25–29 September 1936, although there was a very strong turnout of younger LSE economists. At this meeting Harrod, Hicks and Meade presented their formal models of Keynes’s General Theory, of which Hicks’s became famous for his IS-LM diagram.3 At the Rockefeller conference Robbins’s interventions show his skills as a committee member. Halfway through the first session he felt that . . . the discussion was wandering rather far from the Agenda, and in order to pull things together suggested that speakers should confine themselves to answers to simple propositions: (1) Is there a world economy? (2) If there is what aspects might be most fruitfully studied? (3) How shall these aspects be studied and by what means?

Answering his own questions, he stressed the need for ‘realistic study of the structural, political and social conditions in the various world economies’ as well as for statistical data. There was a pressing need to develop new theories which were more likely to come from the work of individual researchers than from national research institutes. He urged the foundation to renew its fellowship programme and to support ‘Haberler-like’ activities rather than attempting to set up an international research institute. On the last morning he suggested as suitable subjects for investigation public finance, ‘Involuntary Unemployment and the wide question of the Demand for Labour, a subject which had been brought into great prominence by Mr Keynes’ recent book’ and problems of structural change. He received strong support from (among others) R¨opke, Rappard and Ohlin; the main finding of the conference was that Haberler-like activities should be continued (Record of the Discussions at the Conference called by the Rockefeller Foundation to consider the Desirability and Feasibility of Encouraging Coordination of Economic Research upon Problems of Economic Change, Annecy, July 3rd, 4th, 5th, 1936, Rockefeller Foundation RG3/910/4/31). Lionel and Iris did not return to the Continent that summer. They took their family holiday in August in the Western Highlands of Scotland, where it rained all the time, and near Aberdovey on the Welsh coast, where the 3

Theories of Business Cycle 8–10 September 1937, 10B/29950/12653, and Theories of Business Cycle Meeting of Experts Cambridge July 1938, 10B/33815/12653, LoN; Phelps Brown 1937.

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weather improved for a few days only. Writing to his father from the Pennal, Merioneth, farmhouse in which they were staying, ‘with the rain pelting in torrents on the windows on either side of the room’, Lionel resolved that ‘next year if the franc has been devalued & there is no war’ they would go to the South of France. He spent his time in the bad weather writing his book based on the lectures he had given in Geneva a year earlier. Three weeks into the Michaelmas term Lionel wrote to Caroline on 25 October: ‘the administrative struggle is at last coming to a head. I have had to spend the last two weeks drafting a document on the constitution – rather interesting but very time consuming. . . . Beveridge has played his hand very lamely just recently & I am not without hope that, after an interval during which everything will be even more unpleasant than it is now, we shall emerge with something like ordinary academic standards and institutions. Then I shall come to the States.’ He was, however, still working on his book, now provisionally titled Reflections on Planning from an international point of view: an Essay on Economic Nationalism, World Socialism and International Liberalism, and had started on the last chapter. He had wanted to call the book ‘Cosmopolitan Reflections on Planning’ but ‘all my advisers say that cosmopolitan reminds them of men with eccentric beards gesticulating in cafes – at least that’s what they convey rather less vividly’. On 30 October Hayek told Machlup (Machlup 43–15) that Lionel had finished his book and that he himself was revising the first draft of his own book on capital theory. Lionel sent the manuscript to Harold Macmillan, who accepted it in less than a fortnight, offering to publish it on the same terms as Robbins’s previous books. Lionel agreed except that he asked for a larger advance, which Macmillan readily conceded, and did not initially give Macmillan the American rights but approached Harper & Co in New York (LCR to Macmillan, 10 and 26 November, Macmillan to LCR, 19, 24 and 27 November 1936, PE & WE drafts, RP). Lionel took the proofs with him when he and Iris went skiing in Switzerland after Christmas. Economic Planning and International Order was published in England on 30 April 1937 and in New York on 22 June – by the American Macmillan company as Harper had not been interested. Unlike The Great Depression this was not a book he would later claim to wish he had not written. At the time of his autobiography, and the reprinting of his planning book, he still stood by many of the arguments he had made there and the implications he had drawn from them, although he criticized himself for his lack of appreciation of macroeconomic problems and a lack of realism about international federalism (Robbins 1971a, 160–2, 1972e, preface). The Geneva lectures and the book were like Gaul divided into three parts: the first

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part on the international significance of national planning; the second on ‘partial’ international control of trade, production and labour conditions; the third on ‘complete’ international planning (in which the last chapter, on international money, used the arguments for a genuinely international monetary system he had made in his lectures in the Netherlands in 1935). In each part his approach was to consider the arguments for various forms of planning from an international point of view rather than from that of any one country: as he put in his notes for his first lecture (ms International Aspects of Planning, PE & WE drafts, RP), ‘I take as [my] standard [the] real incomes of inhabitants of world. Criterion economy max satisfaction within continuous system, count[ing] each [individual] as one’ and he found that ‘judged by this standard that separate national planning likely to lead to uneconomic distribution world’s resources’. In the first part he considered – critically of course – tariffs, quantitative restrictions on imports, control of overseas investment and exchange controls. In the second he considered bilateral trade agreements, international cartels and international commodity agreements, and international regulation of wages and hours of labour: as he told his listeners in Geneva, since his discussion in his first lecture had ‘Showed how [national planning] led to more and more isolation [and] shrinkage [of] trade & investment’, it was ‘Tempting to suppose that to be remedied by international action[:] Planning by cooperation between nations or by some central authority.’ But over and over again he showed that all these attempts at partial international planning could benefit only a particular group of producers in one industry or one country. They offered ‘No solution [to the] problems [in] first lecture’. When he turned in the third part to international socialism (international communism as he called it in the book) he ‘did not wish to repeat here [in the lectures] at length the brilliant analysis by which Prof Mises [has] shown that solution of this problem [of planning production to meet consumers’ wishes] in community this size demands a system [of] prices’, but he did think ‘consideration of this proposition in context of problems actual world economy tends to make them very vivid’. As he noted in the book (1937c, 201), ‘In a world economy, with hundreds of thousands of types of commodities and hundreds of thousands of ways of producing them, the attainment of one solution [to a series of simultaneous equations], let alone the continuous change of solution which changing conditions would involve, would be completely out of the question.’ The most interesting feature of the book from the biographical point of view is the argument for international federation to which it leads. In both lectures and book his final reflection on complete international planning

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was that the inevitable centralization made it incompatible with democracy. Hence, as he put it in his lecture notes, ‘National Planning tends to break up world economy & political strains resulting therefrom. World planning is almost certainly unworkable & involves abrogation of political systems & values intended to save.’ He found the escape from this impasse in liberalism, that is free markets and private property. But he was aware of its limitations and emphasized two of them. One was the need for some goods, and not just security, defence and legal rights, to be publicly provided if they were to be provided at all. The other was from his international point of view a world of independent national states was not sufficiently liberal. As things were at present (1937c, 239), ‘There is world economy. But there is no world polity. The different national states each arm against each other. Between their members there is not the ordered freedom of the liberal state but the brutish anarchy of the state of nature. The opportunities of division of labour make us members one of another. But for lack of proper governmental machinery we make war or prepare for war continually.’ So, in the book, following both his old teacher Cannan and Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist (1788), he concluded the ‘only one solution to this stupendous problem’ (245) was an international political federation, in which national states would surrender certain rights, especially the right and power to make war, to an international authority. In trying to delimit the other powers that should be surrendered, he resorted to the principle, used by Cannan in his work on local government authorities, that (251) ‘The different local authorities, whether “national” or “local”, should pursue such policies as, without restriction, should give the greatest value to the resources permanently fixed within their jurisdiction.’ He did not claim a liberal world order would be perfect – even without international migration of labour (which he strongly favoured) it would not remove inequalities of income (but migration would help to reduce them). In a final concluding chapter he directly addressed the question whether an international system was desirable, taking the opportunity to attack Keynes’s counterargument in ‘National Self-Sufficiency’ in 1933 (JMK 21, 233–46) as at best short-sighted and ignoring the danger of war between autarchic nation states. Keynes was nonetheless (321) ‘still the man who wrote the Economic Consequences of the Peace, one of the most magnificent gestures in defence of the great principles of peace and international justice of this or any other age.’ His own conclusion (324) was ‘there is no longrun advantage for the members of the different national groups from the preservation of national sovereignty. There is no gain from trade, there is no gain of security which would not be better provided for by some form of international federation.’

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Lionel sent copies of his book to many friends and received many appreciative letters. Hugh Dalton told him on 29 June (Correspondence, RP) that it was ‘very much the best written of your opera. Indeed, it is a joy to read; clean, simple and emphatic English, such as few can keep up for long. On the other hand, gone is nearly all hope of great surprise in your writings now!’ The chapter on liberalism was particularly good: ‘“Here” the reader will say, “is the man’s religion, and how fervently he holds it!”’ Not surprisingly, reviewers’ reactions to the book were mixed. Most praised the style and the logic and many the sincerity of the writing. But some thought it too abstract for the practical matters with which it dealt, others, such as Roy Harrod and Redvers Opie, that it overstated the case against socialism (‘An economist’s manifesto’, The Economist, May 15, 1937; Harrod 1937a; Opie 1937; Morrow 1937; Knight 1938; Knox 1938; Prest 1938). Lionel defended himself to Harrod by pointing out that he was ‘not opposed either to countercyclical spacing out of public works or to all measures to mitigate inequality’ (draft letter, 13.1.38, Correspondence, RP). The case for federation – on which Lionel was to write much more in the next three years – received less attention than the more realistic chapter on international money which was much commended. It was more warmly received in France (Pirou 1937) and a French translation was soon published (1938e) – though not by Payot (the publisher of La Grande Depression) in spite of the efforts of Etienne Mantoux, who had come to admire Lionel greatly while he was his research student at LSE in 1935/6 (Mantoux 1946, ix; Mantoux to LCR, 22 December 1936, Letters from Economists, and Mantoux to LCR, 13 May, 4 July, 18 and 20 September 1937, Letters from Economists 1946– [sic], RP). The French publishers of the planning book later offered to publish a translation of Nature and Significance, which was not completed until January 1940 (Genin, Librairie de Medicis, to LCR, 15 June 1939 and 5 January 1940, Correspondence, RP; Robbins 1947e). Viner, writing on 14 December 1937 (Viner 22–14), encouraged Lionel to visit the United States: ‘Your latest book is attracting a great deal of attention here, most of it favourable, and you would be received . . . as a distinguished person, and many fatted calves would be slaughtered in your honor.’ Lionel had long wanted to visit the USA but, as he had told his sister a year earlier, he would not go until he had resolved the problems with Beveridge at LSE. The document on the LSE constitution Lionel had been helping to prepare in October 1936 was another draft report from the Constitution Committee. At a meeting on 7 October, which had before it a document prepared by

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Beveridge on the ‘Working Constitution’ of the School, most of the members thought the time had come again to try to improve the running of the School, specifically by setting up an academic body smaller than the Professorial Council which Beveridge would have to consult. The committee ‘finally agreed’ that Robbins, Parry and Laski should draft the proposals during the next three weeks. Their report was tactful but unambiguous: ‘The School has grown to its present position largely as the result of the initiative of particular individuals, in particular as a result of the zealous care of the present Director. . . . But we submit that the time has now come when, if friction between different parts of the School is to be avoided, . . . some machinery for more systematic organisation of initiative is desirable.’ While the director had ‘at a very early stage of nearly all important developments’ called together small groups of the academic staff, this was ‘consultation by choice rather than consultation by rule’. The committee recommended a General Purposes Committee, as had the Inspectors of the University of London when they visited LSE in 1935. This committee must be small enough ‘to permit of frank discussions without rhetoric’, which implied an ‘extreme upper limit’ of thirteen regular members; the membership should be filled partly by rotation among the professors and partly by election by the Professorial Council. The revised draft report emphasized that it dealt only with the role of the Professorial Council and not with the position of the Emergency Committee or of the director. Although the Professorial Council approved the report on 18 November 1936, the Constitution Committee continued to meet, first to deal with Beveridge’s document and then to prepare a final report. In December they went through Beveridge’s document and persuaded him to make changes before it went to the Court of Governors. Among the issues they raised were the powers of the committees appointed by the governors, especially the Emergency Committee, and of the academic departments. Lionel suggested the departments, which existed only de facto, should have departmental committees. Beveridge agreed to put the suggestion before the new General Purposes Committee when it was set up. The final version of his document included the GPC and recognition of the Emergency Committee as a Standing Committee of the Court of Governors. The ‘final report’ of the Constitution Committee to the Professorial Council included a note of some of the points raised in the discussion of the Beveridge document – such as Robbins’s suggestion of departmental committees (Constitution Committee 2 and 11 December and 27 January 1937). The committee split over the question of immediately seeking a formal Charter for the School;

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so did the Professorial Council on 3 March (Dahrendorf 1995, 322). LSE still does not have a charter. The de facto Economics Department continued to act collectively under Robbins’s leadership. In the mid-1930s the Rockefeller Foundation had begun to phase out institutional grants in favour of project grants: when the School’s five-year grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial ended in 1933 the foundation renewed it for two years at a reduced rate and when that came to an end allocated a five-year grant on a rapidly diminishing basis to end in 1940 (Rockefeller Research Fund Committee 14 June 1933 and 3 July 1935). A special committee, including Lionel, appointed by the Professorial Council on 20 November 1935 to consider how to allocate the reduced funds, decided that the Rockefeller Research Fund Committee should consider applications from departments rather than individuals and give preference to projects which would lead to some definite publication within the five years. The four professors of economics (Gregory, Hayek, Plant and Robbins) decided to set up an Economics Research Division, to comprise all the economics staff and to be run by a committee of the director, the professors and the editor of the LCES (Bowley) (Rockefeller Research Fund Committee 26 February 1936; Hayek to Beveridge, 30 October 1936, attached to Agenda for Professorial Council 18 November 1936). When this was created in December 1936, Hayek became the deputy chairman and Allen the secretary of the committee. In its first four months the Division employed three research assistants to work on four large projects and approved a dozen smaller projects (Rockefeller Research Fund Committee 31 May 1937). It is interesting but not surprising that Lionel had no project on the list. Lionel continued actively to support empirical research at LSE. Since the representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation at the Annecy conference had made clear their desire to encourage international economic research by the various European business cycle institutes, Lionel and Dennis Robertson suggested the LCES apply for funds to extend its activities, especially for research on cyclical fluctuations and on international capital movements. Bowley and Paish, as editor and secretary of the LCES, submitted an application in February 1937 based on Robbins’s and Robertson’s proposal (Memorandum on the Organization of Research of the London & Cambridge Economic Service, 14 December 1936, Beveridge IIb36; Paish to Beveridge, 29 January 1937, Paish, The London and Cambridge Economic Service, and Beveridge to Kittredge, 11 February 1937, LSE 241B). The negotiations for a national institute of economic research were still complicated by Beveridge’s desire to resign as director of LSE to direct the

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new institute (Jones 1998, 3). At one point Stamp threatened to bow out because of the problems he and the other LSE governors were having with Beveridge, especially when Mrs Mair tried to obtain an extension of her appointment as Secretary of the School beyond the retiring age: Beveridge threatened to resign when Stamp would not support him against the senior academic staff (Hall, The origins and prewar development of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, RP). With respect to Mrs Mair a compromise was worked out. Kittredge of the Rockefeller Foundation reported to Van Sickle in New York on 8 February 1937 (Excerpt from letter from TBK to JVS, Rockefeller Foundation RG 1.1/401/71/944): In long conversations with Stamp, Beveridge, Robbins, Hall and others, I have gathered that the Institute project has at last come to fruition. Beveridge has made his decisions, and has reached agreement with Stamp and the members of the Provisional Committee. There is general agreement here that he is the logical man for the position of Director. The difficulties from the side of the School seem also to be disappearing[.] Robbins now expresses himself as satisfied with the Institute’s plans and will cooperate fully. The Institute will be entirely independent of the LSE. Beveridge has recognized the necessity of this, and will arrange to turn over the directorship of the School some time in 1938 to his successor. Mrs Mair will retire as Secretary of the School in 1938, will then have a year’s leave of absence, and will draw a pension of £500 a year from 1939. No decision has yet been taken as to choice of Beveridge’s successor. A number of influential persons are supporting the candidacy of H.A. Smith, an Oxford philosopher, . . . It appears likely, however, that H.A.L. Fisher will be retiring shortly from his position as Warden of New College and that Smith may succeed him. Another candidate mentioned is Carr-Saunders, but there is a possibility that he will be appointed to the Chair of Social Biology at the LSE, to succeed Hogben. If he is not appointed professor, this chair will probably remain vacant, and he will be considered for the directorship. Loveday’s name has also been mentioned, but it appears unlikely that he would be offered this appointment. It has been intimated that in the end, after other candidates have been examined, it is possible the position may be offered to Robbins. The present professors of the School have an informal agreement that none of them will seek or accept the appointment as Director. If an outside appointment is not decided upon before the end of the year, however, all groups may unite on Robbins. He has won a reputation for fairness, and administrative ability in the past few years as a member of the Senate of London Univ. He himself is backing the Smith candidacy, but his wife is said to be more ambitious than he himself.

Fisher did not resign as Warden. Hogben accepted the chair of natural history at Aberdeen; the academic members of the Court of Governors objected strenuously to the continuation of his Chair of Social Biology and proposed instead that Kuczynski be appointed to a senior readership

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in demography. But Beveridge did not become director of the National Institute. At the end of February his old college asked him if he would let his name go forward for the Mastership. He agreed and was elected Master of University College Oxford a month later. On 30 March he resigned the directorship of LSE as from 30 September (Confidential Note by Professors on Chair of Social Biology attached to Agenda for Emergency Committee 25 February 1937; Dahrendorf 1995, 323; Hogben and Hogben eds 1998, 142–3). Lionel was on a lecturing trip in Portugal (LCR to RRR, 16 April 1937) when a special meeting of the Court on 7 April formally accepted Beveridge’s resignation and appointed a selection committee for a new director. Early in May the committee recommended Carr-Saunders. When Lionel heard this from Beveridge on 6 May he immediately wrote to Carr-Saunders to tell him how glad he personally felt at the news (Carr-Saunders C/2, BLPES). At the next meeting of the Court, on 13 May, the governors also accepted the recommendations of the Constitution Committee, notably the establishment of a General Purposes Committee – to which the Professorial Council elected Robbins on 9 June. One of its first actions was to support the appointment of Kuczynski as a reader. Another was to set up a committee, including Lionel, to produce a report on the activities of the School in the last fifteen years, which had been requested by the Rockefeller Foundation as supporting material for another major grant application. It also considered, sympathetically, Lionel’s proposal for formal academic departments and, more urgently, the work of the School in the event of war.4 The Rockefeller Foundation awarded the LCES the funds it requested. When Kittredge attended a meeting of the London members of the editorial committee in November 1937 called to discuss plans for using the new money, he found the meeting ‘extraordinarily harmonious’, easily agreeing on the division of research tasks between the Service and the National Institute, of which Hall had recently agreed to be the director (Kittredge, London and Cambridge Economic Service, 17 November 1937, Rockefeller Foundation RG1.1/401/71/944). After the meeting, Bowley and Robbins told Kittredge that most of the past differences between LSE and the promoters of the Institute had disappeared now that Beveridge had gone – but Lionel remained hypersensitive to any hint of a suggestion that the institute 4

GPC 13 and 27 October and 24 November 1937, 12 January, 9 March, 18 May and 15 June, 16 November 1938, 22 February and 26 April 1939. LCR’s Memorandum on Departmental Reorganization makes it clear that he wished to strengthen the heads of departments vis a` vis the director.

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had to be independent of LSE because of the political views of its faculty (LCR to Henry Clay, 2 February 1938, Correspondence, RP). Lionel had been appointed in March 1935 to represent the Faculty of Economics on the Senate of the University of London for 1935/6–1938/9, in place of Bowley who was retiring, and had attended his first Senate meeting on 23 October. The following June the Professorial Council nominated him as one of its representatives on the LSE Court of Governors for 1936/7– 1940/1. He attended his first Court meeting on 5 November 1936, a rather routine meeting after the Court had stood in silence for the death of the economist Herbert Foxwell, who had taught currency and banking at LSE in its early years. Two weeks earlier he had attended his first meeting of the Committee of Management of the Courtauld Institute of Art, on which he was to serve almost continuously until 1975. He had volunteered his own name for a vacancy on the committee when it occurred in his first year on the Senate (Committee of Management 23 October 1936, Courtauld Institute Archives; Robbins 1971a, 244–5). The Courtauld Institute, which is a constituent college of the University, had been founded in 1931 by the industrialist Samuel Courtauld, the art collector Sir Robert Witt (the father of John Witt, Lionel’s student at New College Oxford in 1927–9) and the redoubtable Lord Lee of Fareham, whom Lionel’s father had known as Minister of Agriculture in 1919–20 (Clark ed 1974, 292–4; see Chapter 1). When Robbins joined the committee, its members included the founders; Lee was chairman until April 1937 when he resigned because of ill health and Courtauld took the chair. The meetings were held in Courtauld’s home, Home House, 20 Portman Square, which housed his own magnificent collection of paintings. The director of the Institute, Professor W.G. Constable, had recently and abruptly announced his intention to resign, ostensibly over the question of whether the Institute should teach art history to undergraduates. It had been ‘a deplorable struggle’ according to Lionel (1971a, 244), who was involved in the ‘clearing up’ of the aftermath. According to Lee (Clark ed 1974, 320–1) Constable was bitter and resentful about the appointment of Kenneth Clark to the directorship of the National Gallery, of which Lee was then chairman of the trustees. The Senate accepted Constable’s resignation both of his directorship and of his Chair of the History of Art, which he had first tried to retain, on 16 December 1936 and asked for a report on the issues which had prompted it. Lionel was put on the committee to draft the report, which unanimously (except for the director) came down in favour of essentially admitting only graduates to history of art degrees, and then on the University Board of Advisers for the position of the Chair of the History

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of Art and the directorship of the Institute, which recommended the new director, T.S.R. Boase, a fellow of Hertford College Oxford (Committee of Management 18 December 1936, 5 February, 19 April and 7 June 1937, and University of London, Article in The Nineteenth Century on the Courtauld Institute, Memorandum by Principal, May 1938, Courtauld Institute). Roy Allen once remarked (Shehadi Transcripts, BLPES) that the only occasion that he remembered of a split within the LSE economists in the 1930s was the abdication of Edward VIII in December 1936: ‘you had the Cromwellians and the Royalists split right across the board. For example Robbins was one, and Plant was on the other side.’ George V had died in January 1936. The new king wanted to marry his mistress, a twice divorced American. The Prime Minister (Baldwin) left the king in no doubt that as head of the Church of England which forbade remarriage after divorce, he could not marry Mrs Simpson and keep the throne. After the London papers broke their self-imposed silence on the affair on 1 December, it was only a matter of days before Edward abdicated in favour of his brother who became George VI. Lionel was definitely a Cromwellian. During the brief ‘crisis’ he scribbled some notes on his own views (Notes on the crisis, Articles & Notes, RP). The rationale of constitutional monarchy was solely to provide ‘a focus for the feelings of awe & devotion with which the majority of mankind need apparently to invest some object of collective emotion’. Its function was ‘essentially to unite’. If marriage with a divorcee would not interfere with the unifiying function it was permissible; if it would so interfere it was not – as in the present case. He was not against divorce, let alone a supporter of the Anglican position on the matter, and favoured divorce law reform, but that was irrelevant to the present crisis, for the monarch was not a private individual: ‘The job for which he is paid is to be the symbol. . . . If he does not like this it is open for him to take another employment.’ A few months earlier Plant and Robbins had written an article (1937b) on the teaching of economics at LSE for a special fiftieth anniversary supplement of the Revue d’Economie Politique on ‘L’enseignement e´ conomique en France et a` l’´etranger’. The other English contributors were Harrod (on Oxford), E.A.G. Robinson (Cambridge), G.C. Allen (Liverpool) and John Jewkes (Manchester). When the supplement came out in February 1937 Lionel took exception to a comment in Harrod’s paper in which ‘divagating somewhat surprisingly from the topic of the teaching of economics in Oxford, you describe me as advocating deflation and extreme laissez faire’ (LCR to Harrod, 10 February 1937, BL ADD 71188, f129).

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Harrod replied the next day (Letters from Economists, RP). He was sorry to have given offence but surprised he had done so: he had not said ‘advocating deflation’ but ‘deflationist in tendency’, which was surely ‘broadly correct’ and it was ‘absolutely correct that the kind of view put forward from London in the years after you returned there have given our people furiously to think’.5 Harrod’s reply satisfied Lionel on the personal level but as well as denying there was a doctrinal ‘school’ in London – ‘Whatever you may think of Hicks, Lerner, . . . Allen, Kaldor, Durbin, Bird, Coase & many others, you certainly must agree that they are not particularly tainted with any orthodoxy, other than that (which I know you would approve of) of not thinking that Economics began somewhere round 1930’ – he did not think Harrod’s description of his own views was accurate. He defended himself at length: I suppose the term deflationist can be made to cover a very wide species. But if it is used in the sense of supporters of general contraction, I would claim that I stand outside. I have never supported deflation in this sense, and I have often opposed it. I was opposed to deflation prior to 1925. As soon as we were off the gold standard, I urged that to try to recover the old parity would be folly and in recent years I have often tried to persuade my French friends that, once the international standard had gone, it was really fruitless for them to impose on themselves the agonies of contraction merely to keep pace with the vagaries of the pound & the dollar. As regards the pure theory of stabilization, I have considerable sympathy with the Marshallian view that stable money incomes provoke least disturbance. But given an international standard I am in fact much more expansionist than that. Given the present system of trade restrictions etc I would prefer a secular trend of rising gold prices, even at the cost of some instability. I suppose there are two grounds on which you would hold the term deflationist to be applicable. Firstly that I am willing to support local contraction in the interests of an international standard. Secondly that [I] have opposed certain measures designed by their promoters to arrest a deflationary process. On the first point I plead guilty to the substance of the charge. For reasons I have often explained, I do hold that the disadvantages of monetary separation outweigh its obvious advantages: and I admit that to keep in step it may sometimes be necessary to contract local factor earnings. But I would urge that the description of the offence is misleading. A local contraction which is accompanied by expansion elsewhere is very different from contraction alround; and I very much doubt whether discussion is clarified by putting them under the same heading. 5

Harrod (1937b, 86–7) had written: ‘Il est retourn´e a` Londres, et fortement influenc´e par ce que l’on a appell´e “l’Ecole autrichienne”, il a pris la tˆete d’un mouvement de renaissance de la pens´ee e´ conomique favorable aux doctrines de l’extrˆeme laissez-faire et de tendance d´eflationiste. On s’est, ici, grandement int´eress´e a` ce developpement, et le sujet a` donn´e lieu a` de nombreux d´ebats amicaux.’

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As regards reflation in the last slump, I think you have often misunderstood my attitude. I opposed hastily improvised public works because I saw no prospect of their being rightly timed or not incredibly wasteful. I opposed unbalancing of the Budget because I thought . . . that the indirect effects might be inimical to healthy recovery. As you know, I was also, rightly or wrongly, greatly concerned with the dangers of prolonging international monetary uncertainty. But I have never been opposed on principle to anti deflationary measures. At the present time I am wholeheartedly in favour of deferring public spending until the next depression, though I would hesitate to say anything which would raise high hopes in this connection. And I have a little plan of my own for counteracting deflation which I think does something of what you want to do by unbalancing the budget without as I conceive it, involving the dangers of that step. Is this really deflationism?

He also defended himself against the charge of extreme laissez faire, on lines similar to his arguments in his planning book (ms draft reply dated 14 February, Letters from Economists, RP). All of this was true – but Harrod was right to be less contrite in his second reply than in his first when he pointed out on 16 February (Letters from Economists, RP) that ‘certain Austrian thinkers, however eminent and worthy in themselves, would have had less vogue’ in England without Robbins’s support. Harrod conceded Lionel was changing his views on macroeconomic issues, at least as far as current policy was concerned. In November 1936 Robbins had contributed to a ‘symposium’ on monetary policy in The Economist (1936g). Although he saw a danger of the current rearmament boom getting out of hand, ‘while I should not be averse to the most vigorous use of the Bank rate if the situation appeared to warrant it, at the moment I favour other measures’ to dampen the boom, such as raising taxes to finance rearmament expenditure and cutting back on other government expenditure. Three weeks later, that is in early December, he received a draft preface from the Polish translator of The Great Depression, Adam Heydel of the Economic Institute in Krakow. The draft was very complimentary but Robbins was not happy with two of the translator’s claims, that the theory he had used was derived from the Austrian School and that his policy prescription was ‘a severe and rigid regime of monetary policy’. He wrote to Heydel on 8 December (Letters on GD, RP): In the first place I think that it might be inferred that I hold rigidly to the so-called Austrian View as an explanation of all economic fluctuations. This is in fact not the case. I believe that most of the great crises of modern economic history are to be explained in terms of the capital shortage induced by excessive credit expansion. . . . I think that part at any rate of the recent depression is to be attributed to this cause.

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But I do not hold that it is not possible to conceive other causes of depression. . . . I believe, for instance, that in the [absence] of re-armament expenditure the building boom in Great Britain might have expired. . . . Secondly: so far as policy is concerned, I have the feeling that you associate me a little too intimately with the advocates of the policy of neutral money. . . . [While] I have some sympathy for the theoretical analysis underlying this view, . . . I think it is much too simplicest [sic] to be made the basis of practical policy. . . . In fact, I do not count myself a neutral money man. In present circumstances I am much more anxious to secure international money than neutral money.6

In January 1937 Keynes argued in a series of articles in The Times that the monetary authorities in Britain should definitely not allow interest rates to rise. Dear money had always accompanied recovery in the past and also heralded slump; ‘if we play with dear money on the ground that it is “healthy” or “natural” then, I have no doubt, the inevitable slump will ensue. We must avoid it, therefore, as we would hell-fire.’ Although there would come a point when it would be desirable to slow down capital investment this should be done by other means than raising interest rates, for instance raising taxes, postponing public investment projects and reducing tariffs. The authorities’ ‘main preoccupation’ should be to plan long-term capital investment projects ready to commence as soon as a slump threatened (JMK 21, 384–95). Keynes entitled his articles, ‘How to avoid a slump’. Robbins took the opportunity of a lecture at Toynbee Hall early in February to talk on the same subject under the title, ‘How to mitigate the next slump’ (ms notes, Speeches & Lectures & Articles on Public Affairs pre-1946, RP). ‘The bait’ was ‘Differences among economists’ which were ‘probably exaggerated’. His first question was whether the recovery could go on; his answer was ‘Yes. Fears premature.’ His second question was whether it could go on without becoming a bad boom. Here he was ‘Doubtful especially since last night’ (when the Chancellor of the Exchequer [Neville Chamberlain] had announced a Defence Loans bill in the House of Commons). The time had not yet come to put up interest rates, although it would come: ‘This a difference [from] J.M.K.’ In the meantime there were other measures that could be taken: reducing tariffs, increasing taxation and the postponement of public works and preparation of future projects, ‘This probably most important practicable step.’ There may have been disagreement in the last slump about the utility of hurriedly improvised public works, which would have been wasteful and could have prejudiced the success of the War Loan 6

In the published preface (1937e, 4) Heydel replaced LCR’s name with ‘supporters of this [Hayek’s] theory’ in two places to meet his objections.

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conversion operation in 1932, but not now when they could be planned in advance. Finally, he had a scheme of his own to ventilate. While he did not agree with the view that unbalanced budgets could counteract deflation he accepted that deficits were almost inevitable in depression. Hence there was a need on traditional budgetary principles to run surpluses and accumulate reserves in good times in order to be able to spend them (on unemployment relief etc) in bad times. But there was a snag in that the investment of the reserves in financial assets during a boom and selling the assets during a slump worked the wrong way, keeping interest rates down in the boom and up in the slump. It would be better that the accumulated reserves be ‘hoarded’ in some way, held in gold or in bank deposits. In his Toynbee talk he ‘submit[ted this was] ready to hand a foolproof mechanism. Unsensational would alarm nobody. . . . Why not try to do.’ When he expanded his notes into an article for Lloyds Bank Review (1937d) he was more restrained, but as he concluded (244), ‘we are not yet so well equipped with safe methods of mitigating depression that we can afford to neglect to examine any new opportunity which presents itself’. When he republished the article two years later along with his 1936 lecture to the Stockholm Economic Society he drew attention to the ‘slightly more hopeful view’ he now took of the economic effects of government expenditure (1939a, 213n). In the Stockholm lecture he had addressed ‘a subject of very great difficulty’, namely the question whether in a world in which continuous and full employment could not be assumed variations in government expenditure could be used to compensate for variations in private expenditure to produce ‘more continuous, more even economic activity’ (ibid., 213–15). As usual he tended to stress the points of agreement between economists rather than their differences. There was, for instance, a case for financing government expenditure on income account by borrowing in a depression, although it would be undesirable on a large scale and he was not convinced by the argument that budgets should be balanced only over a period longer than a year. But in January 1939 he noted that the austere policy of annually balanced budgets could have the short-run effect of intensifying depression, explaining that ‘I was fully aware of this difficulty when writing this lecture. But at the time I did not see a way out which was compatible with long-term stability.’ Now that he had his plan, which would avoid some of the difficulties of unbalanced budgets, he was ‘glad to have something a little more cheerful’ to offer (ibid., 218n). When he turned to the financing of government expenditure on investment account, he was like most British economists in favour of borrowing rather than taxation in times of slack employment and of attempting to

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plan large public investment projects so that they could be put into operation countercyclically. With respect to ‘extraordinary expenditure definitely incurred to alleviate depression’, he did not believe the socalled ‘Treasury view’ that it would merely take resources away from private enterprise, but he thought that Keynesian multiplier calculations of the potential effects of such ‘shock tactics’ were much ‘too crude’ and tended to overestimate the secondary repercussions on employment. Hence in 1936 he still believed ‘the right way to prevent depression, to even out business activity, is to prevent booms getting out of hand’ by the use of monetary rather than budgetary policy (ibid., 222–36). In 1937 the time for raising interest rates had not yet arrived and the planning of future public investment was ‘perhaps more needed than usual’ (ibid., 247–8): ‘By damping down public expenditure on things other than armaments, it would ease the strain on the capital market and diminish the temptation to resort to unsound methods of finance. By deferring such expenditure till the time of depression, it would prepare a store of sound projects of development which could take up some of the deflationary slack in the capital markets when private investment holds back.’ Lionel had not changed his view that the best hope of restoring and maintaining prosperity was the reduction of trade barriers and the revival of multilateral international trade and investment. When he was asked by Charles Manning, Professor of International Relations, to contribute to a series of eight public lectures by LSE faculty to complement the annual International Studies Conference of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, which had chosen ‘Peaceful Change’ – the peaceful solution of economic, social and territorial problems – as its subject for 1936–7, Lionel spoke on ‘the economics of territorial sovereignty’ on 30 November 1936 (Manning ed 1937; Robbins 1939a, 81–106). He took the opportunity to attack economic nationalism in general and imperialist expansion in particular as dangers to world peace – and also to argue that the only remedy for the territorial inequalities which gave rise to these misguided policies was international federation. On his lecturing trip to Portugal in April 1937, he spoke on ‘British monetary history since the war’ at Lisbon and ‘The present economic position of Great Britain’ at Coimbra, but he ended his Lisbon lectures by emphasizing the need for international cooperation and his Coimbra lecture by pointing out that ‘What happens in five years time depends whether nations of world cooperate to create new markets – Will they?’ (mss in Speeches & Lectures & Articles on Public Affairs pre 1946, RP). Lionel had joined the Economic Committee of the League of Nations Union in 1934, along with his former students Durbin and Meade, but

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unlike Meade who was particularly active he had rarely attended its meetings (Economic Committee 7 December 1933 and 15 March 1934, LNU 5/19, BLPES). He was present, however, on 20 April 1937 at a discussion of a memorandum by Salter on a New Opportunity for Foreign Trade. Lionel argued that the forthcoming Imperial Conference in May and the revision or renewal of the 1932 Ottawa Agreements at that conference provided ‘a unique chance’ to reduce trade barriers. As a result he and Meade produced a pamphlet circulated to the branches of the Union, to all members of Parliament and to the conference delegates (Economic Committee 20 April and 25 May 1937, LNU 5/20; Economic Steps towards World Peace, LNU 7/12). In the main part of the pamphlet Robbins emphasized that international trade was still far below normal and international investment at a standstill; hence there was an urgent need to remove obstacles to both. The conference should seek the abolition of quantitative trade restrictions and of discrimination in trade; Great Britain should take the lead on both fronts by offering to remove its agricultural quotas on the one hand and to reduce imperial preference on the other. In the second part of the pamphlet Meade elaborated on specific points such as the Ottawa Agreements and the most-favoured-nation clause. The promised family holiday in the South of France in August 1937 was blessed with glorious weather. After a leisurely drive down visiting Chartres for the first time and also the Gorges du Tarn which Lionel missed on his travels with Clive in 1927, as well as Nimes and Aix en Provence, where ‘the fountains still play by the lovely plain [sic] trees in Aix & Cezanne’s Holy Mountain still hangs suspended in the quivering heat’, Lionel and Iris and the children settled themselves for the month in Cavalaire, Var. He wrote to his sister from there on 18 August. Every day the sun rises in an (approximately) cloudless sky, diffuses through the world a golden heat, tempered by cool breezes, and gives way at night to a magical darkness in which the stars seem more permanent than ever. The sea is bright blue & emerald & the white boats & the fishermen & the servants loitering about the slopes of the cliffside hotel garden all seem to have been there for ever. I have always thought that the mediterranean in summer must be Paradise & now I know it. This being so, there is naturally nothing to report. There never is in Paradise. Only, and this is theologically very important, although you might think it was all very dull, in fact it isn’t at all. My theory about the world at the moment is that God created it in the belief that change & conflict would be amusing & significant but that since then He has discovered that this was all a mistake & has ceased to take much interest in it – a conclusion which one could have wished he had foreseen but which, in these circumstances, one can completely understand.

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Their return journey was equally leisurely, including a week in the mountains at Modane in the Savoy (LCR to RRR, 28 August and 4 September 1937). Carr-Saunders took over at the end of September 1937 and moved quickly to resolve the outstanding problems left by Beveridge. This did not relieve Robbins of administrative responsibilities but it changed the atmosphere in which he had to work. When he resumed his correspondence on the theory of cost with Viner on 16 October (Viner 22–14) he reported that Gregory had been appointed Economic Adviser to the Government of India. ‘The School will feel a queer place without him and his lovable ups & downs. . . . I don’t know yet what we shall do – It would be interesting to know if you have any views. I take it that until Carr Saunders has settled down we shall postpone deliberations, all of which may be rather unsettling. But we are all so happy under the new regime that I can’t feel that anything very bad will happen.’ Gregory left for India in December – Lionel gave an affectionate speech at his farewell dinner (ms notes, Speeches & Lectures & Articles on Public Affairs, RP) – initially on a six-month leave of absence so that it was near the end of the academic year when the School asked the University to set up a Board of Advisors to search for his successor and nominated CarrSaunders, Hayek, Robbins and Stamp to represent the School (Standing Committee 30 September 1937 and 26 May 1938). In the later 1930s Lionel’s major teaching duties comprised his undergraduate Principles course (now thirty-five lectures over three terms and repeated in the evenings), Select Problems in Advanced Economics I (ten lectures in the Michaelmas term on value and distribution since 1870) for graduate students, and the seminar. In 1938/9 he also offered in the Lent term five lectures on the economic causes of war and six on theories of economic policy (by which he meant liberalism, socialism, economic nationalism, syndicalism and so on) (LSE Calendars). His Principles lectures showed the impact of developments in microeconomics in the 1930s, as the second edition of his Nature and Significance (1935g) had. Judging from students’ notes for 1938/9 (Victor Urquidi) and 1939/40 (Puey Ungphakorn), he now made extensive use of diagrams – indifference curves, offer curves, production functions and so on. One undergraduate (Philip Clarke) remembered ‘the loving care’ with which he expounded the details of Joan Robinson’s theory of monopoly in 1936/7.7 But, although he included Hicks’s ‘Mr Keynes and the classics’ (1937) at the end of his Principles reading list for 1938/9, he 7

Dr Urquidi sent a copy of his notes, Course 42 1938–39 General Principles of Economic Analysis, Prof. Lionel Robbins, to the author in January 1993; ‘Mr P. Ungphakorn’s notes of Professor Lionel Robbins’ Lectures on the General Principles of Economic Analysis 1939–1940’ were photographed, bound and placed in the LSE library during the war and

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left macroeconomics to Hayek and to their younger colleagues, especially Durbin and Kaldor. Hayek’s reading lists for Industrial Fluctuations did not include Keynes’s General Theory; Durbin’s and Kaldor’s for their courses on current controversies in macroeconomics did (LSE Calendars 1936–7, 1937–8 and 1938–9). The 1936/7 graduate student seminar was the last advertized as run jointly by Hayek and Robbins and held on Monday afternoons; in the next two years Robbins ran it alone on Thursday afternoons, although Hayek still attended. It is not known what the general topic of discussion was in 1936/7, but public finance featured in 1937/8 and 1938/9, when Robbins was writing on such matters. Scitovsky (Shehadi Transcripts, BLPES) remembered that when Lionel was assigning specific topics to graduate students, ‘we all laughed . . . [when] he asked for a paper to be given on tax avoidance . . . and asked David Rockefeller [a graduate student at LSE in 1937/8] to do it.’ (Rockefeller [2002, 83–4] remembered Robbins as his ‘favorite teacher’ at LSE and ‘valued his friendship until his death in 1984’.) The student participants in these years included, besides Rockefeller and Scitovsky, Harold Barger, Helen Makower and Chi-Yuen Wu, who all obtained their PhDs in late 1937; J.K. Galbraith, who attended while he was spending a year (1937/8) in Cambridge; and the ‘Austrian’ economist Ludwig Lachmann, who had arrived from Berlin in 1933 and completed his MSc(Econ) in 1935 but was having difficulty finding an academic job and remained at LSE on a Leon Fellowship (Professorial Council 17 November 1937; Galbraith 1982, 74–8; LCR to Machlup, 27 January 1938, Machlup 61–1). In 1937/8 Aaron Director from the University of Chicago was there: Robbins told Viner on 21 December (Viner 22–14) that he ‘captivated us all’ and confirmed Lionel’s view that the Chicago economists were ‘now . . . easily the most important group in the world’. In 1938/9 the student members included Asik Radomysler, a displaced student from Germany who obtained a First in the BSc(Econ) in 1938 and joined the staff as an assistant in 1940. Radomysler was, like Lachmann, interned as an enemy alien in 1940 but returned to teach at LSE on his release in 1941.8 Lionel acquired another senior colleague in 1937/8, the New Zealand economist John Bell Condliffe, who had been with the Financial Section of the League of Nations since 1931 and was editor of its World Economic Survey, in a new position of Professor of Commerce with special reference to

8

are now in the Robbins Papers; Philip Clarke sent his Recollections of Lionel Robbins from Philip Clarke, undergraduate and graduate student 1936–9, to the author in 1991. Lachmann then taught for a while as an assistant lecturer at UCL and became a professor at the University of Witwatersrand in 1949.

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international trade. This had been Beveridge’s idea, to which the Emergency Committee had agreed on 30 January 1936. Condliffe found the other economics professors rather cool towards him when he arrived eighteen months later. After two years he was ‘a little baffled & sad to think that . . . no one [has] ever called me by my first name’, although he admitted that he had often been away from LSE to work for international organizations based in Paris and Geneva. At that point Lionel admitted to him that, as Condliffe put it in his autobiography, ‘he had never felt able to give me his confidence because of my close friendship with one whom he regarded as an enemy of the School.’9 After the two-year struggle to produce Economic Planning and International Order Lionel was not attempting to write another book. He began to put together some of his articles and unpublished papers with a view to producing a volume of essays on economic policy problems. In the event it was a paper, ‘The economic basis of class conflict’, for a symposium held by the Institute of Sociology in the autumn of 1937, that became the first chapter. Asked by the organizers of the conference ‘to analyse the economic conditions which may give rise to conflict between different classes’, he pointed out that the groups in society with common economic interests frequently did not correspond to sociological classes. Nor was there an inevitable conflict between the propertied and the propertyless on the lines of the Marxian theory of class war. Conflicts for economic reasons were far more likely to arise between groups of producers which deliberately prevented others from entering and enjoying their higher incomes (1939a, 3–28). In December he took an active part in a weekend conference organized by the ‘Ownership for All Committee’, which focussed on the effects of different types of ownership of agricultural land. His well-informed and unsentimental attitude to farming was much in evidence. He pointed out that the tendency for agricultural land to be lost to building development was economically a good thing as land became more valuable and that the theory that country dwellers were healthier than urban ones was much ‘overworked’. He predicted that the more profitable types of farming in the future were likely to be capital-intensive and efforts to increase efficiency to result in greater movement of labour from the land. In his concluding remarks, he ‘suggested that the upshot of the discussion was that it was a mistake to support the small holding system as an economic activity, though there was a general 9

Condliffe to LCR, 3 October 1939, and draft reply, Letters from Economists 46–, RP; Condliffe Autobiography VIII-13, J.B. Condliffe Collection Box 8, Hoover Institution Archives, copyright Stanford University. Neither man divulges the identity of Condliffe’s friend.

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case for the diffusion of property’ (ts “Ownership for All” Committee, Precis of proceedings at the Liberal Party Organisation Office, Dec. 18th & 19th, 1937, Robbins 1/9). In the spring of 1938 he wrote another Lloyds Bank Review article (1938a), this time on the budgetary consequences of the latest expansion of British rearmament, for which the government had begun to issue long-term defence loans in 1937. This became the final chapter in his new book. Several late 1930s plans for a collection of his essays survive. One comprised papers on protectionism in its various forms (Material for a possible Collection of Essays on Economic Policy, RP). Another was for a collection on trade and the depression, which was to include ‘Consumption and the trade cycle’ (1932h) as well as papers commenting on British economic policy in the years 1931–4 and which was to end with a chapter entitled ‘Why I am not a socialist’. This last would have been based on a talk, perhaps to students, on socialism which described his youthful socialism before outlining arguments similar to those he used in his International Planning and Economic Order (ms list of chapters and Socialism, Essays on Trade and the Depression, RP). A third and later list of titles was a more mixed bag, including ‘The economics of territorial sovereignty’ and ‘The economic basis of class conflict’ as well as several unwritten papers.10 The chosen version fell into two sections. The first and longer part opened with ‘The economic basis of class conflict’; followed by an expanded version of ‘The economics of restrictionism’ originally written for The Banker magazine(1935a); a previously unpublished paper on the supposed ‘inevitability’ of monopoly; ‘The economics of territorial sovereignty’; and four published papers on protectionism, including the two 1934 ones on British agricultural protection.11 The second and shorter section included his Stockholm lecture; ‘How to mitigate the next slump’; and a revised version of his April 1938 article for Lloyds Bank Review. This last was revised at the proof stage in March 1939 when the Chancellor of the Exchequer (now Sir John Simon) announced a huge increase in defence borrowing for the 1939/40 financial year (R & R Clark Limited to LCR, 9 March 1939, Letters from Economists, RP). As Lionel had said before in his Stockholm lecture, large-scale government 10

11

Ms ‘Plan for a Collection of Essays [:] Economics of Sovereignty Imperialism International Aspects of Population Economic Basis of Class Conflict Syndicalism Inequality Liberalism & Laissez Fair War & the Economic System’, Material for a possible Collection of Essays on Economic Policy, RP. At the time he signed the preface he wrote to Beveridge on 14 January 1939 (Beveridge IIb38) for permission to publish his chapter on agricultural protection for Tariffs (1931d), but although Beveridge readily gave his permission the chapter did not appear in the volume.

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expenditure could speed up economic activity only under certain conditions – unused productive capacity, advance planning of the expenditure, low interest rates and general confidence in the government’s financial policy – but in 1938–9 those conditions seemed to be realized. For the longer term, however, he was concerned about the growth in the national debt and the burden of higher taxation to pay interest which would be imposed on future taxpayers. Hence his conclusion in 1939 was as gloomy as in 1938 (1939a, 276–7): ‘The only way in which the democracies of Europe can hope to preserve their safety and to support the burden incurred by its preservation is by pooling their resources, by setting up the beginnings of a federal structure which in happier days, when the totalitarian savagery has exhausted itself, may become the nucleus of a United States of Europe. . . . The long-period budgetary problem is nothing less than the problem of the fate of European civilization.’ Lionel did not complete his volume until the 1938/9 Christmas vacation. In April 1938 he had reported to his sister Caroline that ‘The School has absorbed every moment of my time even during the vacation. Beveridge’s successor is a great success. But . . . we have had to carry out a vast review of our history for the last fifteen years for the Rockefeller foundation and most of the writing of this has fallen to me. So you may well imagine that there hasn’t been much scope for anything else. We saw Lac des Cygnes the other day at Sadler’s Wells and before Xmas we heard Fidelio. Apart from that I don’t recollect going anywhere since we last met. We may have done early in the Michaelmas term but any remembrance thereof has vanished.’ The idea of visiting the University of California at Berkeley during the next academic year also came to naught as ‘there was so much work to do’ (LCR to Machlup, 30 March 1939, Machlup 61–1). Caroline had written to her brother to offer to look after the children in America if there was a war in Europe. On 12 March Hitler had marched into Vienna and incorporated Austria into the Third Reich. Philip Clarke recalled that when the news broke in London Lionel told his weekly class for final year undergraduate economics specialists that ‘Today we can’t discuss economics but must talk about the Anschluss.’ He told his sister that ‘I imagine Vienna to be one of the saddest schemes witnessed in European history. I know one economist who has committed suicide. So far we have no news of the rest’ and that Hayek ‘greatly daring on the strength of his connection with Nazi relatives’ had gone to find out. At this stage Lionel thought he would be inclined to accept his sister’s offer if war came, but ‘I must confess that at the moment I simply don’t know what will happen’ or what Hitler would do next. He did think, however, that Chamberlain, who

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had succeeded Baldwin as Prime Minister in May 1937, should immediately bring Churchill into the government: ‘I should sleep easier in my bed if I thought that at least one first class man were grappling with the problem of outwitting the Dictators.’ There had been some bright spots in the first half of 1938. William Rappard gave the Cobden Lectures in February, speaking on ‘The struggle for the liberation of international trade’ (LSE Calendar). Hayek told Haberler on 7 February (Haberler 67) that he was brilliant as a speaker even if there was not much new in his lectures. In May Lionel finally met Frank Knight when he came over to give four lectures at LSE. He lectured on ‘Free enterprise versus collectivism’ and also to the London Economic Club on ‘The problem of economic dynamics’ (Knight 1939; Notice of meeting [16 May] of Economic Club, 22 April 1938, LSE 241B; Knight to LCR, 10 June 1938, Correspondence, RP). Rappard invited Lionel to lecture again in Geneva. Lionel proposed as topic ‘The economic causes of war’ and as dates April or May 1939 (LCR to Rappard, 19 February 1938, GIIS Archives). In the early summer of 1938 Lionel also returned to methodological issues. In a short note for Economica (1938b) he attempted to ‘separate the quick from the dead in order that we may not any longer be encumbered with the latter’. The issues he thought now dead were the objective of economics – which was surely to understand real world phenomena – and its scope – where he claimed there was little real argument between economists who favoured the scarcity definition and others still attached to the exchange definition, although he noted the continuing difference of opinion over the place of value judgments. On method, too, economists agreed on the need for empirical testing (of some sort) of their hypotheses. The live issues, on the other hand, related to the logical status of economic theories (a priori or empirical) and to the interpretation of the findings of quantitative studies. He alluded to the views of Mises, of Bernadelli and Kaufmann who had recently argued against each other in Economica (1936 and 1937) and of Hutchison (1938). (Barbara Wootton had also provided a comprehensive and temperate criticism of Nature and Significance in her Lament for Economics (1938), not so much in her chapter on Robbins’s book but in the rest of her book, with side swipes at Mises and Hayek.) But Lionel admitted that in both editions of his Nature and Significance he had tried to avoid epistemological questions which were ‘philosophical rather than practical’. His readers may have wished he had addressed these questions but instead he claimed that ‘practising economists . . . all agree that in general we need both induction and deduction, observation and theoretical system; and that the important thing is to suit the method to the job’. He sent a copy of the

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article to Wootton, who responded very generously on 20 September that she would now like to restate some of the argument in her Lament, omitting the parts where there was common ground and concentrating on the normative aspects of economics, ‘which still doesn’t seem to me adequately disposed of in what you say’. She also noted that his final remarks on method did ‘not convey anything very concrete’ (Correspondence, RP). The Robbinses spent August and the first half of September again in France. They took four days to drive to Guethary on the Atlantic Coast, where the swimming was excellent but the weather was not. They hoped to spend a few days walking in the Pyrenees but as the weather did not improve they visited Carcassonne and Albi and the prehistoric caves at Les Eyzies on their way to Brittany, staying in La Baule where the Plants were also holidaying. Lionel left Iris and the children for a few days to attend a conference of business cycle institutes at Pontigny near Chablis in Burgundy (IER to Mr and Mrs Robbins, 12 August, LCR to RRR, 29 August 1938). At this conference he met up with Hayek and Condliffe who had come from another conference in Paris, the Colloque Lippmann organized by the French social philosopher Louis Rougier in honour of Walter Lippmann, whose Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society had been published a year earlier (Condliffe Autobiography VIII-18, Condliffe 8–15).12 As usual when he wrote to his father Lionel told him of his current views on the political situation. This time, ‘Hitler has not spoilt the holiday – yet. But I confess I find him more and more of a preoccupation. It is like being imprisoned in a powder magazine with a lunatic. . . . I am convinced that our only hope is to make it overwhelmingly clear to the Nazis that once more they will be up against the world if they make the slightest resort to force [in Czechoslovakia]. If we can do that quickly enough they will scream abuse but they will do nothing more. The question is, can we sufficiently quickly obliterate the impressions of five years ignorant hesitation? Let us hope so.’ If there was a war over Czechoslovakia (where some 3m Sudeten Germans lived), Lionel thought Czechoslovakia’s allies would win. The [British] navy is relatively more powerful than ever before: there should be no difficulty in imposing complete blockade. I take it that the combined air forces of France, Great Britain, Tchechoslovakia & Russia are considerably stronger than that of Germany alone & probably equal to those of Germany & Italy together – if Italy should come in which I doubt. The French army is still probably as strong as the German army by itself – and I do not think that the possibility of internal disaffection in Germany can altogether be ruled out. But I don’t think it would be 12

Bruce Caldwell was informed (FAH 10, 46) that LCR attended the Colloque Lippmann but the published proceedings (Rougier 1939) confirm that he did not.

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a quick victory & most of the things I am interested in would have perished in the process. The only good I can see out of all this evil is the possibility that men’s minds may come to see more clearly the only ultimate remedy – federation of Europe. If there were a war, imposed federation would be the only just peace – the Germans would have to lose their sovereignty & submit to a common rule. If there is not, I cannot help wondering whether the mere danger may not bring about some sort of federation of the west. Why should we not federate with France? The federation could be of the loosest kind . . . [but] I do not think it would be long before the other European democracies came in.

By the time the Robbinses returned home the Munich crisis had begun, with Chamberlain making his first flight to visit Hitler at Berchtesgaden and offering the separation of the Sudeten Germans from the rest of Czechoslovakia. This was for Lionel just the beginning of ‘a horrible autumn’ (LCR to ICR, 13 November 1938) – but there was first one item of good news: Dennis Robertson had resigned from the Board of Advisors for Gregory’s chair and agreed to stand as a candidate (Robertson to LCR, 18 September 1938, Letters from Economists, RP). This was largely Lionel’s doing – he had talked to Robertson in the early summer while he was in Cambridge examining for the Tripos – and a great coup for the School. The Board unanimously recommended Robertson, who formally accepted the position (as from 1 January 1939) in October (Senate 19 October 1938, ST 2/2/55, University of London Archives). Iris had been four months pregnant when the Robbinses went to France. Soon after their return it was realized that the child was dead. As Iris told the author in 1992, she suffered a severe haemorrhage following surgery: Lionel apparently fainted in the hospital lift when he was told that she was unconscious and needed a blood transfusion. As he waited alone at home for news he was shaken by a terrific bang: Clive’s portrait of Iris had fallen from the wall. Rushing to the phone to call the hospital, he learned that she was still breathing but the needed blood had not yet arrived. Fritz Hayek then came and sat with him for the rest of the evening. ‘No doubt they talked economics.’ Iris was in hospital for some weeks. Meanwhile Chamberlain had met the French Prime Minister and Foreign Minister and reluctantly agreed to defend a truncated Czechoslovakia; Hitler had raised his demands at a second meeting with Chamberlain; the House of Commons had been recalled from holiday; and, at the end of September, Chamberlain had flown to Munich again and come back waving the piece of paper containing the Munich agreement. During the Iris crisis Lionel found it ‘almost a relief’ to

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talk about the political situation, as he told Keynes on 31 October (Keynes EJ/l5 ). He distracted himself by writing a note in response to an article by Harrod in the September EJ (1938). Harrod raised the question of the status of interpersonal comparisons of utility. Lionel’s reply (1938c) was an account of the origins of his own views. Keynes, on receiving the note, sent it to the printer immediately in order that it might appear in December, telling Robbins on 3 November that he had ‘the greatest sympathy’ with his point of view and with the general thesis that economists ought to know and think more about ethics (Correspondence, RP). Robbins’s note prompted two more, by Nicholas Kaldor and Leslie Melville, which appeared in September 1939. Although Lionel found it difficult to make up his mind on the rights and wrongs of the Munich settlement vis a` vis Czechoslovakia he had no doubt that it was a humiliation. He told Caroline on 13 November: Whether given the military situation it was a humiliation that could have been avoided, is very difficult to say. . . . Whether it was right not to fight or not, it is surely obvious that we ought not to have been in a position in which, if the necessity of fighting arose, there was any doubt of the outcome. . . . Chamberlain seems to me a national disaster – like his predecessor Baldwin before him. I listened the other night to his speech at the Guildhall. It was quite a frightening exhibition. Obviously sincere. Obviously determined. Obviously completely and utterly incompetent to grasp the significance of the issues he is handling. While he was speaking, the Nazis were preparing their pogrom [Kristallnacht]; and the next day the air minister here announced that he hoped to be able to protect the munition [making] areas by the end of next summer!

Iris made a slow but steady recovery, assisted by another skiing holiday at Arosa at Christmas (LCR to Beveridge, 14 January 1939, Beveridge IIb38). This revived Lionel’s spirits: as he had told Rappard (21 October 1938, GIIS), he had been struggling with his work on the economic causes of war, ‘finding the German material which I design [sic] to handle most extraordinarily indigestible and . . . proceed[ing] at a snail’s pace’. Iris remembered being told what was happening in Germany by Germans they met in Switzerland while driving in a sledge and wondering whether they were being followed: it was a ‘scary winter’. At LSE, however, ‘the School [was] flourishing’ in 1938/9. Mrs Mair had followed Beveridge to Oxford: her successor was Walter Adams, whom Lionel knew well from his work as secretary to the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (as the Academic Assistance Council was renamed in 1936). Lionel told Machlup on 30 March (Machlup 61–1): ‘Things are very satisfactory if it were not for the everpresent shadow [of war]. Robertson’s arrival has given us all an

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intellectual fillip, and the greatest harmony prevails everywhere.’ As usual there were overseas visitors: in the Lent term Erik Lindahl gave two lectures on Monetary Theory and Policy. Per Jacobsson who was in London attended the lectures; he thought Hayek and Robbins were both disappointed in them (Jacobsson diary, 16 February 1939). The public lectures planned for 1938/9 included a series of eight lectures on ‘The economics of war’ by Condliffe, Hayek and Robbins, which was cancelled, and two lectures by the civil servant Wilfrid Eady, who had been secretary to the Unemployment Assistance Board 1934–8, on ‘The care of the unemployed’ (Professorial Council 12 October 1938 and 1 March 1939). It was realized before Eady’s lecture that there might be an attempt to disrupt it by Marxist students or outsiders. Carr-Saunders was reluctant to restrict admission to the Old Theatre, but, he reported to the GPC on 22 February, ‘after Professor Robbins, who was to be Chairman at the [first] lecture, had reported that Mr. Eady was extremely anxious for personal reasons that there should be no disturbance’, he had tried to prevent demonstrators coming in. In the event, ‘a few [demonstrators] did gain admission to the lecture, but made no disturbance, beyond calling out questions to the lecturer at the end’. A member of the administrative staff recalled (though dating the lecture to the time of the Jarrow March in 1936) (Stanley Godfrey to Shirley Chapman, 14 October 1988, LSE History Collection Box 45iv, BLPES) that an agreement was reached at the beginning of the lecture: ‘six of the unemployed would attend the lecture, accompanied by six students who would be held responsible for their good behaviour. At the end of the lecture they tried to tackle the speaker but we hustled him out before they could do so. Of course, it may be that the large contingent of police whom we summoned from Bow Street [police station] helped to “persuade” them.’ It was later rumoured among LSE undergraduates that Robbins had once been chased through the Refectory at lunchtime by an enraged student armed with a knife (Jacqueline Wheldon in Abse ed 1977, 138): ‘The appalling thing was to imagine how any student could be so very bold and out of his senses to even dream in the smallest way of molesting the Professor Robbins we looked upon with awe. More baffling was trying to imagine anyone at lunchtime being able to chase through the Refectory, as we knew it, where 1200 lunches were served in a space where only about 200 students could sit down at any one time.’ Baffling though it was, it was true. Lionel received a Christmas card in 1953 which he preserved in his papers (More Recent Personal & Professional History) with the annotation ‘The sender of this tried to assassinate me in 1939. He was temporarily dotty.’

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During the Munich crisis primitive trenches for air raid precautions (ARPs) were dug in London parks. After the crisis the government put Sir John Anderson, ‘the outstanding administrator of his generation’ (Taylor 1970, 531), in charge of ARP and brought him into the Cabinet. (Anderson had been Permanent Secretary of the Home Office (1922–32) and Governor of Bengal (1932–7) and was now MP for the Scottish Universities.) Plans were made for the evacuation of children from London. The Robbinses made their own provisions, having a trench dug in their garden (which promptly filled with water from an underground stream) and, more importantly, renting a cottage at Lacey Green in the Chilterns. Tor Cottage is in fact a rather ugly square 1930s bungalow with attic rooms and extensive outbuildings in the back yard, but it has a large garden for growing vegetables and its location gives it a fine open view over the Vale of Aylesbury. Between Princes Risborough and High Wycombe, it is also near Whiteleaf. Against the background of the breakup of Czechoslovakia on 15 March, the family spent the Easter vacation there. On Easter Sunday Lionel wrote to Caroline: It is a long time since you had a letter from me and since it is quite probable that within the next few weeks or even days, we shall be at war, it seems worth while using this lovely Easter morning for writing a few lines before distractions begin. I won’t enlarge on the situation. For, being an inhabitant of a country with a free and efficient press, you probably know more about it than we do. It has been a bitter thing to see all one’s predictions come true: and the grim pleasure that one can still draw from the rapid and detailed exposure which history has already afforded of the folly of the Chamberlain policy is a scanty compensation for the wreckage of any hopes one ever entertained for a peaceful resolution of our difficulties. How easy it would have been in 1934–5, how difficult it is going to be now, to rid Europe of this nightmare. However, I will not yet despair. I do not see how war can be avoided, if not now at least later on. But I refuse to believe that we need to be defeated. If we can hold on for the first six months or a year, then I still think that the long term forces are in our favour. By this I do not mean (what so many people here think) that America will be drawn in – I never have had any very great hope in that direction – [b]ut the economic & psychological factors will weigh heavily in our favour – even if the Axis powers overrun all eastern and S.E. Europe. The weak factor is France. But the French always have shown unexpected resilience & I have some hope that they may do so again.

After reporting news from Sipson, he continued: Here at Meadway Close we are all reasonably well and happy. Iris is much better and although she gets tired much more easily than before her troubles, I am hopeful that the summer will see her completely recovered. Anne is now nearly as tall as her mother and rapidly developing the family love of history. Richard grows handsomer

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every year and there are some signs that his mind may at last be stirring. For me the last few months have been really memorable. I recovered all my creative powers at Arosa and since then I have been working with a zest and intensity I have only known three or four times since I graduated. I have a small book of essays coming out in a week or two (Hitler permitting) – most of them old stuff but refurbished for this edition and bolstered up with two long new papers on current topics: and since preparing this, I have been working at a book on the Economic Causes of War which is to be the boiled down version of some lectures I have been giving at the School & shall be giving at Geneva in a fortnight, – if the war holds off that length of time. Marvellous months. If the Gods take all henceforward I shall still thank them that, in the fortyfirst year of my age, I could recapture the carefree intellectual eagerness and fertility of earlier and happier times. I think that if, by some miracle, this avalanche were not to fall, I could do good work now for the next ten or fifteen years.

Lionel gave his five lectures in Geneva on 24–28 April. R¨opke and other members of the Institute ‘enjoyed [his] stay tremendously’; Rappard attributed the ‘extraordinary success’ of the lectures to Lionel’s ‘personality’ and the work he had put in for his exposition of ‘an exceptionally difficult subject’ (R¨opke to LCR, 12 May 1939, COLL MISC 683/4, BLPES; Rappard to LCR, 15 May 1939, GIIS). On his way to Geneva Lionel lectured in Paris on the current economic position of Great Britain, comparing what had happened in 1932–7 with what had happened since under the impact of rearmament (ms notes and mimeo La position economique de la Grande Bretagne a` l’heure actuelle, le 20 avril 1939, Speeches & Lectures & Articles on Public Affairs pre-1946, RP). He began his Geneva lectures with a discussion of the meaning of an economic cause, which he relegated to an appendix in the published book. The plan of the lectures and book (1939d, 18) was ‘very simple . . . an exposition of the main outlines of the relevant Marxian theories, in particular the theory of imperialism . . . It will then go on to test this theory in the light of history’ and, the results being largely negative, to outline an alternative explanation. He admitted he had misunderstood the Marxian theory of imperialism for years, assuming it rested on ‘a somewhat rigid form of the underconsumptionist theory of the trade cycle’ (23), which was easy to demolish. He took the writings of Rosa Luxemburg and J.A. Hobson as representative of underconsumptionist theories. But he admitted that there was some validity in recent theories of unemployment which explained it in terms of savings which failed to be invested in real capital at current interest rates. This ‘represent[ed] a state of affairs which might certainly exist in reality.’ However, ‘Whether it is a state of affairs which is generally prevalent – whether, as Mr Keynes and his followers seem to think, it provides the explanation of the trade cycle,

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or whether, as is the view of those who adopt a more eclectic attitude, it only describes an explanation of possible turning-points and a restricted phase of depressions which may have been brought about by other causes’, these theories did not imply the Marxian claim that depression was due to capitalism (31). Far from it: it only showed that something was wrong with the financial system, which could be fixed. Hence the real Marxian theory of imperialism had to be Lenin’s, which came from Rudolf Hilferding and whose ‘central assumption [was] not underconsumption but the influence of monopoly finance and the struggle of capitalists to avert the secular tendency to a falling rate of profit’ (34). Since the Leninist theory stated that capitalist imperialism was the typical and inevitable cause of war, it was easy to show by historical examples that while there were cases when imperialism had led to war (for instance the Boer War) there had been other wars where the interests of the capitalists had been opposed to those of the government. Lionel relied on the researches of others, especially, but not only, those of Eugene Staley (1935), a former pupil of Viner’s. But there were economic causes of war, which he had identified in his Economic Planning and International Order and elaborated in his new book: sectional interests, which were fostered by trade barriers and protected by restrictions on immigration. These interests did not usually produce international conflict directly. ‘The immediate cause of conflict is the desire of governments to maintain or extend their power – a national not a sinister interest. . . . But this aim would not arise if it were not for the practices of restrictionism; and these practices must be ascribed in large part to the influence of pressure groups.’ From this it followed that ‘The ultimate condition giving rise to those clashes of national economic interest which lead to international war is the existence of independent national sovereignties’ and that the remedy was the limitation of independent sovereignty by federation of at least the European states (91, 98–104). When his sister Caroline read the book, she commented (12 January 1940): ‘I . . . more than ever regret you didn’t decide to be a historian: you move comfortably and intelligibly through the kind of material that downs many a professional and I have always felt that you were a humanist and a philosopher. With your thesis I am of course in complete agreement: I am also of course profoundly pessimistic about the future acceptance in any practical way of your ideas.’ Iris and Lionel and the children returned to Tor Cottage for the summer of 1939. The cottage meant that they saw a good deal of their families at Whiteleaf and Hollycroft. Caroline and Joe also came over. But that last summer of peace was also overshadowed by the serious and life-threatening

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illness of their younger sister Nancy. Nancy had trained as a doctor at the Royal Free Hospital in London. Her father had not been keen, on the ground that medicine was ‘a very strenuous life for a woman’. He had nonetheless offered her the same support he had offered Lionel, asking her to estimate the amount she needed to finance her training and then paying the whole lot into her bank account. In 1939 she fell ill with streptococcal septicaemia. Before her illness she had a conviction that God wanted her to serve in India, and although she was told she would never be fit to work in the tropics, she later succeeded in her ambition. She worked as a doctor at the Dohnavur Fellowship in South India for thirty-two years (information from Nancy Robbins and N. Robbins 1997, 2–6). Her younger brother Rowland, meanwhile, had gone up to Cambridge after his education at a minor public school, St Lawrence in Ramsgate, to read physics and had just graduated. He admitted to the author in August 1997 that he always thought his admission to Trinity College was facilitated by Lionel’s ‘reputation and influence’. In April Britain had provided a guarantee to Poland against German aggression, but it was not until 25 August that an Anglo-Polish treaty was signed, two days after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the USSR and Germany. On 1 September Germany invaded Poland. The same day Lionel happened to meet Winston Churchill, whom he had met once before with Beveridge. He found Churchill’s view of the situation was similar to his own – that ‘it is the next few weeks or months which are the period of maximum danger’, while Britain was still building up its defences; ‘Hitler’s only chance is to strike now.’ Churchill thought Poland would be overrun; he was also ‘depressed & pessimistic’ about the Chamberlain government.13 On 3 September Britain declared war on Germany. This brought Lionel ‘a feeling of considerable relief. . . . I listened in to the news that our ultimatum [to the German government] was expiring with our [Tor Cottage] neighbours, the gardener & his wife. “So there will be no dishonour after all”, I said. It was what we had all been feeling.’ He found Chamberlain’s broadcast unexpectedly ‘dignified and moving. There is this to be said for the policy of appeasement – that although it lost many valuable opportunities it did mean that in the end we were more united than it would have been possible to be had we not given Hitler so much rope. As I listened to that quiet friendly voice I could not help feeling that, whatever the strategic 13

LCR to IER, undated. The note is written from the Reform Club. Iris has written on it ‘early 1940?’ but it must be 1 September 1939: Lionel referred to discussion in the Manchester Guardian of the evacuation of children from London which began that day and 1 September was the first day Churchill was in town after the treaty with Poland (Gilbert 1976, 1105–7).

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position, we do enter with a moral power which must tell very heavily in our favour.’ The first thing Lionel told Caroline in his first wartime letter on 6 September was, however, that Nancy was apparently at last out of danger. He also told her that he was not immediately trying to find a wartime job. ‘I have still two chapters of my essay [on the economic causes of war] to write and, as I shall be gagged if I join up either in the army or in the civil service, I do not think I am unjustified in taking a week or two to finish them. I believe I have something to say which is intensely relevant to the present situation. Whether I can get it across is of course quite another matter. Later on I hope that something rather more active than organizing the rump of our Economics Department in our new home at Cambridge will come my way. But I have offended so many people in high quarters by inconvenient criticisms of policy that getting a place with any scope is not going to be at all easy.’ Lionel finished his book in the next two weeks, signing the contract with Cape on 22 September (it was published in December). As he had commented to Caroline, ‘After all it is still the vacation – strange as it may seem to think of it that way.The weather has been lovely – the compensation September so often makes for a wet summer. I shall not quickly forget the beauty & serenity of the last few days of peace. It was a great comfort to think that the Vale of Aylesbury would go on looking like that whatever happened in the war.’

1. Sipson Farm, Lionel Robbins’s birthplace

2. Hollycroft: lawn and west windows

3. Hollycroft: the nursery

4. Caroline, Lionel and Winifred

5. Nethania, c. 1911: Lionel Robbins’s maternal grandparents surrounded by their family (Lionel and his father are standing at left, his sister Caroline seated in front of them)

6. The ‘three blind mice’ (seated): Eddie Rose, George Davidge and Lionel Robbins, late 1916

7. 2nd Lt Robbins 1917

8. The Battle of the Lys, April 1918

9. Lionel Robbins and Iris Gardiner about the time of their marriage

10. Rowland Richard Robbins, 1925

11. Lionel Robbins in Berlin, 3 May 1932 (Ludwig von Mises is on his left)

12. Lionel and Iris on holiday in Austria, 1933 or 1935

13. Sketch for a Christmas card, 1933

14. Lionel lecturing in Cambridge in 1940

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The LSE Michaelmas term 1939 began late and in Cambridge. The School was lucky to be there. It had protested against a University plan to evacuate it to Glasgow and Aberdeen; it preferred Reading, but Reading could not provide sufficient accommodation. Carr-Saunders began to negotiate with Oxford, but in mid-July the question of a wartime location was still not settled (Standing Committee 23 March, 25 May, 15 June and 13 July 1939). On a visit to Cambridge he ran into Austin Robinson, who introduced him to the University Treasurer over lunch at Sidney Sussex (Robinson’s college), and ‘the three of them settled on a college that had not yet been commandeered by a [government] ministry preparing for evacuation’ (Cairncross 1993, 78). On 25 July the Governing Body of Peterhouse agreed to take in LSE if war broke out; Carr-Saunders immediately accepted. Administration and part of the library were housed in New Court, a building (now known as The Hostel) opposite the main gate of Peterhouse. The School rented Grove Lodge, also in Trumpington Street, next to the Fitzwilliam Museum (and now the Fitzwilliam director’s house), for student common rooms and a lending library. Some classes were held there but most lectures were given in the Cambridge lecture rooms. In 1939/40 evening classes and public lectures were still given in London, at Canterbury Hall in Cartwright Gardens, the School buildings being occupied by the Ministry of Economic Warfare (Dahrendorf 1995, 341–4). There were 620 LSE students in Cambridge in 1939/40 and another 350 evening students in London, compared with a prewar total of around 3000. The academic staff was immediately depleted as several members went into government service, including Allen and Robertson to the Treasury, Benham to the Ministry of Economic Warfare – but he resigned a few weeks later and returned to LSE because of ill health – and Webster to the Foreign Research and Press Service. The governors rescinded leaves already granted, 342

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including a sabbatical leave for Durbin and leave of absence for Hayek to lecture in America (Standing Committee 28 September and 24 November 1939). The LSE teaching staff in economics in 1939/40 thus comprised Benham, Coase, Durbin, Edwards, Hayek, Kaldor, Paish, Plant, Robbins, Schwartz and Thomas. A year later most of these were also in government service. On 5 November Hayek wrote to Machlup for the first time in English: ‘after an initial period of uncertainty on whether or when the School would reopen, work has at last broken out with such intensity that we have little time for anything else. We have not only resumed normal day-teaching in Cambridge but we have now also started our evening classes in new quarters in London’ (Machlup 43–15). He and his family were still living in London but he was spending three nights a week in Cambridge. As for the Robbinses, Iris and the children remained at Tor Cottage. Lionel spent the weeks in Cambridge and weekends at Lacey Green. In Cambridge he and some other colleagues stayed in a large house, 17 Clarkson Road, which the School rented for them, spending ‘the long darkened evenings . . . [in] good talk’ (Robbins 1971a, 166–7).1 The LSE and Cambridge economists shared lecture courses, with, for example, Pigou giving lectures on Elementary Principles to the students reading for Part I of the Cambridge Tripos and LSE Intermediate students and Lionel his General Principles of Economic Analysis to the Cambridge Part II students and the LSE Finals BSc(Econ) students. The Cambridge Lecture List for 1939/40 also advertized the Seminar in Economic Theory on Thursdays at 2, run jointly by Robbins and Hayek (Cambridge University Reporter, 7 October 1939, 13 January and 17 April 1940). Lionel also offered ‘one or two informal talks about financing the war’ in October (CarrSaunders to LCR, 6 October 1939, Robbins Personal File B, LSE). This was the period of the ‘phoney war’. Street lighting was extinguished and the blackout commenced in September. In London air-raid warnings sounded but no bombs fell. Hitler concentrated on Poland and the threatened ‘Blitzkreig’ did not materialize. The French army mobilized and a British Expeditionary Force joined them. At home Chamberlain replaced his peacetime Cabinet with a smaller War Cabinet and set up new Ministries of Home Security, Economic Warfare, Food, Information and Shipping. Churchill joined the government as First Lord of the Admiralty. An emergency budget increased taxes (including the standard rate of income 1

LCR described the house as the Beales’ because the economic historian Lance Beales and his wife stayed on and rented the house for the rest of the war after their colleagues had moved elsewhere (Agenda for Professorial Council 24 November 1939 and 26 May 1941).

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tax from 5s 6d to 7s 6d in the pound); the Treasury introduced exchange control. Military conscription proceeded slowly. Lionel wrote to his sister Caroline on 14 January 1940 that ‘Life here continues on the curious plane of semi-anaethesia on which we have moved ever since September. . . . One gets used to the blackout very quickly & the rationing [of petrol since September and of bacon, butter and sugar since 8 January] is so slight as to be merely a nuisance. Taxation of course is dreadful & will become (or ought to become if we are to avoid inflation) much worse. But we are all in the same boat here & so it doesn’t matter so much.’ Lionel had clear views about war finance. In his lecture on ‘Paying for the war’ on 10 October (Speeches & Lectures & Articles on Public Affairs pre 1946, RP) he pointed out that the ‘General Economic Problem’ of war was ‘Very similar to military problem at bottom. Getting people to right places.’ He stressed that war has to be won with current resources – ‘Battalions of posterity cannot fight – or work’ – and that the ‘Limits of war effort [are] all that can be spared above subsistence.’ No war was lost for financial reasons but only ‘when not enough [to] eat or shoot or when people lose heart’. Nevertheless ‘way finance carried out very important – (1) keeping up people’s spirits and (2) financial position after war’. Of the three methods of war finance, inflation was to be avoided if at all possible; taxation was preferable to borrowing, even though high taxes brought problems of evasion and discouragement of enterprise; but war loans were inevitable given the amount needed to be raised. He used numbers given in the recent budget and from The Economist to make rough calculations of the sums involved. While he was unsure how much could be raised by borrowing out of voluntary saving, he was sure that ‘(1) Taxation must go up. (2) Difficult [to] avoid inflation even so.’ Ten days later Keynes gave a lecture to the Marshall Society in which he put forward his proposal for ‘compulsory savings’ or ‘deferred pay’ to be imposed on wage earners with incomes too low to be subject to income tax, in order to prevent their spending more out of increased wartime incomes, a proposal he made more public in The Times on 13 and 15 November (JMK 22, 40–51). (Lionel was probably not present as it was a Friday and he attended a conference in Oxford the next day.) When Robbins subsequently prepared a paper on ‘British War Finance’ (Gardiner 3/11), which was published in the American journal Foreign Affairs (1940d), he used the estimates of prewar national income made by Colin Clark that Keynes had used and published in the Economic Journal in December. He briefly discussed the wartime balance-of-payments problem before considering the main problem of financing government expenditure of at least £2000m

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without inflation. Increased taxation could not fill the gap between what was needed and what was already available from taxes and government borrowing, because as Keynes and others had shown, nearly two thirds of total national consumption was by persons earning less than £250 a year. Keynes’s ‘most ingenious proposal’ would solve the problem. But although Lionel thought, correctly, that ‘Most economists in Great Britain’ would support it he did not, at that stage, think it would be adopted, just because of its novelty and subtlety. He thought more likely a variety of expedients, including some form of Keynes’s compulsory saving. He had no fear that the gap would be bridged: as he had said to the students, ‘The will to win includes the will to take whatever financial measures are necessary.’ Indeed, eventually the economists’ expedients were used to restrict consumption, including Keynes’s proposals and ‘points rationing’. Hayek came out in favour of Keynes’s proposal in The Spectator on 24 November, also suggesting that the money to repay the compulsory savings after the war could be found from a levy on capital – a proposal Keynes included in his revised proposals published as How to Pay for the War on 27 February 1940 (FAH 10, 164–7; JMK 9, 367–439). By that time there was, as Keynes put it (JMK 22, 102), ‘Amongst academic economists . . . almost universal agreement on principle, though some differences on points of detail. This embraces the school of economists from whom I have frequently differed of late; in particular Hayek, who has gone so far as to suggest getting up a circular of support; D.H. Robertson and, I think, Robbins.’ He was right about Robbins: Robbins wrote him on 29 March (Keynes HP/6) that he had been trying to draft a letter of support to The Times from Hayek and himself, but all his drafts had seemed wrong. ‘The difficulty is that I agree with you so completely on this issue that anything extensive serves only to repeat in muted & mediocre terms what you yourself have said so admirably – while anything brief – I agree with Mr Keynes – seems to attach an importance to one’s own utterances which is not warranted by the facts.’ He added that for him personally this agreement was one of the ‘few cheering things’ about the war. Like Keynes, he wrote a letter to The Times (1 May 1940) strongly criticizing the April 1940 budget of Sir John Simon, especially Simon’s proposal to meet the deficit by an appeal for increased voluntary savings. Hayek’s article in The Spectator was preceded by one from Robbins, ‘An Anglo-French Federation?’ (1939c) The idea of federation had become increasingly popular in the late 1930s and by 1939 ‘Federal Union’ was being actively promoted in Britain and America, especially after the publication of the American Clarence Streit’s Union Now. Lionel advocated a United States

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of Europe rather than the union of ‘Atlantic Democracies’ – to include the USA, the British Empire, France and other European countries bordering the Atlantic – proposed by Streit, purely on grounds of practicality. ‘If Mr. Streit could persuade his fellow countrymen to take the step, it would be nearly the best of all possible federations. But . . . [he] may not be immediately successful; and the plight of Europe is such that we cannot afford to wait until he is.’ Since the outbreak of war federalism had been widely canvassed as a principle for a future peace settlement; there were also encouraging announcements about Anglo-French cooperation. Why not strike while the iron was hot, while British and French soldiers were fighting side by side under a common French command, by ‘making a beginning on a [small] scale in circumstances which are uniquely favourable’ and establishing a permanent political union, at least for defence and foreign policy (including foreign economic policy), of Britain and France? As well as being useful for the conduct of war, it would form a nucleus for the postwar federation of Europe, and could perhaps serve as the basis of propaganda to the German people. (He shared the widespread belief that the German economy was in a bad way and thought German morale might crack rather as it had in 1918.) On finishing his book on The Economic Causes of War in September Lionel had written up a ‘A proposal regarding war aims and their realization’ (War Memoranda, RP) – published as the preface to the French translation in January 1940 – the proposal being an immediate federation of Britain and France. He sent it to Lionel Curtis of the RIIA, who circulated it to likeminded friends. Earlier he had sent Curtis a copy of Economic Planning and International Order, when Curtis had been surprised to find how similar Lionel’s conclusions were to Streit’s; Curtis sent a copy of the book to Streit and recommended Robbins get in touch with the three young men, Patrick Ransome, Derek Rawnsley and Charles Kimber, who were setting up a Federal Union organization in Britain.2 When Beveridge helped to set up a research department of Federal Union in October 1939, Robbins and several LSE colleagues joined its economists’ and other committees, attending conferences held in Beveridge’s Master’s Lodgings at University College Oxford. The economists’ committee, which comprised Beveridge, Durbin, Hayek, Robbins, H.D. Dickinson, Marcus Fleming and Barbara Wootton, held its first conference on the economic aspects of federation on 21–22 October (Beveridge Diary). When the research department became a shortlived ‘Federal Union Research Institute’ in March 1940, Hayek and 2

Curtis to LCR, 23 September 1939, Letters from Economists 1946–, RP; LCR to Curtis, 24 May, and Curtis to LCR, 6 June 1939, Ms Curtis 16 ff173–5, Bodleian Library.

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Robbins were both members of its organizing committee. Its two annual reports, which include the memoranda of the research committees, have been republished (Ransome ed 1991); according to the introduction (18) ‘Robbins[‘s] . . . writings on the economic causes of war and the economic aspects of federation are today considered fundamental contributions to federalist theory.’ At the time his two books (1937c, 1939d) particularly impressed Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, to whom Luigi Einaudi sent them when they were confined as anti-fascist militants on the island of Ventotene (Pinder ed 1998, 2–4; Rossi to LCR, 24 September 1948, Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47-Dec 1948, RP). At its first conference the economists’ committee reached some provisional ‘general conclusions’. According to the report by Wootton, there should be a Western European Federal Government for defence, foreign policy and control of dependencies; and ‘as a further safeguard against . . . war’, this government should also have control over trade, currency and migration (Ransome ed 1991, 53–7). At its second conference in January 1940, the committee discussed the report and memoranda contributed by H.D. Dickinson and James Meade (ibid., 58–90). Wootton’s report revealed ‘a surprising degree of general agreement’, as Lionel commented (Second Conference on Economic Aspects of a Federation of Western Europe Jan. 8th 1940, War Memoranda, RP), given the different political views of the members. Wootton and Dickinson were well known as socialist economists: Wootton had written her Lament for Economics (1938) as a ‘counterblast’ to Robbins’s Nature and Significance (Wootton 1967, 87); Dickinson, lecturer in economic history at the University of Leeds, had just published his challenge to Mises, Economics of Socialism (1939), which Hayek was about to attack in Economica (1940). Fleming, who had recently joined the Ministry of Economic Warfare, had been with the Financial Section of the League of Nations in Geneva 1935–7 before moving to the Graduate Institute of International Studies and working with R¨opke on a Rockefeller-funded project on postwar protectionism. Lionel had first met Fleming, a graduate of Edinburgh University, when he spent time in London attending seminars at LSE before going to Geneva (LCR, Reminiscences of Marcus Fleming, Biographical Notices; Fleming to LCR, 1 August 1937, CORRESPONDENCE, RP). Meade, who had joined the Financial Section of the League a few months after Fleming left it and was still in Geneva, had been a Keynesian ever since 1930/1 when he spent a year in Cambridge and participated in the ‘Cambridge circus’ of young economists which discussed and criticized Keynes’s Treatise on Money; he was also a ‘liberal socialist’ who had worked with Durbin and others for the Labour Party (Howson 1988, 543–64). What

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they shared in spite of their different views on domestic economic policy was internationalism: Wootton told Robbins when she read The Economic Causes of War (28 December 1939, CORRESPONDENCE, RP) that ‘I am still an unrepentant planner as sceptical of the market as ever, but I have always thought that the greatest tragedy that ever befell the Left was when it turned its back on its internationalism.’ In January 1940 Lionel was out of the blue offered a Stirling Professorship at Yale. The offer came via a telegram from his sister Caroline, who explained to him on 12 January that she had sent it at the request of Wallace Notestein, Stirling Professor of History, whom she had met at a dinner party during the American Historical Association meetings in Washington. He declined with little hesitation, telling her on 14 January: ‘In the first place, if we were at peace, I should regard my position as senior professor in London as being probably, for me, the position of maximum advantage anywhere. I don’t say that it is intrinsically more important than Oxford or Cambridge here or Yale Harvard or Chicago with you. But it would take ten years for me to build up a position of comparable influence anywhere else & in ten years’ time I shall be within measurable distance of the end of my period of maximum productive capacity. But of course we are not at peace. . . .’ He believed his duty was to stay: even if he was unlikely to be offered a wartime government job, he could perhaps influence outside opinion. ‘I feel that while any hope remains of exerting this in a direction favourable to winning the war & making a real peace, it would be almost an act of desertion to escape to the tranquil & congenial atmosphere of the Yale Seminars. One of my colleagues has actually gone to California [Berkeley]. I could not do myself what in my heart I condemned him for doing.’ He did not name the colleague, who was Condliffe. Lionel also told Caroline that ‘the war has gone much better than I should have thought there was any reason to hope’ and referred her to his annual assessment of the European outlook for the New York Times Annalist (clipping in War Memoranda, RP). At sea British and French shipping were coping well with German submarine attacks, so that ‘If the Germans cannot do better than this, the outcome of the war at sea is not at doubt.’ (As one of the official war histories commented [Hancock and Gowing 1949, 122], ‘The first half-year of war at sea was, by the standards of previous experience, easy – not at all the kind of war that Britain had fought in 1917–18, and had, after great tribulation, won.’) On land and in the air developments had been even more surprising: there had been no German attack in the West and the British and French were steadily building their strength. ‘In consequence,’ Lionel boldly claimed, ‘from the Zuider Zee to the Swiss

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frontiers, the German forces are confronted by a line of defences, neutral and allied, which, though certainly not invulnerable, can only be broken at the cost of sacrifices which themselves might be decisive.’ However, even though ‘as I see it, the ultimate issue of the struggle is not a matter of doubt’ since Allied resources were superior to German, he admitted that it was ‘far too early yet to indulge in facile optimism. The German morale may be impaired. But it is not yet broken. The German economic position is not good. But it is not yet catastrophic. . . . Because the Blitzkreig of the west has not yet burst upon us, that is no reason for supposing that it will not be attempted.’ He did not expect a very long war, perhaps three years at most. In the meantime, despite the disruption of the move to Cambridge, he felt ‘comparatively fortunate’: ‘this Xmas at any rate we have had a splendid vacation [at Tor Cottage]. I am hard at work trying to think out details of European reconstruction & the peace of this lovely refuge in the hills is a great help.’ Robbins had been asked to contribute an essay to a ‘symposium’ on Federal Union which was published in April 1940 (Chaning-Pearce ed 1940). His chapter was also published by the Federal Union Research Institute as a pamphlet (1941), the second in a series of ‘Federal Tracts’ (the first was by Beveridge). He gave a lecture on the same topic in an LSE series of public lectures on federation given in both London and Cambridge in February. The other speakers included Tawney and Laski. After the second conference of the Federal Union economists’ committee, which he chaired, he drafted an Interim Report, agreed at another meeting in February.3 Its recommendations are similar to those in Robbins’s essay. The federation of European democracies Robbins envisaged was first and foremost a political union. It would nonetheless have to decide which powers over economic matters it would assume and which it would leave to the federated states: ‘These are questions which must be settled before any detailed draft of a federal constitution can be begun to be constructed.’ On all these matters the union, since it would be a federation not a unitary state, should assume only those powers which could not be left to the individual states without promoting possible conflicts. Hence there would have to be freedom of migration and trade, and if not complete freedom then any restrictions on trade or migration should be federal and apply to all states equally. On money and banking within the union, there was a division of opinion among federalists, with some like Robbins favouring a common 3

Professorial Council 6 December 1939 and 27 January 1940; Ransome ed 1991, 91–7; Federal Union Economists’ Conference, Sunday, February 18, 1940, Master’s Lodgings, University College, Oxford, War Memoranda, RP.

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currency and banking system, others (notably Meade) advocating variable exchange rates between the currencies of the states of the union. There were good arguments on both sides; whichever was chosen it had to be decided by the federation as a whole (and if variable rates were chosen the federation would have to establish rules for exchange rate changes). The federation must certainly have full taxing and borrowing powers and also the power to carry out public works, such as those involving more than one state, a Channel Tunnel for instance. The federation could allow member states to make ‘collectivist experiments’ by nationalizing their industries as long as that did not damage other member states’ industries or consumers, but the federation would have to govern economic relations between member states and the rest of the world. There might be a customs union, although Robbins would prefer a freer international trading regime in the long run. With his LSE colleagues Lionel planned a book on the economics of federation, to which he would contribute the first and the last chapters, while Plant would write a chapter on federal regulation of interstate trade, Hayek on monetary policy in the federation, Paish on federal public finance and so on (outline in War Memoranda, RP). In reviewing Meade’s book, The Economic Basis of a Durable Peace (1939) for The Spectator (1940a), Robbins hinted that the jointly authored book would appear shortly. In his review he emphasized that he and Meade had arrived at similar conclusions from different starting points; when Meade thanked him for the review on 31 March (Correspondence & Newspaper cuttings, RP) he agreed that ‘it is really very cheering to think that economists of different schools of thought seem now – provided they have a reasonably international outlook – to be able to reach complete agreement on so many fundamental points.’ Like Lionel he hoped that the economists who agreed on the need for an international authority would proceed to argue amicably about the technical issues, such as the merits of a single international money versus national currencies with adjustable exchange rates. Lionel was also anxious not to let political differences stand in the way of federation, imagining himself as a constitution maker trying to create a federal structure which could accommodate states with a wide variety of domestic economic policies. He insisted that the editor of the Federal Union symposium make this clear in his ‘survey’ of the essays in the volume (ms draft letter to Chaning-Pearce, 8 March 1940, Correspondence & Newspaper cuttings, RP). Federal Union remained topical through the winter of 1940. Etienne Mantoux, writing on 14 January (Correspondence & Newspaper cuttings, RP) from ‘“somewhere in France” with an observation balloon’ (he was serving as an observation officer in the French Air Force on the Saar frontier

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[Mantoux 1946, xi]), commented that Lionel’s ‘hopes of a Anglo-French federation which you expressed to me during your visit to Paris last year [in April 1939], seem to be taking shape even earlier than I could hope.’ In March Wilson Harris, editor of The Spectator, initiated an examination of Federal Union with two short, and sceptical, articles on the various current proposals. Robbins contributed the third article on 29 March, to which Wilson Harris responded in the next issue, Robbins replied in the 12 April issue and Wilson Harris had the last word the next week. Harris seriously doubted that a European federation on the model of the USA or Switzerland was possible; on the other hand if a loose and informal grouping like the British Commonwealth was all that was intended then so far as he was concerned ‘all my difficulties fall away and I can subscribe myself as a Federal Unionist with no reserves’ (Harris 1940). For Robbins, however, the problem of federation was essentially a European problem. ‘Federation implies not merely a common culture . . . it implies almost more or less similar governmental institutions and habits; it implies complicated administrative and financial readjustments; it implies a degree of order which, on the most favourable hypothesis, is not to be expected at the end of the present war. These are not things which can be brought into being in a day or even perhaps in a generation.’ The most that could be done now was to make a small start with Anglo-French federation (Robbins 1940b). While Harris thought such a union would break down under the strain of divergent political views and continued to prefer loose political associations, which might or might not evolve into a closer relationship, Robbins argued in his second article that economic order was not achievable without a political framework (1940c). In sending that article to Harris on 8 April (War Memoranda, RP) he also privately expanded on his attitude to the Empire, since ‘the difficulty is that none of us like to talk in public about the Emperor’s beautiful clothes’. As he pointed out, ‘the political cohesion of the Empire is largely a fluke. If it weren’t for Japan and Germany Australia would have been out long ago. We fear Canadian Isolationism so much that we have to send poor George VI trotting round [on a royal visit in May 1939] to stoke up Imperial feeling. South Africa as nearly as not remained neutral [in September 1939]. . . . As for economic cooperation the thing is a sham from beginning to end . . .’ On 10 April, two days after the German invasion of Norway and Denmark, Lionel went to Paris for an Anglo-French economists’ conference, which discussed the Interim Report he had prepared after the second conference of the economists’ committee of Federal Union. The other British delegates were Beveridge, Hayek and Wootton; the French delegates included

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Rueff and Rougier (Ransome ed 1991, 98–103). The discussion of Robbins’s report was inconclusive but in the preceding general discussion there was ‘unanimous agreement that Anglo-French cooperation must be pressed forward to the utmost now while we were still at war; indeed, that it was not enough to win the war and then to think, but that “we must fight for Federation”, i.e. that the Allies must now agree on Federation as their Peace Aim.’ Beveridge told Mrs Mair on 13 April (Beveridge Supp 1/32) that ‘it was all exceedingly friendly & serious. . . . All English speeches have to be translated for the French, but the English (including myself) pretend that they understand French & need no translating.’ Lionel later remembered only (1971a, 167) ‘reading in the Continental Daily Mail a report of the French attitude to the contemplated British action in Norway, where it was alleged that the average Frenchman looked upon any military operations under British auspices with much the same anxious affection as a husband of long experience would look upon the efforts of his wife learning to drive.’ Shortly after his visit, however, he wrote (to his sister on 12 May): It was an inspiring & illuminating experience. The French rise so magnificently to the great emergencies of life; and to witness the quiet dignity of their behaviour is most reassuring. I was over for conversations with French economists & political scientists on war organization and problems of [postwar] reconstruction. . . . You must realize that drastic reconstruction is no longer an academic question over here. In peace time one could talk of Anglo French Union or a Federation of the Western Fringe until you were blue in the face and of course nothing would happen. But now you have a state of affairs in which the most ardent & deepfelt wish of the average man is to make this sort of thing impossible; and changes which seemed out of the question before become well within the range of probability.

The Lent term was a ‘most exhausting term’, with a heavy teaching load and with the travelling by train between Buckinghamshire, Cambridge and London made harder by exceptionally cold weather with heavy snowfalls (LCR to Keynes, 29 March 1940, Keynes HP/6; Hayek to Machlup, 17 March 1940, Machlup 43–15). Lionel was, as he feared, finding it difficult to obtain a government job. In April 1940 he had a conversation with E.M.H. Lloyd of the Ministry of Food about a position in that ministry but Carr-Saunders was reluctant to let Lionel leave LSE at a ‘distinctly difficult time’ for the School’s teaching. Lionel promised Carr-Saunders he would not actively seek a government position, but the two agreed that if he were offered a sufficiently important job it would be right to accept.4 4

Carr-Saunders to LCR, 1 May and 11 June, LCR to Carr-Saunders, 9 June 1940, LCR Personal File B, LSE.

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At first Cambridge in the Easter term was ‘an unbelievable Paradise’. As he told Caroline on 12 May, it was ‘one of the fortunate bye products of the war that I have had to do what probably I should never have done otherwise – walk morning after morning to my lectures through the breathtaking beauty of the Backs in spring.’ On warm days classes were often held in the garden of Grove Lodge. At the weekends ‘the hills and the woods . . . [of Buckinghamshire] were at their most magical.’ Lionel was also cheered by the fall of the Chamberlain government over the Norwegian crisis: ‘I doubt very much whether Chamberlaine [sic] deserved to fall on the Norwegian issue . . . but it is an immense relief to have got rid of his circle even on an false charge, for there can be no question that their conduct of affairs was very gravely disturbing. I regard the relegation of Simon [the former Chancellor of the Exchequer] to the House of Lords as worth the destruction of several German divisions. . . . There is also much to be said for the inclusion of Labour. The present battle apart, our main problem is a problem of production & it can be solved much more easily now that the Labour leaders are in responsible positions.’ But the German invasion of Holland and Belgium had begun in the early hours of the day that Churchill became Prime Minister of a wartime coalition government. Although Lionel went on to claim that the war could still be over in a year, he also commented: ‘It is no good making predictions any more. My belief that Hitler’s demon would lead him to strike and stake all has been justified; & there is now nothing to do but to await the outcome with what patience one can command.’ On 14 May the German army broke through the French defences at Sedan. Before the end of the month the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk had begun, shortly before Belgium capitulated. Holland had already been overrun. With Hayek and Kaldor and his former student Honor Croome (who, as a mother of four young children, had been teaching parttime at LSE since 1936), Lionel heard the news of the Dunkirk evacuation in Cambridge over the radio at 17 Clarkson Road (Croome to LCR, 27 June 1943, Private Letters War Period, RP). Clarisse Kaldor remembered that he enquired whether she had relatives still in France: ‘He was very sympathetic.’ For Lionel ‘academic life became almost unendurable’. But one afternoon at Tor Cottage in the first week of June he took the telephone from his son, who had answered it to hear the voice of Austin Robinson. Austin, ‘speaking on behalf of the assistant secretary responsible’, invited him to join the Office of the War Cabinet as an economic assistant; he accepted on the spot (Robbins 1971a, 168, and information from Richard Robbins). On Friday 7 June he called on the assistant secretary, Francis Hemming, and then talked to Carr-Saunders; he officially asked for leave of absence on

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Sunday and reported for work in Whitehall on the Monday (Hemming to LCR, 7 June, and LCR to Carr-Saunders, 9 June 1940, LCR Personal File B, LSE). By the middle of June the French were ready to give up. At the last moment the British sent a proposal offering a political union (Colville 1985, 186– 8). Lionel heard the news while he was visiting his father at Hollycroft on Sunday 16 June (Robbins 1971a, 236): he listened with ‘the deepest emotion and approbation . . . the tears came into my eyes at the thought that out of these terrible misfortunes the foundations of a stabler, stronger habitation for Western ideals might be laid.’ His father did not agree: ‘He was moved the other way. “He [Churchill] shouldn’t have done it. He shouldn’t have done it”, he kept repeating.’ The next day Prime Minister Reynaud resigned and his successor Marshal P´etain immediately sought an armistice which was concluded on 22 June. When Lionel next wrote to Caroline on 17 July, he admitted ‘I was all wrong about France & the French army. I knew about the rottenness of the French politicians. But I always thought that that was a mere surface phenomenon & that the army was sound. 100% error.’ He told Viner in July or August (Viner 22–14) that ‘My great sorrow . . . is the moral collapse of the French. . . . The dreadful thing is the feeling of being morally alone – on this side of the water. Before the collapse my world was still tolerably clear. I wanted to move gradually on the basis of AngloFrench unity to a reconstruction of Europe . . . Today – perhaps wrongly I don’t feel so sure . . . ’ When France fell Caroline and Joe, and a few days later the Viners, cabled Lionel and Iris offering to look after their children in America for the duration of the war. The Robbinses, however, decided otherwise, at least for the time being. As he told Viner, the voyage (by sea) would be risky; Lacey Green seemed a relatively safe refuge; and Anne and Richard themselves preferred to stay in England. The family remained at Tor Cottage for the rest of the war, Anne (fifteen years old in 1940) going to the Farmhouse School, Wendover, and Richard, two years younger, New College School in Oxford and then Dauntseys School in Wiltshire. Hayek’s wife Hella and their two children joined the Robbinses at Tor Cottage. In June Hayek was still in London, alone in his house in Hampstead Garden Suburb and, he told Machlup on 21 June (Machlup 43–15), ‘immersed in examination scripts, as Lionel . . . has now at last joined a Government Dept. and I have to do all the examining for him in addition to my own. We are trying to get it over before bombing starts in earnest.’ In the summer of 1939 the Chamberlain government had asked Josiah Stamp to undertake a ‘Survey of war plans in the economic and financial

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spheres’, with the assistance of two senior economists, Henry Clay and Hubert Henderson, and two permanent civil servants, Francis Hemming and Piers Debenham. Once war broke out the ‘Stamp Survey’ reported to a new ministerial committee on economic policy. In October it was suggested that there should also be a Central Economic Information Service (CEIS), at least as a support to the Stamp Survey, made up of a few economists recruited from the universities as temporary wartime civil servants. John Jewkes, who had succeeded Clay as Professor of Social Economics at Manchester in 1936; Harry Campion, Reader in Statistics at Manchester; and Austin Robinson were appointed in December 1939. Hemming was administrative director (Cairncross and Watts 1989, 10–16). With the end of the phoney war and the change of government in May 1940 Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, became Lord Privy Seal and Deputy Prime Minister, Sir Kingsley Wood Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain Lord President of the Council and Lionel’s former employer Arthur Greenwood Minister without Portfolio: these ministers between them were to look after economic and home affairs. A new ‘steering’ committee, the Lord President’s Committee, was to coordinate the work of the several other civil committees. The CEIS was attached to Greenwood and given new duties, which necessitated an increase in personnel. Hemming had already thought of recruiting Robbins and Ronald Fowler from LSE; in June, with Greenwood’s backing, he persuaded the Treasury to allow the hiring of additional staff, although Sir Edward Bridges, Secretary to the Cabinet, hesitated over Robbins as a potentially disruptive influence, given his antiKeynesian laissez faire reputation (Hemming to Bridges, 26 June 1940, CAB21/940; Cairncross and Watts 1989, 24–5 and 53). When Hemming offered Robbins a position as a Chief Economic Assistant, at a salary of £750 pa (on the assumption that LSE would make up the difference between that and Lionel’s professorial salary),5 he explained on 7 June (Private Letters War Period, RP): that the new Government had decided to extend our organisation and convert it into an Economic Staff to be available to advise the members of the War Cabinet specially charged with responsibility for economic problems. Our organisation will be primarily responsible to Mr. Arthur Greenwood. . . . It will also act as adviser to Mr. Attlee, who, as Lord Privy Seal, is Chairman of the Food Policy Committee. 5

LCR was pleased to be able to tell Carr-Saunders a fortnight later that Hemming had notified him that the Treasury had agreed to a salary of £800. Nine months later LCR asked Carr-Saunders to inform the Standing Committee that his government salary in 1941 would be £1000 ‘as I have been given to understand that there was one member who, if not at the committee, at least outside, expressed some criticism of my willingness to enter government service for a lower stipend’ (4 April 1941, LCR Personal File B, LSE).

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In addition, we shall now be charged with the responsibility of running a central statistical service for the information of Ministers, and it will be our duty also to prepare for Ministers periodical returns showing the progress made by Departments in giving effect to decisions by the Government in the economic field. ... Already, as a result of the change of Government, all sorts of new work is being given to us and for our part, therefore, the sooner you can join us the better . . .

When Robbins joined the CEIS his existing colleagues included besides Jewkes, Robinson and Campion, Alec Cairncross and Ely Devons. Cairncross came from Glasgow University to which he had returned as a lecturer after a Cambridge PhD; Devons from Manchester where he had been working as an economist on the staff of the Cotton Trade Organisation. The group had just completed a major memorandum, ‘Urgent economic problems’, ‘a kind of economists’ manifesto’ in Cairncross’s words, for circulation by Greenwood to the ministerial economic policy committee. In the next few weeks they were joined by (Daniel) Norman Chester, Stanley Dennison, Evan Durbin (who was already a wartime civil servant in the Ministry of Supply), Peggy Joseph, James Meade, Richard Stone and Harold Wilson (Cairncross and Watts 1989, 25, 33–5). The one non-economist was the genial and down-to-earth Chester, who had left school at fourteen and subsequently gained an external BA, an MA and a lecturership in public administration at the University of Manchester (also a Rockefeller Travelling Fellowship to the USA in 1935–6 to study public utilities). He told his wife on 21 July that he had ‘taken a liking to Robbins & Meade but . . . [found] Robinson a little austere’ (Chester Papers 12/4, Nuffield College Oxford). Lionel for his part christened him ‘Friend of Man’: ‘There has not been since time began/One of such pure integrity. . . . Still shall he stay as he began/The kindly friendly FRIEND OF MAN.’6 Dennison, who had been working for the Anglo-French Coordinating Committee headed by Jean Monnet, had recently been appointed professor of economics at the University College of Wales at Swansea. Joseph had, like Meade, been working for the Financial Section of the League of Nations. Robinson had asked Meade to join the CEIS in order to help prepare reliable estimates of national income and expenditure: Robinson had heard Keynes’s proposals for wartime finance at the Marshall Society in October and had managed to persuade Hemming and Bridges of the pressing need for such estimates. Meade reached England from Geneva only after a nightmare journey across falling France in a small car with his wife and three small children and a crossing from Nantes 6

Ms ‘The Book of the Prophet Daniel’, Casual Poetry etc More Recent, RP.

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delayed by the Dunkirk evacuation. Robinson also invited Stone, a recent Cambridge graduate who had been working at Lloyd’s of London and, since the outbreak of war, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, to assist Meade with the statistics. Stone arrived in August, when he found Meade already drawing up the framework for the estimates in the form of a complicated system of balancing tables (Howson 2000, 127–8; JEM 1, 106–17). Harold Wilson (the future Labour Prime Minister) had been a reserch fellow of University College Oxford before the war and had previously, like Lionel a decade earlier, worked as Beveridge’s research assistant (Pimlott 1992, 66, 71–2). Alec Cairncross liked to tell the story that Lionel, on his first day in Whitehall, ‘shown a particularly dispiriting report by the Chiefs of Staff, . . . was so agitated that he had to be taken home in a taxi’. It could have been that Lionel had one of the migraines to which he was prone; it is true, however, that as of 10 June few in England outside the government had any idea of the gravity of events in France (Cairncross and Watts 1989, 53; Lukacs 1999, 208–9). Ten days later he wrote Carr-Saunders (LCR Personal File B, LSE): ‘A week’s work here has convinced me that I did right to come. The opportunities are really extensive.’ He threw himself into the work of helping to create a war economy. On 25 June he circulated a memorandum on the new problems for economic strategy created by the fall of France (Note on certain necessary revisions in economic strategy, T230/14). Britain now had to endure what was virtually a siege and at the same time to prepare for a future offensive: ‘We need not only a political economy of siege, but a political economy of inter-continental warfare.’ To face the danger that Britain’s ports, and hence its capacity to import food and materials, could be damaged by bombing, it was necessary immediately to reduce consumption by extending food rationing, to increase stocks and production for stocks, and to consider the evacuation of noncombatant civilians to the Dominions and the USA. Moreover, agricultural effort had to be redirected ‘on a scale much greater than anything yet attempted’, so as to concentrate on the production of wheat, potatoes, vegetables and milk and drastically to reduce all livestock, which compete with human beings for foodstuffs, except for dairy cattle. To prepare to fight the enemy in due course it was not enough to rely on the blockade of Germany; it was necessary to increase production of the weapons of war at home by moving manpower to munitions and aircraft manufacture at the expense of exports, and overseas by using less skilled labour in Australia and India as well as persuading neutral America to supply war material on a large scale. As always Robbins was prepared to defend his proposals vigorously: Cairncross remembered him (Cairncross

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and Watts 1989, 53) as ‘particularly insistent on the need for a livestock slaughter policy to accompany a cut in imports of feedstuffs. Another of his enthusiasms in June 1940 was for the transformation of India into an arsenal of democracy: he visualized the mobilization of the Indian masses for the manufacture of armaments alongside that other arsenal across the Atlantic without which victory was impossible.’ On 25 June Lionel wrote to Keynes (who was not yet in government service). They had been discussing the problem of the limitation of consumption a few days earlier. It is clear that much the tidiest solution of the problem would be something on the lines you have proposed or a suitably graded universal income tax. But these, we agree, seem to encounter the most intransigent position in politically influential quarters. At the same time it seems that the idea of rationing encounters no such resistance, indeed the working class leaders are willing to countenance a much greater extension of rationing than is really sensible. In our conversation . . . you were suggesting that perhaps the difficulty might be surmounted by rationing groups of commodities. I would like to go further and ask would it not be possible to reach exactly the end you desire by rationing total expenditure. The method I take it would be something like this: a scale would be drawn up of the proportions of income which people in different income groups and with different family responsibilities should be allowed to spend. Then at the same time as wages are paid or other incomes earned, there would be issued books of coupons in value terms. Shopkeepers, cinema proprietors, transport undertakings and so on, would be prohibited from taking cash unless it were accompanied by an equivalent value in coupons. Is this utterly absurd?

Keynes did not think it was absurd but he was sceptical, doubting it was administratively practical. Robbins responded that he had not intended his proposal to be limited to retail expenditure, as Keynes seemed to assume; he had in mind ‘something as nearly as possible the practical equivalent of your scheme save that, whereas you would stipulate the amount that people should save, I would stipulate the amount that they might spend’, because this might be more acceptable politically. They agreed to meet to discuss it but Lionel could not manage lunch on 4 July, and it was not until November that he wrote to Keynes on this subject again (LCR to Keynes, 25 June and 2 July, Keynes to LCR, 28 June and July 1940, T230/118). In July Robbins was writing a report on agricultural price policy. In the first nine months of the war, with the general intention of encouraging an expansion of agricultural production as well as covering farmers’ increased costs, the government had allowed a haphazard series of price increases for individual products. In June 1940 the conflict between the resulting agricultural price structure and the priorities of food policy came into

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the open. Following an increase in the agricultural minimum wage, which necessitated a further revision of agricultural prices, an interdepartmental committee on food prices, on which the Treasury, the Ministry of Food and the Ministry of Agriculture were represented, recommended an increase amounting to £20m in total but with individual price increases adjusted to provide appropriate incentives. The Ministry of Agriculture rejected the recommendations, proposing an increase totalling £34.5m and the maintenance of existing relative prices. When the Food Policy Committee chaired by Attlee could not reach agreement, the dispute went up to the newly established Lord President’s Committee on 22 June (Hancock and Gowing 1949, 159–61). The committee eventually produced a compromise, accepting the Ministry of Agriculture’s demands for the 1939/40 season but asking for an alternative scheme of prices for the 1940–1 season (LP(40)7th meeting, 28 June 1940, CAB71/1). Greenwood was asked to provide a report on the effects of the decision on the cost of living and the practicability of an alternative scheme. Lionel took on the task of producing the report. He had no difficulty in demonstrating that a scheme under which agricultural prices would be based on prewar production costs with special incentives to producers on marginal lands was not what was needed. As he and his economist colleagues were to do on numerous occasions he first raised the broader issues. The problem of wartime food production was not one of increasing food production as a whole but one of increasing the output of those foodstuffs ‘which are deemed essential to siege conditions – wheat, milk, potatoes, etc’. It was ‘essentially a problem of transfer – a problem of securing the withdrawal of resources from some lines of production and their re-allocation to others’. Prices based on prewar costs would not provide the incentive to produce more of the desired commodities nor would incentives to production on marginal land: ‘what is needed is an incentive to marginal production. . . . But the marginal bushels are not all grown on the marginal land. They may be equally the product of extra capital and labour within the margin.’ Hence ‘the sine qua non of a successful price schedule is the establishment of appropriate relations between the prices of the different commodities. If the Government desires that the existing supplies of maize should be fed to dairy cows rather than to pigs, it must take measures to ensure that the price of milk in relation to the cost of producing milk is more favourable than the price of pig products in relation to the cost of producing them.’ He also pointed out the inconsistency between a food production policy based on increasing the output of food and a food consumption policy intended to keep down the cost of living (Report on agricultural price policy, T230/2; LP(40)26, Agricultural price

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policy, Memorandum by the Minister without Portfolio, 3 August 1940, CAB71/1). The report was a small contribution only to a dispute which went from committee to committee and eventually to the War Cabinet. But a new price schedule announced on 30 August slightly favoured milk and potatoes over oats, barley and fat stock, thus going ‘a little way towards vindicating the principle of differential price inducement’ (Hammond 1951, 90–1). The 1940 discussions were also (Nash 1951, 209) ‘the first step in the gradual development of a more orderly procedure for determining price changes, and the precedent for a series of general agricultural price reviews which were conducted at intervals throughout the remainder of the war’. The economists in the CEIS had tried to allocate tasks among themselves by topics. Robbins would be in charge of work on prices and wages, Meade that on ‘finance, exchange and export’, Jewkes would concentrate on manpower, Robinson on production and supply, Debenham food and consumption and Cairncross shipping and transport. Campion would remain in charge of the preparation of statistics. Each would have a junior economist as an assistant, and Robbins would chair an informal committee to make sure the work was distributed evenly (Note on the organisation of the Central Economic Information Service, T230/12). It did not work out that way. Lionel and his colleagues experienced two or three months of hectic activity in the summer as they endeavoured to provide papers on the many urgent economic problems they could see needed attention, but then found themselves, as he put it to his sister a year later (4 July 1941), ‘becalmed in a very dreary backwater and up to Xmas [1940] scarcely a day passed but I opened my drawer & asked myself whether I ought not to dispatch the letter of resignation which lay there ready written’. As he later explained (1971a, 170–1) this was not only because Francis Hemming, whose favourite official occupation was the pedantic correction of other people’s drafts, was a poor administrator but also because the responsibility of the CEIS to ministers had been inadequately defined and there was no guarantee that their papers would be read. Cairncross and Watts (1989, 27–8) are blunter: ‘Papers written for circulation were held up, committees did not meet, or, when they did, discussed matters of no concern to the economic staff. Part of the trouble was the incompetence of the Minister: Greenwood was too often drunk and too rarely in touch.’ They also blame Hemming, with his inability to delegate and great weakness for long documents. It would have been better, Robbins wrote (1971a, 172), to join an established government department in a subordinate position ‘than linger in this semi-academic limbo, privileged no doubt in a way but, so far as we could see, completely

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sterile as regards impact on anything. It was wellnigh intolerable to have to sit around at this critical period of the war, watching the economic conduct thereof in chaos, as it certainly was, and ourselves not able to help to do anything effective to remedy it.’ A good example of this fruitless activity is their work on the surplus problem. Robbins recalled (transcript of Economists’ Dinner, The Reform Club, London, March 5th, 1973, RP): ‘Dalton [who was Undersecretary in the Foreign Office] got it into its head that the main economic problem of the war was overseas – was going to be the accumulation of indefinite surpluses of war materials and food, and what could we do to offset this. And so we all scurried about in different directions – . . . [making] studies of futures and the stockpiling of coffee and wool, and all sorts of things. And then Francis Hemming spent weeks and weeks compiling an index to these commodity studies.’ The surpluses in question were export surpluses of primary commodities accumulating in the producing countries as a result of the wartime disruption of trade and the blockade of enemy countries. Lionel’s contribution to the studies was a short paper on fruit, which was utilized in one section of one chapter of a massive report to a ministerial committee on export surpluses, which was not completed until November. He wrote a potentially more useful, but practically equally futile, note in September.7 This note, characteristically for him at this stage of his wartime government service, attempted ‘to sketch out a theory of the surplus problem’. The problem was not really an economic problem for Britain, which would, other things being equal, benefit from a fall in commodity prices, but a political problem: a drastic decline in incomes in the surplus areas, which included India, British and French colonies and South America, could lead to disaffection and unrest. Although there was a need to build up stocks of food and raw materials for the postwar relief of Europe – an announced objective of government policy – the ‘main justification’ for taking measures to deal with the surpluses was to prevent political trouble in the surplus areas. The solution was obviously to buy up the existing surpluses – and if necessary destroy them if they could not be stored or shipped – but the government would have to encourage future restriction of production. It had also to avoid using scarce US dollars and take into account that maintenance of the incomes of primary producers would keep up their imports from the USA 7

ES(D)(40)17, Note on policy for the fruit (hard, citrus & dried) surplus problem, 19 August, ES(D)(40)73, Export surpluses and their importance to the producing countries, Survey prepared by the Secretariat to the Ministerial Committee on Export Surpluses, 14 November 1940, CAB 72/27; ECS(40)11, Notes on the surplus problem, 11 September 1940, CAB72/24.

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and hence the prices of goods which the UK needed to buy from the USA. ‘This is not necessarily an argument against providing relief: we may well decide that the price is worth while. But when we are attempting to compute costs it certainly is necessary to take account not merely of the direct, but also the indirect repercussions of policy.’ The memorandum was written for, but never discussed by, an official subcommittee on export surpluses set up in September and chaired by Hemming. In November, after the committee had recommended the government purchase £200m in surplus commodities, Sir Frederick Leith-Ross, Director-General of the Ministry of Economic Warfare, took over the committee (EP(ES)(O)(40)1st and 7th meetings, 11 September and 19 November 1940, CAB72/15). But the anticipated huge surpluses, ‘which [would have] made the similar problems of the Great Depression look in retrospect as nothing’ (Rowe 1965, 94–5), were still only threatening to appear when the Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia abruptly turned them into shortages at the end of 1941. The committee lasted, however, and Leith-Ross (1968, 286–317) remained in charge of organizing supplies for postwar relief until April 1946. The Battle of Britain is usually reckoned to have begun on 10 July and reached its climax on 15 September, after which British fears of imminent invasion began to subside. On 7 September the ‘Blitz’, the nightly bombing of London and then provincial cities, commenced and lasted for several months. It has been a terrible summer [Lionel wrote Caroline on 24 October] ‘& no doubt there are still many frightful ordeals ahead but if you had been here you could never have believed it possible that we should go under. Partly, no doubt, this has been due to the Prime Minister whose speeches for me at any rate embody, as if by miracle, all that is strongest and best in the tradition of the English soul. But you would have been reassured too by the common people. . . . Sirens wail almost perpetually through the upper atmosphere. Bombs plunge through the night & the clouds, pulverising their homes, destroying their friends & comrades. The amenities of life disappear in this troglodyte existence of ill ventilated & inadequate shelters. Travel is delayed & dangerous. Yet day after day the typists shop assistants charwomen messengers & clerks & workmen come steadily to their work grumbling, good humouredly, joking at misfortunes, never sparing themselves in the unusual or difficult situation and ridiculing the thought that they could ever be finally beaten.

Lionel reassured Viner (27 September 1940, Viner 22–14): ‘The nightly bombing is unquestionably unpleasant though, I am glad to say, I have an underground refuge to sleep in which permits me to get fairly undisturbed rest.’ With many of his colleagues he slept in the basement of the buildings

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in which they worked, in Richmond Terrace until March 1941 and then in Great George Street, where the Treasury was housed after its former quarters were bombed (twice) in October 1940. As Roy Harrod (who was working in the Prime Minister’s Statistical Branch) discovered after he had joined them for a while in the basement of the New Police Building, they were not as safe as they thought they were at the time (Harrod 1959, 218; Cairncross and Watts 1989, 50–1). Chester often joined Robbins and Meade after supper: ‘When I get down LCR usually says – Well King Chester . . . give us something to talk about, some new topic to explore (in other words something on which LCR can lavish his talent for the apt quotation, the decorative phrase, the delightful reminiscence or the telling anecdote). So I do my best.’ On 6 December Chester chose food, deliberately extolling the virtues of Lancashire cheese after Robbins had been enthusing about French cuisine over supper (7 December 1940, Chester 12/5). Lionel was lucky. Among the many who lost their living quarters, Meade had been bombed out of his sister’s flat in Chelsea in September 1940. In the East End Toynbee Hall was hit several times; in the last and worst raid, on 10 May 1941, the Warden’s Lodge was burnt out: Stella and Jimmie Mallon lost all their belongings including Mallon’s unpublished autobiography. Among the 40,000 civilians who lost their lives in England and Wales in 1940–1 were Josiah Stamp, his wife and his eldest son at their home in Kent on 16 April 1941.8 The government was still dragging its feet over economic and financial policy. The use of manpower, productive resources, shipping and domestic transport was not being planned or controlled. Imports of food and animal feeding stuffs were not yet being cut to match the shipping shortage. Goods for civilian consumption were becoming scarce but most were unrationed. An extra budget on 23 July increased taxes but the increase in revenue would only cover 35 per cent of the increase in war expenditure. Inflation was a serious potential danger (Hancock and Gowing 1949, 264–5, 316, 327). In July Keynes was appointed to the new Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Consultative Council, but until he was given a room in the (old) Treasury in August he was offering largely unsolicited advice to the Chancellor and his officials (Moggridge 1992, 636–8, 642–3). In late September Robbins was allowed a week’s holiday. At Tor Cottage he did ‘nothing but ride, which made me saddlesore, and dig, which made me stiff in every limb, and lounge about reading old favourites’. He also told 8

Information from Margaret Meade; Briggs and Macartney 1984, 125–7; LCR to H.A. Williams, 24 July 1967, PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE, RP; Titmuss 1950, appendix 8; Jones 1964, 347.

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Viner on 27 September (Viner 22–14) of his reactions so far to government work, of which Viner had plenty of experience as a consultant to the US Treasury since 1934. While it was interesting to observe the business of government from inside, ‘its practical utility is a matter about which my opinion oscillates with the ups & downs of day to day business. I have been able to do one or two jobs which perhaps were of some use. But on the whole I am inclined to think that the title is more imposing than the duties attached to it; and I sometimes sigh for the freedom to think & write in one’s own tone of voice which I enjoyed before.’ He was already determined to return to academic life once the war was over, for although he was ‘adaptable in practical affairs and do find it easy to get on with new people’, he thought he would find life as a peacetime civil servant ‘almost unbearably unsympathetic’. Back in the office in October Lionel wrote a scathing indictment of current economic policy (Note on the present state of economic co-ordination, T230/12). The organization of the economic side of the war effort required comprehensive surveys of both real and financial resources, planning of military and civil programmes in the light of these surveys and, of course, execution of these programmes by means of coordinated administrative controls. There were glaring deficiencies in the estimates of real resources and the information on financial resources was ‘lamentable’; there were similar gaps in planning of programmes and little or no coordination of administrative measures. The most oustanding example was where finance, production and consumption inter-act upon one another. No effort has been made to frame financial policy so that civil consumption shall be limited to just that amount which the needs of war production make necessary. We impose taxes which we hope will bring in a certain proportion of the war expenditure and hope to luck and Sir Robert Kindersley [ie the national savings campaign] to cover the rest without inflation. We have no plan for limiting consumption still further as war production expands and timing the increase of revenue so as to permit non-inflationary increases of expenditure. So far we have not even troubled to collect the information which alone would make possible the development of such a policy. The Treasury regards finance as its own special prerogative and is only prepared to tolerate elsewhere such measures of co-ordination as fall outside this taboo.

As he concluded, ‘We have done better than we expected in the Battle of Britain this year. But we are likely to fall grievously short of expectations in the Battle of Europe in the future if we do not carry through quite quickly a drastic overhaul of our long-term plans.’

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On 3 October 1940 Sir John Anderson replaced Neville Chamberlain, who was ill and died a month later, as Lord President of the Council. This was to bring a great improvement in the working life of the CEIS economists but not until the new year. Anderson, even as a member of the War Cabinet, had little to do in his first few weeks (Wheeler-Bennett 1962, 261). Before Lionel went on leave he had, to his surprise, been contacted by British Intelligence, who had informed him that ‘a certain Professor Rougier had presented himself with the request to be brought to London on highly confidential business and citing me as a witness for his probity.’ Lionel, who had met Rougier only once or twice in Paris, duly reported that, adding ‘that I saw no harm and some possible good from bringing him over’ (LCR to Patricia R. Newell, 21 May 1973, 1973 Day File, RP). Rougier was in Geneva, having travelled there from Vichy where the P´etain government had retreated. He had conceived the idea of acting as an intermediary to dispel the ‘tragic misunderstandings’ between the British and French governments following the British attack on the French fleet at Mers-elK´ebir (Oran) in July, and had gone to Geneva to try to contact Robbins through the British consulate. A telegram addressed to Robbins had been sent on 25 August. The reply of 27 August was, according to Rougier (1946, 61 and 310): ‘Your suggestions extremely interesting but in order to dicuss fully and with necessary personages essential you should come to London.’ When Rougier reached London, Churchill was told (Note dated 25 October 1940, marked ‘Copy sent to the Prime Minister’, FO371/24361, TNA) that: Professor Louis Rougier, of Besancon University and lecturer in Paris on Foreign Affairs, arrived in Geneva from Vichy in the third week of August, and informed “C” ’s representative there [C being Brigadier Stewart Menzies, head of MI6] of the Doriot Bergery plot, having as its object a declaration of war on the United Kingdom. The Professor said that he had reported this plan to General Weygand, who was actively opposed to it, and who, he believed, was desirous of establishing contact with the British Government and General de Gaulle. Professor Rougier offered to go to Lisbon if he could meet there a representative of General de Gaulle and Professor Robbins, an old acquaintance and now in the Economic Section of the Cabinet Offices. After consultation with General de Gaulle, who, while not optimistic as to the possibility of using General Weygand, agreed that this approach should be encouraged, Professor Rougier was invited, ostensibly by Professor Robbins, to come to London.

Lionel was summoned to meet Rougier at the Waldorf Hotel in Aldwych on 22 October and ‘instructed to impress upon him simply the necessity

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for avoiding contacts of any kind during the period of his mission’. Rougier had just arrived from Lisbon by flying boat (Rougier 1946, 67). ‘When I saw [him],’ Robbins recalled (in his letter to Patricia R. Newell), ‘he seemed to me to be in a state of great nervous agitation. . . . it was the time when there were frequent air-raid alarms and he was obviously considerably exhausted emotionally and physically. I remember that he expressed to me great pessimism concerning the prospects of averting the complete defeat of the Allies and he hinted at important communications which he wished to make to Ministers. But he certainly did not disclose details to me. Our interview must have lasted not more than half an hour. That was the last I saw of Professor Rougier.’ Ten days later Rougier wrote to Robbins from Bournemouth (Miscellaneous Correspondence, RP), where he was waiting to fly back to Lisbon, saying that he admired the moral resistance of the British but he could not see how Britain could win the war. He hoped they would meet again in better circumstances and gave Lionel his address in New York, where he hoped to be in a few months’ time. In London Rougier had seen Churchill and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. When Lionel later read Rougier’s account of the conversations, he was ‘astonished at the importance which he seemed to have attached to my connection with him. But I was much more surprised at his account of his exchanges with Churchill and quite frankly . . . I do not for a moment believe that it reported an accurate account of what had happened.’ Rougier (1946 and 1954) claimed to have negotiated a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ between Britain and France, whereby Vichy undertook to defend its colonies and bases from German control and to refrain from any attempt to win back its dissident colonies by force or to interfere with those which declared spontaneously for de Gaulle, while London undertook to abstain from interference in colonies loyal to Vichy and to exempt trade between French North Africa and unoccupied France from the blockade. This claim, which has been shown to be exaggerated (Thomas 1979, 69–70), was embarrassing to the British government, and probably also to Lionel since he had enabled Rougier to come to London. Rougier’s accounts contain some grains of truth. For example, Rougier (1954, 67–72) claimed that he saw Churchill twice, on 24 and 26 October, and that on the second occasion, when there had been rumours in the press of a peace treaty between P´etain and Hitler, Churchill shouted at him: ‘I will send the Royal Air Force to bomb Vichy. I will broadcast to the people of France to tell them of my resolve to pursue their government of traitors wherever they go.’ Churchill saw Rougier only once, according to Foreign Office records, on the evening of 25 October with Halifax present

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(note by William Strang, 25 October 1940, FO371/24361), when Churchill ‘emphasised that if the Vichy Government were to participate in the German war effort against us, we should undoubtedly attack the seat of the French Government from the air’.9 Although Rougier made crucial alterations in the document when he published it, so as to make it look like a treaty, he did take back to P´etain a memorandum written by himself in Strang’s office on 28 October (Rougier 1946, 73–8; Note by Strang, 29 October 1940, FO371/24361/C114412; Thomas 1979, 70). A few weeks later Halifax reported to the Cabinet that the government had ‘two valuable contacts’ with the Vichy government, one of whom was Rougier, who had seen Churchill and himself and taken back to P´etain a memorandum. ‘After indicating that British morale was splendid, that no compromise peace would be acceptable and that we had the financial means and the armaments to continue the war, the memorandum went on to say that we would restore the French Empire if France did not help our enemies. If General Weygand joined us again he could count on our wholehearted collaboration and a share in United States assistance. We would not answer for the future of France and her Empire if naval or air bases were surrendered, and we would attack the government responsible for their surrender. Active or passive assistance from France would mean some relaxation in the blockade.’ Rougier had since seen P´etain and Weygand and had reported to London that P´etain had given specific assurances not to sign a separate peace with the Axis, nor to surrender air or naval bases or the French fleet to the Axis powers, and to accept de Gaulle’s ascendancy in French Equatorial Africa at least until the end of the war. Halifax nonetheless thought that the Canadian charg´e d’affaires at Vichy was a more useful contact (WP(40)486, Contacts with the Vichy Government, 19 December 1940, FO371/24361). But Halifax, who was anxious to maintain contact with the Vichy government, was almost immediately sent to Washington as HM Ambassador to replace Lord Lothian, who had recently died. The economists in the Cabinet Offices continued to try to increase their contribution to the war effort. Jewkes initiated regular staff meetings which from November took place each Wednesday morning, with an agenda and papers for discussion circulated two days earlier. Jewkes also asked his colleagues for their individual views on the most urgent topics for discussion. Robbins’s response was to call for a second, shorter edition of the ‘Urgent 9

Gilbert (1983, 864–5) follows Rougier in claiming Rougier saw Churchill twice, even though he cites and quotes from the Foreign Office record.

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economic problems’ memorandum the CEIS had prepared before the fall of France.10 This should cover: (a) The stagnation of production and its causes in (i) the slowness of labour transfer [and] (ii) the deficiencies of supply organisation . . . (b) Import programmes (c) Problems of inland transport (d) The problems of stocks and rationing (e) Limitation of consumption (f) The future of prices and the cost of living.

But he deliberately omitted the budgetary problem, ‘since it is clear from what has already happened that this is a problem which is best tackled by circuitous methods’. According to the diary of one of the Prime Minister’s private secretaries on 19 October (Colville 1985, 317), Greenwood had ‘shocked the Treasury by suggesting that his economic experts should consider a number of problems of the present and future and the methods of dealing with them. Measures which he thinks should be visualised are, amongst others: (i) lower limit for income-tax exemption, (ii) extension of the scope of the purchase tax, (iii) forced saving. . . . Sir Kingsley Wood objects to Greenwood trying to steal the Treasury’s thunder and points out that he has got some of the ablest economists in the country, such as Keynes and Den[n]is Robertson, to advise him . . . ’ According to Caincross and Watts (1989, 28), the response had been ‘a tactful letter from Greenwood and Attlee, drafted by Robbins and Hemming, and Robbins was invited to call on Keynes and Hopkins with a view to arranging collaboration’ between the Treasury and the economists in the Cabinet Offices. Sir Richard Hopkins was the second secretary of the Treasury and in charge of its finance division. Robbins gave Keynes a fuller account of what had been happening (JMK 22, 326–7). (1) After much coming & going, the nature of which you can guess, our Minister [Greenwood] prepared for submission to the Economic Policy Committee a proposal for a thorough investigation of the present position as regards financial potential, the budgetary gap & various methods of restricting consumption. Before circulating this, however, he decided to show it to the Chancellor [Wood]. 10

Jewkes, Notes for Staff Meeting, 15 October, ES(S)(40)1st Conclusions, Meeting of the Staff . . . on 1st November, 1940, ES(S)(40)1, Proposal for a new edition of Urgent Economic Problems, 4 November 1940, T230/12.

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(2) After a short interval, the Chancellor rejoined with a very stiff letter, obviously drafted by officials. The gist of this was that he deprecated the whole proposal, did not mind the Minister’s economists messing about on their own but insisted that (a) as regards facts, most of the knowledge & all the prescriptive rights lay already at the Treasury and (b) as regards policy, the right place for discussion was the Cabinet. (3) To this, the Minister returned the soft answer – said that he had no desire to invade the Treasury preserves, maintained, however, that the business of economic coordination must involve regard to finance & suggested that while the preparation of memoranda regarding policy was a matter for discussion, it was essential that the survey of financial potential & national income must be made. (4) To this, in turn, the Chancellor replied that he must have misunderstood the Minister’s initial proposal & suggested a meeting between Hemming & Hopkins. (5) This meeting took the form of a lunch discussion. Hopkins seems to have been very friendly but he took the amazing line that while he didn’t mind our preparing memoranda on policy he had strong objections to any investigation of the size of the national income. (6) Confronted with this, Hemming attempted a compromise and suggested that at least we might collaborate in an investigation of the national income of 1938 and decide later on whether the national income of 1940 was wholly sacrosanct. (7) To this Hopkins replied that he must seek further instructions from the Chancellor. He promised however to submit to the Chancellor the various arguments which Hemming had put forward in favour of the whole inquiry. I ought perhaps to add that, some time before all this started, Hopkins had already expressed concern to Hemming at the report that Meade was looking into national income problems. At that time Hemming met his strictures by suggesting that he should speak to you. Quite obviously this was never done.

Lionel did not mention that he and Hemming had drafted ‘the perfectly diplomatic letter which [Chester thought on 24 October] should win us the day’ or that he had gone with Hemming to see Hopkins on 29 October (which implies the letter to Keynes was probably written on 30 October); a couple of days later Chester told his wife that ‘it looks as though he [LCR] has carried F.H. through the Treasury battle’ (Chester 12/5).11 Keynes persuaded Hopkins to support the work on national income estimates, for which Meade and Stone needed financial data to continue. By 11

Chester by now thought ‘L.C.R. is a delightful fellow with an excellent flow of language (not bad) – he is widely read (apart from the field of Economics) and has a wide circle of acquaintances & friends. . . . I think he would make a good statesman. Here, though he is very fed up with the way things are being managed he counsels moderation. Rightly, I think, he says that unless you have a clear & better alternative nothing can be gained by letting out irritation. . . . We must manoeuvre & go slowly. Most of us think he carries this too far.’

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early December Meade and Stone had a first draft of their national income estimates, which Keynes submitted to the Treasury’s Budget Committee early in the new year (Meade, Future work on the national income, 5 December 1940, T230/96; Moggridge 1992, 645). Robbins also sought Keynes’s help when he and his colleagues in the CEIS began to consider the possibilities of the limitation of consumption by rationing. As he told Keynes on 19 November (T230/118), the shortage of shipping had led to a reduction of food imports which would inevitably lead to shortages in the shops since prices would not be allowed to rise; as a result an extension of rationing was likely to be demanded. Now, as you will agree, to ration individually all these minor commodities would lead to intolerable complications. The only rational solution would be something on German lines whereby generalized ration cards were issued entitling their holders to stipulated amounts (or values) of a number of alternatives. ... Now the question which suggests itself to me is this, in planning to meet this emergency, to what extent can we rely on your having secured in time a substantial curtailment of spending power? Clearly if you were able to go the whole hog and reduce disposable incomes by the whole amount necessary to finance war purchases, the remaining problem would be small. We might get through altogether without any great extension of rationing. But I can’t help thinking that that is too much to hope for and if I am right here, then obviously the solution will have to be a bit of both: and the question is how much of one and how much of the other. Are you yet in a position to give any advice on all this? No doubt in the event, the machinery of government being what it is, it will all be decided in a hurry at the last possible moment. But it would at least be interesting to try to think ahead . . .

Keynes replied the next day (T230/118): ‘Your letter . . . confirms more expressly what I suspect to be the nature of the present trend of things. I am in strong agreement with what you say and imply: and am doing and will do what I can in that direction.’ On 27 November the weekly staff meeting was devoted to a general discussion of rationing, on the basis of papers by Meade on the principles of war finance and Joseph on the principles of rationing (ES(S)(40)10 and ES(S)(40)11, 25 November 1940, T230/12). Both emphasized that the direct control of consumption by rationing and its indirect control by financial measures reducing purchasing power were alternatives in principle but in practice could complement and reinforce each other. (The third, undesirable, alternative was inflation.) Since in general financial measures were preferable, the extension of rationing should, as Meade put it, be confined to ‘those cases in which “bottlenecks” factors of production or

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“standardised necessities” are involved or where the problems of administration are not too formidable’. A fortnight later, after talking to Richard Kahn in the Board of Trade who had told them about the schemes currently being considered there, Joseph, Meade and Robbins concluded that some form of rationing of essential articles of clothing and household goods was urgently needed, that rationing on a physical basis (rather than by value) was probably preferable given there were already controls on the manufacture of some goods, and that they favoured (as did Kahn) a system of ‘points’ enabling consumers to choose freely between the various rationed commodities, rather than the quantitative rationing currently preferred in the Board of Trade (ES(S)(40)14, Board of Trade Proposals for Consumer Rationing, 10 December 1940, T230/12). Under points rationing consumers are issued with an alternative money: a specified number of ‘coupon points’ which they can ‘spend’ within a limited period on items from a group of rationed goods. Within the group, each item has a point value and customers have to surrender both coupons and money at the time of purchase. Goods covered by the points system can be purchased only if the customer has the required number of points. The economists in the Board of Trade, notably Kahn and his Cambridge colleague Brian Reddaway, were soon able to persuade their official superiors to put forward a points rationing scheme for clothing and footwear. Supported by the new President of the Board of Trade, Oliver Lyttleton, this was approved in principle by the Lord President’s Committee on 18 February 1941 (Booth 1985, 297–8, 303–8). The introduction of points rationing in the much more contentious area of food was to become a major preoccupation for Lionel in 1941. On 3 December 1940 Hemming summoned an urgent staff meeting. The Prime Minister, irritated by the use of conflicting statistics produced by different departments, including his own Statistical Branch which he had set up at the Admiralty in the winter of 1939/40 with the Oxford physicist Frederick Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell) as its head, had demanded that his department should issue the final authoritative statistics circulated to ministers. As Cairncross and Watts (1989, 29) report, citing Chester’s letters to his wife on 3, 5 and 12 December, The news that they [the economists] were to be deprived of one of their principal functions came . . . as a thunder-clap. Some of them wondered whether this was the thin edge of the wedge. Lionel Robbins contemplated resignation. . . . Jewkes, Robbins and Meade called on Greenwood . . . [who] apparently misinterpreted their intentions, thinking that they had come to ask for help in saving their jobs. A few

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days later it was rumoured that (as was eventually decided) Hemming would be given charge of the CSO [Central Statistical Office] and Jewkes of the Economic Section.

Hemming had not told the economists that he and Bridges had been trying to deal with Churchill’s demand for some weeks. In December Bridges obtained Sir John Anderson’s support for a proposal for a Central Statistical Office while retaining both the PM’s Statistical Branch under Lindemann and an Economic Section in the War Cabinet Offices which would report to Anderson.12 Greenwood was given responsibility for postwar reconstruction – not a high priority in the winter of 1940–1. This was not announced until 21 January (ibid., 29). On 3 January Chester still feared the economists would disperse to different ministries, with Robbins going to the Ministry of Food where he had again been offered an important post; ten days later there was ‘still no definite news . . . But L.C.R. this morning told me that everything was “very satisfactory” and he picks his words carefully’, so that Chester guessed correctly that they would hear good news in a matter of hours (Chester 13/1). The next day the economists remaining in the Section reallocated their responsibilities among themselves. Jewkes was to direct the Section and work on labour problems, Wilson and Dennison would also work on manpower and labour, and Dennison would help with the administration of the Section. Lionel’s remit was ‘Food, agriculture, consumption [and] associated questions of prices and wages’, Robinson’s ‘Production and supply questions, including associated questions of raw materials’. Cairncross and Chester between them covered shipping, imports, raw materials, transport and priorities. For the time being Meade would work on the national income estimates with Stone who had gone to the CSO along with Campion, Devons, Fowler, Hemming and Joseph. They also agreed they should try to become members of the many and various interdepartmental committees dealing with economic matters (Economic Section Conclusions of an Informal meeting 14th January 1941, T230/13). Jewkes enquired of Bridges whether he could attend meetings of the Lord President’s Committee and whether Robbins could attend Attlee’s Food Policy Committee. Attlee agreed but Anderson pointed out that the LPC excluded officials except on special occasions. Lionel was already on the official committees on food prices and exchange requirements (Jewkes to 12

Hemming to Bridges, 11 November, Bridges to Hemming, 15 November, Bridges to Prime Minister, Statistical organization, 20 November, Brook to Bridges, 9 and 11 December 1940, CAB21/1365.

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Bridges, 20 January, Bridges to Topham, 22 January, and Topham to Bridges, 22 January 1941, CAB21/1365). Wilson, joint secretary of the Manpower Requirements Committee, found himself working for Beveridge again and left the Section when Beveridge was made an undersecretary at the Ministry of Labour early in 1941 (Pimlott 1992, 73–4). According to his biographer, Anderson’s ‘first impact upon the members of his Economic Section was very similar to that experienced in the past by his colleagues and subordinates in Dublin and in Calcutta. As he had found despondency in the Castle and in the Civil Service of Bengal so now he encountered it in Whitehall.’ In describing how ‘Anderson’s coming changed all that’ from January 1941 onwards, Wheeler-Bennett (1962, 262– 4) relied on the account which Lionel wrote for him (Recollections of Lord Waverley, 11 October 1960, Biographical Notices, RP). The effect on the Section was instantaneous. At once our official work acquired purpose and meaning. Our main business became clear: to provide briefs for the Lord President on the various items coming as the agenda of the regular meetings of his committee, to provide secretaries for the various special committees and enquiries over which he presided and, in general, to keep him in touch with the current state of the economy and the problems which loomed ahead. This was a full-time job and overnight our lives became very strenuous. But it was a joy to work for John Anderson: he took what we did seriously, we felt we were playing our part. John Jewkes was then head of the section and the first time he saw our chief he was told: ‘I will read what you send me and I am not necessarily a foe to long documents if you think it is important that I should read them.’ This was shortly after the Prime Minister had issued one of his more picturesque directives laying it down that all minutes should be condensed to one sheet of paper. Of course, this put us on our mettle: we took great pains that he got nothing that we did not think it was not strictly necessary for him to read. But it was a great comfort to know that what we did was likely to be noticed; and as, day after day, the papers that we had sent up the night before, were returned with a big tick initialed J.A. and the salient passages underlined in the margin, we speedily began to feel that life in the public service in wartime was not so futile and unrewarding after all.

On reading Lionel’s description in January 1961, Tom Padmore, who became Anderson’s personal assistant later in the war, sent him his own recollections (Notes on Lord Waverley (John Anderson), Miscellaneous Correspondence, RP). He noted that Anderson ‘did less tinkering with other people’s work than anyone I have known in his kind of position. A draft was a means to an end and not an end in itself. If it served its purpose, he would leave it alone . . . ’ as well as encouraging and praising his subordinates’ efforts with his brief comments at the end of the drafts. Furthermore, he had ‘a truly astonishing memory’, which had the great advantage,

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especially for those briefing him, that ‘when he went to a meeting, not only had he read the papers (which does not always happen in Whitehall), . . . he knew what was in them. To do this he only needed to read them once. This must have made his colleagues feel at times that he had an unfair advantage over them.’ In the next six months Lionel was so busy that, as he told Caroline on 4 July 1941, ‘I have no holidays nowadays except Sundays when I sleep, and when I have finished in the evening at the office, I am usually so tired that letter writing is not easy.’ He had written a couple of letters to Caroline during the winter ‘but I imagine that they must have gone down in the Atlantic’. His only letters to Viner were introductions for colleagues, Charles Webster who became Director of the British Office of Information in New York in March 1941, and Edward Twentyman, a Treasury man who had been transferred to the Ministry of Food in 1940 and was sent out to join the British Food Mission in Washington in June 1941 (Viner 22–14; Hammond 1951, 234–5). Although British and Commonwealth forces (with the inclusion of those who had managed to escape from the defeated Allied countries) were fighting Germany and Italy on their own in 1940–1, they were not fighting without material support from the USA. During 1940, and especially after the Battle of Britain, the US had been supplying not only food, raw materials and machinery but also guns and ammunition, which the UK had to pay cash for and to carry in its own ships because of the American neutrality acts. After the fall of France Britain abandoned the export drive which had been intended to procure dollars for the purchase of American goods. The maintenance of overseas supply was thus threatened by the shortage of dollars as well as by the difficulties in shipping the goods in face of enemy attack at sea and from the air. After President Roosevelt was reelected in November 1940 he made the offer of ‘lend-lease’ by which the British could obtain military and other supplies from the USA without immediate payment or a monetary debt but for some ‘consideration’ to be negotiated later. Roosevelt made the offer on 17 December 1940 and signed the Lend-Lease Act on 11 March 1941, but it was not until 31 May 1941 that the first lend-lease shipments of food arrived. In the meantime Britain was struggling to bring merchant ships in convoy across the Atlantic, and to unload and transport their cargoes when the major ports were being bombed by the Luftwaffe. The Blitz on Britain’s cities continued until May, but the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’ was not won until 1943. As Lionel remarked to Caroline, ‘It [was] a great relief in these anxious days to have plenty of work to do.’

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As he predicted, the deterioration of the shipping position meant increasing food shortages in the winter of 1940–1. A year earlier the government could only bring itself to ration butter, bacon, sugar and meat, and the rationing of the last had begun only in March. In July 1940 the butter ration had become a joint butter and margarine ration, and tea had been rationed, in spite of the reluctance of the Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, himself. Now the meat ration had abruptly to be cut – the result of ‘sinkings, diversion of refrigerated ships to military purposes, and previous improvidence’ (Hammond 1951, 113–25, 164). Unsatisfied demand for rationed foods spilled over on to unrationed foods; and when maximum prices were imposed in order to prevent price rises, some goods, such as home-produced eggs, onions, rabbits and turkeys, simply disappeared from the shops. As a Canadian diplomat recorded (Ritchie 1974, 87), ‘At the Indian restaurant they give you curry without onions that tastes like hot mud. . . . In fact there is a shortage of everything except potatoes, bread and fish, and . . . the last is too expensive for the poor.’ Opinion polls and Home Intelligence reported widespread dissatisfaction with the food situation and the unfairness of the rationing system (Zweiniger-Bargielowska 2000, 70). ‘As early as January 1941,’ wrote the official historian of wartime food policy (Hammond 1951, 194), ‘the economists advising the War Cabinet were urging that rationing of further foodstuffs, even if it were practicable, would not go far enough. Two alternatives were outlined: rationing of all food consumption by value, or “the German point system”.’ The old convention of an impersonal civil service precluded him from identifying Robbins as the author of a memorandum on food rationing, which he circulated to his colleagues in the Section on 7 January 1941 (EC(S)(41)3, T230/13). ‘Nothing was more certain,’ Lionel argued, that price control without rationing would extend the problem of onions and turkeys to a wide range of foods. But these could not individually be rationed as their supply was too short to guarantee even the smallest possible ration. Hence the need to devise a means of rationing expenditure on foodstuffs in general, which would remove the danger of a general rise in food prices, provide a more egalitarian distribution and help to limit total consumption. He outlined the mechanics of the point system, although at that time he still preferred global expenditure rationing, which avoided the problem of ‘pointing’ all the various items and could be combined with any measures to control or to encourage the consumption of particular foods on nutritional grounds. As Lionel knew, he had support from Keynes and others in the Treasury. When his memorandum was discussed in the weekly Section meeting on

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16 January he could report (EC(S)(41)2nd meeting, T230/13) that ‘the Treasury now accepted the principle of a global value ration for certain foodstuffs, and that general proposals for this were to be submitted to the Ministry of Food’. A few days later he and P.D. Proctor of the Treasury went down together to a meeting in the Ministry of Food at Colwyn Bay in North Wales, where the Ministry’s headquarters had been located since June 1940. Proctor, a friend of Richard Kahn as an undergraduate at King’s College Cambridge, had abandoned classics for the civil service with the encouragement of Keynes and had been in the Treasury since 1930. Robbins and Proctor were to work together for many years after the war, because of their shared love of painting (see Chapter 21). At the Colwyn Bay meeting, which was chaired by E.M.H. Lloyd, Robbins and Proctor explained the need for expenditure rationing of food to some twenty Ministry officials. They did not receive a sympathetic hearing. The Ministry was wedded to the principles of the existing food rationing schemes, especially the fixed flat-rate ration and the consumer-retailer tie: each consumer had to register with a specific retailer for each rationed commodity (except for tea) to obtain the guaranteed ration. ‘The rationing of any food was therefore a serious and intricate process, not to be lightly undertaken’ (Hammond 1951, 195). The Ministry of Food people raised every possible practical objection they could think of to the Economic Section–Treasury scheme. After Lloyd had suggested as an alternative that the Ministry guarantee a minimum supply of certain groups of foods within which consumers could substitute, and for which consumers would again have to register with retailers, the meeting ended with agreement that a document should be prepared ‘setting forth the alternative proposals, as a basis for further discussion’ (Minutes of a meeting on distribution and rationing held on Monday, 20th January, 1941, at 11 a.m. (Room 5, Colwyn Bay Hotel), T230/118). Chester was suprised (22 January, Chester 13/1) that when Robbins returned from Colwyn Bay ‘where he had rightly been made much fuss of by the M of Food officials [he] brought some of the atmosphere with him & even quoted Ted Lloyd with whom he had been staying as saying that we had the ball at our feet. He could argue this even though we had made no progress for nearly a fortnight.’ Lionel prepared the document, telling Lloyd on 24 January that he had ‘tried to set forth as concisely as possible the salient features of the schemes discussed at our meeting’ and hoped he had been objective. After outlining the pros and cons of the two schemes he did ask, however, whether the Ministry really would be able to provide the supplies it promised? ‘Clearly its capacity to honour the guarantee must be a major consideration in deciding

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upon its merits.’ He concluded diplomatically that it might be possible to experiment with a guaranteed minimum for certain groups of foods while preparing for more extensive expenditure rationing (EC(S)(41)6, ‘The problem of shop shortages’, 24 January 1941, T230/13 and T230/118). His document was circulated as a report by the interdepartmental Committee on Food Prices. In spite of Treasury support, the economists lost this round. The Ministry of Food went ahead with a guaranteed minimum scheme for the ‘preserves group’ of jams and marmalade, which came into force on 17 March. It had to be replaced with a maximum ration three months later (Proctor to LCR, Extension of rationing, 7 February 1941, T230/118; Hammond 1951, 195–6). The economists did not give up. Lionel circulated a longer and more persuasive version of his paper in February, sending it to his friend John Maud, the Master of Birkbeck College London, now Deputy Secretary in the Ministry of Food, among others outside the Section (The new problem of food distribution and a possible method of solution, 11 February 1941, T230/118 and Redcliffe-Maud 1, BLPES). With his colleagues he drafted a Section paper on ‘The problem of price stabilisation’ (T230/114), which went to the LPC on 26 March (LP(41)48, CAB71/3). This warned that the present position was not stable: the supply of consumption goods was being reduced by the reduced imports of foodstuffs and by reductions in home production as labour and other resources were transferred to the armed forces and the munitions industries, while the demand for consumption goods was rising with increased employment and earnings. If the cost of living rose there would be pressure for wage increases, which if granted would push up prices further. There were three remedies for the inflationary gap: increased direct taxation, increases of voluntary saving and extension of rationing. ‘It is arguable that a wise policy will have recourse to all three methods: we may expect increased direct taxation; we may hope for increased voluntary saving. But it is highly improbable that, by themselves, these two methods will be adequate sufficiently to reduce consumption. . . . [and] recourse must also be had to a very considerable extension of rationing. What detailed form these extensions might take – whether there should be sectional expenditure ration or some form of the German point system – is a matter for discussion.’ At the meeting on 28 March (LP(41)12th meeting, CAB71/2) the Lord President drew the conclusion from the Section paper that ‘the inflationary gap could not be closed without recourse to a further extension of rationing. This might take the form, either of group rationing, some forms of which were now being adopted by the Ministry of Food, or of point rationing. . . . If

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the Committee agreed, he proposed to deal with this question in a further paper to be circulated for the consideration of the Committee at their meeting the following week.’ The further paper recapitulated the limitations of the existing method of rationing which fixed the physical quantity of a good that each consumer could purchase: it could not allow for variations of need or tastes; it could not be applied to commodities in such short supply that a fixed ration could not be guaranteed; and it was anyway administratively impossible to ration separately the thousands of individual items. The two methods of general rationing, points rationing and value rationing, both avoided these problems: under the former the consumer would be allotted a number of point coupons which could be used for the purchase of alternative combinations of rationed commodities according to a schedule of point values; under the latter the consumer would be permitted a certain total expenditure on the range of rationed commodities. Although total expenditure rationing would be seen as too drastic, there was ‘much to be said for’ the general rationing of expenditure on food, while clothing would be rationed under the points system as the LPC had already agreed. In briefing Anderson for the 4 April meeting, Lionel pointed to the general lack of enthusiasm for a general expenditure ration, except in the Treasury, and the difficulties in the present plans of the Ministry of Food. He expected the Ministry would continue with its present plans ‘in the absence of a strong lead’ from Anderson’s committee and hoped ‘the Ministry could be earnestly requested’ to examine other methods.13 The Ministry remained obdurate and continued to play with group rationing schemes involving registration with retailers (Hammond 1951, 195–7). Lionel was embroiled in another controversy in the early months of 1941: not surprisingly, that over livestock policy. At the beginning of the year he had included the disequilibrium in agricultural production – ‘a precarious milk supply and a population of livestock other than dairy cattle which can only be fed at the expense of (i) human consumption or (ii) the provision of the materials of war’ – in a list of outstanding economic anxieties. Other anxieties included the reduction of imports, the budget deficit and the threat of inflation. In so far as these problems stemmed from a lack of coordination of plans, the issues would sooner or later have to go to the Lord President’s Committee. His colleagues agreed that he and Cairncross should prepare a note on import policy for Anderson and that a revised version of his coordination memorandum should go to Anderson (EC(S)(41)2, Note on 13

The extension of rationing, Notes for a future Paper, 27 March, LP(41)53, The extension of rationing, Memorandum by the Economic Section of the War Cabinet Secretariat, 1 April 1941, and [LCR] to Lord President, General Rationing, [3 April 1941], T230/119.

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the present economic position with special reference to the functions of coordination, 15 January, EC(S)(41)2nd and 3rd meetings, 16 and 22 January 1941, T230/13). Lionel got himself invited to the interdepartmental Conference on Livestock Policy, set up to discuss ‘the bearing of the proposed cut in the meat ration upon slaughter policy, and the allocation of feeding-stuffs between different classes of livestock’, which included representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Food and nutrition experts (FP(M)(41)9, Food Policy Committee, Livestock Policy, Memorandum by the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, 3 February 1941, T230/88). When he attended its third meeting on 23 January it was considering its first interim report. Generally speaking the Ministry of Food advocated a compulsory slaughter policy for beef cattle, on the basis of statistics forecasting a ‘catastrophic’ fall in milk and meat production between February and May, because of the shortage of imported and homegrown feeding-stuffs, unless there were a drastic and immediate reduction in the number of cattle. The Ministry of Agriculture objected, claiming the statistics were misleading. Its view prevailed in the Conference’s first report, which concluded that ‘it would be premature to take sweeping measures’, only a few small steps such as exhorting farmers not to maintain prewar numbers of cattle and warning them of continuing feed shortages (Hammond 1951, 175–7; Conference on Livestock Policy, Interim Report to the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, 30 January 1941, T230/88). The ‘major issue’ of Cairncross and Robbins’s paper on import policy was the amount of shipping space that could be saved by cutting imports of animal feed, which at present took up nearly one third of the food import programme: this was an exceedingly wasteful use of shipping space compared to importing meat, which could be brought by less than a sixth of the shipping. It was often defended as a means of maintaining a reserve of ‘meat on the hoof’ for emergencies. No more costly reserve could be devised. One generation of animals after another has to be fattened to maturity while our ships constantly ply through dangerous waters bringing millions of tons of feeding stuffs year after year to produce a few hundred thousand tons of meat. We preserve animals as assets at enormous expense in terms of shipping; while at the same time we are content to dissipate assets such as exchange reserves and to allow assets such as blast furnaces to remain idle for lack of materials which are wasteful of shipping. Should animals be carefully preserved while gold and industrial plant are treated with scant reverence?

It was ‘not enough merely to reduce imports of feed: the enemy can be relied upon to do that for us’: what was necessary was a carefully planned

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slaughter policy and a new planned import programme (EC(S)(41)8 and 8 Revise, Cairncross and Robbins, A major issue in import policy, 31 January and 4 March 1941, T230/13). Cairncross and Robbins made discreet enquiries of experts in and out of government as well as colleagues in the Ministry of Food for statistical ammunition for Robbins to use in the Conference on Livestock Policy and in briefing Attlee for the Food Policy Committee (Cairncross to E.M. Duckham, 1 March, LCR to Lord Privy Seal, 12 March 1941, T230/88). The Conference’s third report provided statistical estimates of the reduction in livestock numbers that would be needed in 1941–2 given the likely reduction in the supply of feed. The Food Policy Committee on 13 March recommended the culling of beef herds (and a much smaller reduction in dairy herds), but the Minister of Agriculture, R.S. Hudson, still refused to budge (FP(M)(41)25, Agricultural considerations arising on the Third Report of Conference on Livestock Policy, Memorandum by the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, 11 March 1941, T230/88; FP(M)(41)10th meeting, CAB74/5; Hammond 1951, 177). As Woolton commented in his diary (Ms Woolton 2, Bodleian Library), ‘Hudson has made it clear that he’s going to have the farmers behind him, and that if anything goes wrong on prices, it isn’t the Minister of Agriculture but the Minister of Food, who is to blame.’ Agricultural policy in relation to the cattle population was still under acrimonious discussion in Whitehall in May. Anderson was alerted in case the matter might go to the War Cabinet (Jewkes to Brook, 8 May 1941, T230/88). Briefing Attlee for the Food Policy Committee meeting on 12 May, Lionel admitted (10 May 1941, T230/88) there were difficulties both with compulsory slaughter, especially when farmers had been encouraged to produce their own fodder crops, and with providing price incentives to induce more slaughtering, but since the new figures for prospective feed supplies were even more pessimistic than previous estimates, compulsory slaughtering would be necessary sooner or later. At the meeting, although Attlee tried to keep the two leading protagonists to the point, they remained at cross purposes. As Lionel observed to Attlee the next day (T230/88): ‘The Minister of Agriculture seeks a pretext for reversing the whole trend of policy up to date and substituting the Dairy Herd rather than the Beef Cattle as the chief victim for the Knife. The Minister of Food, without specifying either the immediate means or his longterm programme, merely insists upon the necessity for home produced meat.

As the debate continued Lionel reminded Attlee (Notes on food production in 1941–2, 10 June 1941, T230/89) that since the objective – the

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maximum production of food for human consumption – involved going all out for crops rather than livestock products other than milk, the price of wheat should be raised and the present agreed slaughter programme must be carried out. Unfortunately for this strategy, when the Ministry of Agriculture claimed there was no impending shortage of meat after all, the Minister of Food raised no objection to a reversal of the existing limited slaughter policy. As Lionel pointed out to Attlee on 3 July (Agenda for to-day’s Food Policy Committee, T230/89), the Ministry of Agriculture had got its way without producing any statistical evidence for its claim. But farmers had never shown any sign of complying with the policy so its reversal had little effect (Hammond 1951, 177–8). The livestock controversy, Chester wryly remarked at the time (Future Programme, 18 June 1941, T230/13), ‘appears to be one of the great inconclusive battles of history’. The economists in the Section and the Treasury were making headway on other fronts. Keynes had persuaded the Budget Committee to use the Meade-Stone national income estimates in its deliberations. The budgetary gap, which had to be filled by voluntary saving or tax increases if it were not to generate inflation, was estimated at £500m. On the assumption of £200–300m voluntary savings the Chancellor decided to aim for £250m in new taxation. It was also decided that the budget statement would be accompanied by a white paper containing the analysis of the sources of war finance and the estimates of national income in 1938 and 1940 (Stone 1951, 84–5; Moggridge 1992, 645–6). Sir Kingsley Wood delivered his budget speech on 7 April. The standard rate of income tax was raised from 8s 6d to 10s in the pound, and allowances were reduced, but the increased taxes paid as a result of the reduced allowances were to be treated as postwar credits on the lines of Keynes’s How to Pay for the War. At the same time the Chancellor pledged he would use the subsidies already accorded to certain essential foodstuffs to ‘endeavour to prevent any further rise of the cost of living index, apart from minor seasonal changes, above the present range of 125–130 in terms of the pre-war level’. The 1941 budget settled internal financial policy for the rest of the war (Sayers 1956). Since the main reason for the cost-of-living pledge was to remove excuses for wartime wage increases, it also settled wages policy for the duration. Writing a short paper on wage policy a month earlier (EC(S)(41)19, 3 March 1941, T230/13), Lionel emphasized that wage rates had not risen by more than the increase in the cost of living, largely because of restraint on the part of the trade unions. ‘I hope none of my colleagues will imagine that I always regard Trade Union policy as in every respect

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admirable. But I do submit that where that policy has shown restraint and prudence it is unfair and foolish not to say so.’ But in the second and third years of war, labour would become more and more scarce while the shortage of goods would put pressure on the cost of living. There was no hope of reversing wage increases and it would be equally futile to try to prohibit them. The only way to prevent further increases was to keep the cost of living stable. But he also argued, here and in a longer paper he and Dennison wrote on 26 March for their Section colleagues (EC(S)(41)23, T230/13), that subsidies to a limited range of goods would not be enough; it would also be necessary to prevent other goods prices from rising by an extension of rationing. The anxieties of the early months of 1941 included the campaigns in Greece, Crete and North Africa. In January and February British forces under General Wavell successfully attacked Italian forces in Egypt and Libya, only to lose the ground they had won when German forces under Erwin Rommel counterattacked at the end of March. Yugoslavia broke from the Axis only to be overrun by the Germans, who then forced the British to withdraw from Greece in April. A month later the British had to abandon another 12,000 men in withdrawing from Crete. Before these disasters, on Budget Day Hayek wrote to Machlup in a cheerful mood (Machlup 43– 15). His family had spent the winter in the country with the Robbinses and he himself had moved to Cambridge where Keynes offered him rooms in King’s. He had little news of his friends: ‘Lionel R. is now in a fairly influential position and so busy that I see him only rarely.’ In May the Lord President’s Committee finally asked the Ministry of Food to submit positive proposals for rationing. When, a month later, the Ministry had produced only proposals for piecemeal extensions of group rationing, Anderson’s committee rejected them on 20 June and asked the Ministry to try again, this time in consultation with the Economic Section and the Board of Trade (LP(41)20th and 25th meetings, CAB71/2). That evening John Maud asked Lionel to go and see him in the Ministry of Food (in the General Department which remained in London). Lionel promised to help, ‘stipulating only that our role should be one of complete anonymity and informality’, and asked Jewkes the next day (T230/118) if he could have the assistance of Meade and Chester in drawing up a plan. Between them they came up with a proposal for points rationing, which they submitted to Maud before Meade and Robbins went down to Colwyn Bay to try to persuade – unsuccessfully at first – the officials there. As they prepared their document for Maud they met regularly at the Ministry with

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Lloyd and C.H. Blagburn, who ‘sat through what seemed to be endless hot afternoons of friendly wrangling between enthusiastic amateurs’ (LCR, I. Note on the progress of our discussions with the Ministry of Food, T230/120, and LCR to Maud, 8 July 1941, T230/119). The ‘amateurs’ in the Economic Section also tried out their ideas on each other in writing as well as verbally.14 The economists had to overcome the Ministry’s attachment to registration of consumers. It was true that without registration the Ministry of Food could not guarantee a fixed ration, but a guarantee was not necessary for all the commodities at present unrationed, even if it were possible: ‘What is desired is, not that each citizen shall be guaranteed an equal fraction of each commodity within a given period, but rather that each citizen shall have reasonable facilities for obtaining a certain minimum out of a wide range of commodities.’ Since rationing without registration was more easily applied to non-perishable foods, they concentrated on non-perishables. For this group the next question was whether there should be a points system or an expenditure ration. They concentrated on the points system, which involved ‘greater complications from the point of view of the consumer . . . [but] less dislocation of consumption habits and less concentration on demand on cheaper products’ (LCR, Notes on the progress of the rationing conversations, T230/118). Lionel still believed expenditure rationing was ‘the simplest and most logical form conceivable and that the purely administrative objections are capable of great exaggeration’, but he recognized it would ‘involve political problems of very great delicacy. It would equalize completely standards of living, so far as food was concerned; and, since high income expenditure was limited, would also involve the diminution of demand for many high quality foodstuffs with many consequential inconveniences to producers.’ The points system was administratively more complex: ‘it involves the setting up and management, as it were, of a second set of prices – the point values of the different classes of goods – side by side with the money prices which are already controlled. But it avoids some of the political difficulties of the expenditure system; and, since it operates through a system of points not included in any cost of living index, it has a flexibility of operation not to be expected of any system operating only through money prices’ (Notes on possible extensions of food rationing, [July 1941], T230/119). 14

Their notes, such as Robinson’s ‘Coupon prices (Weekend task)’, are in ROBN 1/10/3, Churchill College, as well as T230/118.

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Although the principle to be followed in setting point values (the new ‘coupon’ prices) for the different goods was straightforward and obvious to economists, namely to equate supply and demand for each good, the practice of ‘pointing’ was, of course, difficult. Maud recalled (RedcliffeMaud 1981, 37) one practical objection made to Lionel. ‘“Professor,” asked the [Ministry of Food] expert in his Scottish accent, “what would the grocer do with the wee bits of papers presented by the customer out of her book of points?” “Well,” said Lionel, “he could impale them on that sort of spike you often see on the counter in a grocer’s shop.” “O no, Professor,” was the horrified reply, “there would be blood on the butter.”’ However, even while Robbins and Meade were still trying to persuade officials in the Ministry of Food of the principles of point rationing, the economists in the Board of Trade were showing it could be done for clothing (Hancock and Gowing 1949, 332–3; Reddaway 1951). Meade and Robbins spent a weekend with the Ministry of Food Rationing Committee at Colwyn Bay. ‘The conversations were cordial. Mr. Meade and I were at some pains to make it clear that we did not wish in any way to thrust our views on the Ministry and that we were far from claiming special technical knowledge on the administrative problems concerned. In this I think we were successful: I do not think that we succeeded in selling our ideas. But at least we did not make any enemies’ (LCR, Visit to Colwyn Bay, T230/118). A few days later the Rationing Committee put its proposals to Lord Woolton, proposals for the usual form of rationing, based on the consumer-retailer tie, of six groups of foods. The Ministry’s own economists at Colwyn Bay, Ruth Cohen from Cambridge and Eric Nash, had had as little success as the Section economists – as Cohen reported to Lionel in ‘a state of disgust’ and despair on 22 July (T230/119).15 Asked to comment, the Section had no difficulty in comprehensively demolishing the proposals, but Woolton felt obliged to back his officials and take their plan to the LPC (Note on the Interim Report of the Ministry of Food Committee on Rationing (Paper C.R.8), T230/118; Hammond 1951, 198–9). One ray of hope for Cohen was that Robbins was going to see the Minister and his Permanent Secretary, Sir Henry French. When Lionel saw Woolton, Woolton, attracted by the idea of points rationing, agreed that while the 15

Nash was an Oxford- (and Chicago-) trained economist, who had been a lecturer at the University of Birmingham and a civil servant with MAF before the war. He was later professor of agricultural economics at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth (Nash 1965, 9–10).

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Colwyn Bay Committee should go forward with the preparation of its scheme other Ministry officials in London could cooperate with Robbins and his colleagues in drawing up a draft plan for a point system (LCR, Note on the progress of our discussions with the Ministry of Food, T230/120).16 So the economists from the Section went on talking with their sympathizers in the Ministry and produced another version of their plan. Robbins was invited to return to Colwyn Bay on 11 August to discuss the difficulties a point system would encounter were it to be introduced. He met considerable opposition, but so did the Ministry’s own plans in Anderson’s committee on 29 August (Notes on Draft Points Rationing Scheme, LCR to G.R.P. Wall, 12 August 1941, T230/120; LP(41)40th meeting, CAB71/2). Robbins told Wheeler-Bennett (Recollections of Lord Waverley, Biographical Notices, RP) that Anderson had ‘the moment the scheme was explained to him, grasped the underlying theory and lent to what to the more sedate spirits of Whitehall was a fantastic and frivolous whimsy of the academic imagination, the solid weight of his authoritative support’. As Hammond (1951, 200) argued, ‘the advocates of “points”, though supported by a tiny minority in the Ministry, had the ear of Sir John Anderson, and the Lord President’s Committee followed the strong lead given by its Chairman.’ It was a crucial defeat for the Ministry of Food. On 5 September the committee agreed to the introduction of points rationing on an experimental basis for canned fish, meat and beans (LP(41)41st meeting, CAB71/2). Austin Robinson spent a week at Colwyn Bay helping to prepare the detailed scheme, which went into operation on 1 December 1941. It was immediately popular. In the second half of November shops in some towns were already ‘proudly displaying food that we haven’t seen for a long time – tinned salmon, herrings, etc’ (Strange 1989, 77). With this reaction from the public the extension of points rationing to other foodstuffs was soon underway. Finally, on the matter of rationing, the official historian of wartime food policy pointed out that it is hard to imagine that the sophisticated and efficient system which came into operation in 1941–2 could have been devised and implemented if England had still been bombed heavily night after night (Hammond 1951, 160). But in May 1941 the Blitz on Britain’s cities had ceased as Hitler prepared to attack Soviet Russia. The German invasion of the Soviet Union commenced on 22 June, giving Britain a new 16

Woolton was out of his office 1–10 August (Ms Woolton 2) so that his meeting with LCR must have been in the last week of July.

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ally and a breathing space from Hitler’s attention. It was several months before the Red Army could halt the German advance, and the war in the Middle East continued to go badly for Britain. On the home front, however, by the end of the summer of 1941 the conversion of the UK into a fullscale war economy was almost complete.

TWELVE

Director of the Economic Section

With the war economy essentially organized in the summer of 1941 several members of the Economic Section moved on. Cairncross was the first to leave, transferring to the Board of Trade in June and following Jewkes to the Ministry of Aircraft Production later in the year. Churchill had set up the Ministry of Aircraft Production in May 1940 under his friend the Canadian newspaper owner Lord Beaverbrook. When Beaverbrook left a year later the Permanent Secretary asked Jewkes and Chester to prepare a report on the planning of aircraft production – with the result that Jewkes was asked to set up a planning department in that ministry. When he moved in September Lionel took over his duties as head of the Section (Cairncross 1998, 86). On 2 November Lionel told his sister Caroline that his new job was ‘enthrallingly interesting’: ‘It isn’t exactly new but it’s more responsible. The man who was head of our section has moved on for the time being & while he is away I am looking after the show. This means almost daily contact with the formation of high policy in the sphere in which we are working & although the work is hard & the hours long, it is all so absorbing that I could hardly wish for a more satisfying position. . . . Of course in many ways it is narrowing. . . . I live move & have my being in this atmosphere of war administration, obsessed like a young man in love.’ Under Robbins the Section and its weekly meetings became, as James Meade memorably put it (1984, 19), ‘a seminar of young academic economists chaired by their professor . . . Their day-to-day duty was to prepare essays – what in Whitehall were called briefs – on the basic economic aspects of the wide range of problems which came up from the various departments for co-ordination at cabinet level. . . . It gradually became known that Sir John Anderson, the powerful cabinet minister in charge of the co-ordination of economic policies, took serious notice of the briefs 387

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sent to him by Lionel, and thus the Economic Section became an integrated part of the Whitehall machine.’ Meade explained how this was done: He [Lionel] laid down the strictest rules. In their discussion with the relevant departments about the briefs which they were preparing and which might, of course, be critical of certain aspects of the department’s proposals, the members of the section were never in any circumstances to throw their weight about as having influence in high quarters. They were simply to offer to help in finding a solution to the problems in so far as a professional economist’s views might be considered useful. Bit by bit permanent civil servants began to regard economists as fellow human beings.

James might have added that he and Lionel were human beings of such obvious integrity and transparent honesty as well as enthusiasm for their work that they not only won the trust of the permanent civil servants and their ministers but made lasting friendships. For five years Lionel worked closely with Norman Brook, Anderson’s personal assistant until 1942 and then Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet; as Brook commented on 21 December 1944 (CORRESPONDENCE, RP), ‘Five years is not a specially long time span, as official relationships go, but we have travelled a long way during that time – and learned a lot together.’ Among his contemporaries in Whitehall one of Lionel’s closest friends in Whitehall was Frank Lee, whom he first met in the summer of 1940, introduced by his former fellow undergraduate Sydney Caine who had entered the Colonial Office at the same time as Lee in 1926 (LCR, Sir Frank Lee, 24 September 1962, General Correspondence March 1962-January 1963, RP). Lee was transferred to the Treasury in 1940 (and later became Permanent Secretary). He was an unconventional civil servant, who is reported to have marked his retirement by throwing his bowler hat into the river Thames from Westminster Bridge. Others have said of him that if he believed in a policy he would argue it through with his ministers – and usually win – and also that ‘He was a lovely man, good humoured, good company, very sensible and very down to earth. He wouldn’t pull rank on those below him and was not intimidated by those above him whoever they were’ (Hennessy 1988, 160). To Lionel (LCR to ICR, 22 May 1944) he was ‘guide, philosopher & friend . . . during my sojourn in the strange land called Whitehall’. James and Lionel worked particularly closely together, with James becoming Lionel’s deputy director. Their colleagues included, besides Chester and Dennison, Mary Soutar (later Mrs Muray), who was the director’s personal assistant, Ronald Tress, Philip Chantler, Nita Watts and, from 1942, Marcus Fleming. Soutar had read economics as an undergraduate at Girton College

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Cambridge and had spent two years as a graduate student at Bryn Mawr studying industrial relations (Muray cv in MISCELLANEOUS (LSE Staff, Departments etc) October 1951-September 1957, RP). Chantler and Tress both came from the University of Manchester. Watts was an LSE graduate of 1940 who had worked for a year in the Bank of England (Watts to Howson, 28 August 1988). For Lionel Fleming was a particularly ‘welcome recruit’ (Reminiscences of Marcus Fleming, Biographical Notices, RP). In 1942 Evan Durbin became personal assistant to Clement Attlee as Deputy Prime Minister. Austin Robinson also left the Section (Cairncross 1993, 83): ‘After Jewkes left . . . [Robinson] felt that the atmosphere of the Section was less collegial, and that Lionel Robbins was at less pains to take him and other members of the Section into his confidence. Perhaps inevitably, given Lionel’s powerful personality, advice from the Section to the Lord President became increasingly advice from Lionel personally. Austin may also have felt, as other members of the Section had felt in 1941, that the time had come to move from devising restraints on the civilian economy to participating more directly in the positive tasks of organising the war economy.’ In February 1942 he was one of the first people appointed to the new Office of the Minister of Production. Working hours in wartime Whitehall were long. Bridges, as Secretary of the Cabinet, worked a seven-day week, seldom finishing before midnight, and often summoned later still by Churchill from his bedroom in the basement of the Cabinet Offices. As Garrett Drogheda (1978, 86) remembered, ‘His example was followed by those around him and a fifteen-hour day seemed normal.’1 Lionel’s usual hour for reporting to Brook or to Bridges before the Lord President’s Committee or other ministerial meetings, was 11.30 p.m. He might then seek out Marcus Fleming, a night bird who did most of his serious work in the evenings, to discuss the topics they were currently working on (Reminiscences of Marcus Fleming, Biographical Notices, RP). He too often worked late into the night drafting letters and memoranda. Sometimes he managed to eat and drink with friends such as Kahane at the Reform – it reopened once after bomb damage: when he dined out for the first time since the Blitz started he treated his colleague Chester to ‘a very pleasant dinner . . . washed down with some claret’ (Chester 13/2). Otherwise he spent the long winter nights in the office basement 1

Drogheda, who ‘first met him [LCR] during the war when he was Director of the Economic Section . . . where for a while I occupied a humble position’, worked there from October 1941 to February 1942 preparing weekly reports to Oliver Lyttleton, then Minister of State in Cairo (Tributes in Memory of Lord Robbins, CH, CB, Thursday, 11 October 1984, St John’s Smith Square, London SW1).

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reading: as director of the Section he was privileged to have his own bedroom, ‘a more or less bomb-proof cellar through which secret messages scurried in their vacuum tubes like giant rats in the ceiling’ (Robbins 1971a, 184) in the complex of Cabinet War Rooms now open to the public. His wartime letters to his sister are full of his discoveries or rediscoveries of favourite classics, such as Housman, Marvell, Burton, Racine, Milton and Pope’s translation of Homer. He read them in the small blue volumes of the Everyman editions, of which he had a sizeable set by the end of hostilities. Domestic life was confined to short weekends (Saturday was a working day in wartime Whitehall), for much of which he slept, and the occasional longer one. Tor Cottage was, however, very comfortable. Iris and Lionel had been prepared to take Hella and the Hayek children for the duration but Fritz had now found them accommodation in a converted oasthouse in Malting Lane, Cambridge; when they left Lionel and Iris moved their furniture and books from Meadway Close into the cottage. They even found room for the grand piano with ‘a space by the window for playing. The rest of the house is simply very amply furnished & it is very agreeable to have books armchairs wardrobes etc all at hand again.’ In November 1941 Lionel did not think they would move back to 10 Meadway Close after the war: ‘As the children grow up, a small flat in town & a rather larger house in the country somewhere seems likely to be the more convenient arrangement. . . . For the time being I have renewed the lease here [Tor Cottage] for the duration & three months after.’ They ate well in spite of wartime austerity. With the large garden and outbuildings they grew vegetables and kept a pig, chickens and ducks. Iris did the cooking: she ‘feeds us all much better than we have ever fed before: we shall be spoilt for ever if we are ever rich enough again to afford help in the house.’ Iris had a parttime job making fuses (for radar equipment) at home, but she was lonely at Tor Cottage with Lionel away so much of the time.2 By the end of their stay, Lionel told Iris on 6 October 1945, he had come to ‘resent . . . the drudgery’ of her life and ‘the cottage has symbolized that for me as well as the beauty & the fragrance of the countryside. Moreover we were never together there for long; it was a symbol of separation too.’ Throughout Lionel’s years as director the Economic Section was actively committed to planning for a better postwar world. This became Lionel’s major preoccupation in and after 1943. He was deeply involved in three 2

Information from LCR to ICR, 2 November 1941 and 10 October 1942, LCR to Lord President, Self Suppliers of Pigs, 15 September 1942, T230/89, ICR to Mrs Robbins, 22 November 1943, and from Iris Robbins and Anne Johnson.

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aspects: domestic employment policy; international monetary policy; and trade and commercial policy. He and his colleagues’ efforts were to bear fruit in the 1944 white paper on Employment Policy, the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank at Bretton Woods in 1944 and, eventually, the Anglo-American loan agreement of December 1945. He was inevitably, given his background and interests, involved in less fruitful discussions of commodities and agriculture. This section, and the last section, of this chapter describe the beginning of these efforts. In between it concentrates on the variety of pressing wartime problems Lionel and his colleagues had to attend to in 1941–2. The planning had begun under Jewkes. When a ministerial Committee on Reconstruction Problems was set up under Greenwood at the beginning of 1941, the Section immediately considered what contribution it could make to official planning for the peace. Robbins supplied a shopping list of problems to be considered (EC(S)(41)11, War aims and reconstruction, 4 February 1941, T230/13). He put first ‘the general question of the postwar international order’, which included – reflecting his own earlier vision of a postwar world – ‘the extent to which the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth should participate in a closer association of European States’ as well as relations with the USA. Under international problems he also put the problem of security, the problem of economic order (international finance, trade, migration, international investment) and the political problems of the international order. Domestic problems included ‘the problem of equality of opportunity and the reform of the educational system’, ‘the problem of the National Minimum and the reform of social services’, ‘the problem of the planning of Town and Country’, ‘the Reform of the Machinery of Government’ and ‘The stabilization of Employment’. Of the last he noted: ‘Clearly this can only be discussed in the light of the decisions reached regarding the international order.’ Meade, on the other hand (EC(S)(41)17, Economic reconstruction, 26 February 1941, T230/13), started from ‘four fundamental groups of economic problems’, of which the first was unemployment and the last the postwar international settlement. (The other two groups of problems were those of ‘securing a reasonable national minimum standard of living to each citizen and of achieving an equitable distribution of the national income’ and ‘determining the forms of post-war industrial structure’.) Moreover, ‘While the form of international settlement must be borne in mind in discussing these economic problems, it is equally true that these economic problems must be borne in mind in discussing the international settlement; for every endeavour should be made to secure a settlement which is favourable to the solution of these economic

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problems.’ At the first possible opportunity Meade took the initiative in dealing with his first problem: the Section was further ahead with its planning in that area than in the others when Lionel took over from Jewkes. But James and Lionel were to work closely and consistently on the problem of the international settlement for the rest of their years in government. Lionel was first drawn into discussions of postwar trade policy in the spring of 1941. The parliamentary secretary responsible for the Department of Overseas Trade, the Liberal MP Harcourt Johnstone, asked him to comment on a memorandum by R.J. Shackle, an assistant secretary in the Board of Trade. As well as providing comments on Shackle’s memorandum and discussing them at a meeting with Johnstone, he wrote a paper on the subject himself (The future of trade policy (marked in LCR’s hand ‘L.C. Robbins’), T230/414). As in his paper for his Section colleagues, he emphasized that ‘while it is provision for what may be called the armistice period which has priority in time, it is the provision for the remoter period which has priority in logic. . . . before we proceed to devise detailed plans for the interim period we should make some preliminary attempt to get our ideas straight concerning the principles which are applicable to the long run settlement.’ Given the changes in international trade since 1930 – the lack of an international money, the spread of protectionism, discriminatory trade relations, increased use of quantitative trade restrictions and of state trading – which would not ‘change overnight on the morrow of the armistice’, he argued that it was necessary to review the issues of stable versus fluctuating exchange rates, free trade versus protection, multilateralism versus bilateralism in trade agreements, tariffs versus quotas and state trading versus private trade. But the review ‘must not be just another exercise in pure economics’. It should examine the alternative policies in terms of ‘their suitability in relation to the political objectives of the pacification and reconstruction of Europe and our own long term relations with the United States of America’ and should pay attention to the reasons for the prewar changes. After such a review it would be useful to elaborate definite proposals for a possible postwar settlement, which would require making hypothetical assumptions about objectives. His assumptions were different from those he would have made before the fall of France. He suggested starting from ‘three initial general axioms of peace making: (a) In the first place, we must do nothing which will jeopardize the security and solidarity of the Empire. (b) Secondly, it will be desirable to achieve the maximum possible collaboration with the United States.

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(c) Thirdly, we cannot afford to allow the European nations to stew in their own juice, either politically or economically. These three axioms together implied a relatively free trade policy. The Empire could not be economically self-sufficient and needed outside markets for its products. So did the United States. ‘It follows, therefore, that if we are to act politically with the United States, we have between us a joint interest in the speedy rehabilitation of markets elsewhere’, in particular continental European markets. Hence we should ask the specific questions of what changes in trade policies in Britain, the Empire, the USA and in continental Europe would be needed to further this objective. Finally, turning back to the immediate post-Armistice problems, he pointed out the need to forecast the probable UK postwar balance of payments and the prospects of the export trade. His note on Shackle’s memorandum, while agreeing with Shackle on the importance of the removal of exchange control and restoration of stable exchanges over as wide an area as possible, raised two issues: the superiority of a truly international money over flexible exchange rates and the desirability of forming some sort of confederation among at least Englishspeaking countries. At Johnstone’s meeting, ‘After considerable discussion it was agreed that . . . it was necessary to make certain assumptions, the principal of which were as follows: 1) The necessity for export. The desirability of securing the maximum international trade possible. 2) The existence of an international and stable currency. 3) The formation of an Empire policy for co-operation with the United States.’3 By this time the British government was obliged to contemplate the ‘consideration’ to be provided to the USA in exchange for wartime lend-lease aid. In May 1941 President Roosevelt had asked his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, for a draft of an agreement, a task Hull handed to his Assistant Secretary Dean Acheson. Keynes, in Washington on a financial mission, was involved in informal discussions with Acheson and others, including the President. 3

Notes on Trade Policy after the War (marked at top in LCR’s hand ‘Note prepared privately for Mr Harcourt Johnstone’), and Notes of a meeting held in Mr. Harcourt Johnstone’s room, on 24th May, 1941, to discuss post-war trade policy, T230/414. Skidelsky (2000, 199) makes the extraordinary claim that ‘In Lionel Robbins’s view currency floating offered ‘a complete solution to Britain’s problems of external balance”’, citing Eichengreen (1981, 32). Eichengreen makes clear that the (inaccurately quoted) statement was Frederic Benham’s, written in 1932.

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Acheson, who had not thought much of a document Keynes showed him on 15 July, presented him with the State Department’s draft, which Roosevelt had approved, on 28 July. Its Article VII would commit Britain to a postwar trade policy which would ‘be such as not to burden commerce between the two countries but to promote mutually advantageous economic relations between them and the betterment of world-wide economic relations’ and would ‘provide against discrimination in either the United States of America or the United Kingdom against the importation of any produce originating in the other country’. This clearly threatened, as Acheson admitted, the continuation of imperial preference as well as the continuation of exchange and import controls after the war. Keynes protested vigorously that the UK could not make such a commitment (Acheson 1970, 28–30; Moggridge 1992, 659–61). It took six months for the two governments to agree on the final wording of the Article. In August 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt held their ‘Atlantic Conference’ off the coast of Newfoundland. Their efforts to devise a joint declaration (the Atlantic Charter) produced several drafts, many cables and vague wording, which was, to complicate later Anglo-American negotiations even further, referred to in the Mutual Aid Agreement signed in February 1942. The two nations were to ‘endeavour, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms to the trade and raw materials of the world which are needed for their prosperity’ and ‘desire[d] to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field, with the object of securing for all improved labour standards, economic advancement and social security’ (Pressnell 1986, 37–40 and 380).4 Robbins had no desire to retain imperial preference or any other form of discrimination. Board of Trade officials such as Shackle were also strongly in favour of multilateral free trade, although they (and Robbins) were well aware Britain was unlikely to be able to remove exchange and import controls immediately after the war. While Keynes was still in Washington Shackle sent Robbins (31 July 1941, T230/414) a copy of a note he (Shackle) had written on Keynes’s ‘Proposals to counter the German “New Order”’. This had been written in November 1940 but used more recently by the Foreign 4

The final version of Article VII committed the British government to ‘agreed action by the United States of America and the United Kingdom, open to participation by all other countries of like mind, directed to the expansion, by appropriate international and domestic measures, of production, employment, and the exchange and consumption of all goods . . . ; to the elimination of all forms of discriminatory treatment in international commerce, and to the reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers; and, in general, to the attainment of all the economic objectives set forth in [the Atlantic Charter]’ (Pressnell 1986, 372).

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Secretary, Anthony Eden, in a speech in May, as well as by Keynes himself in his conversations in Washington (Moggridge 1992, 653–4). Shackle extensively quoted from Keynes’s proposals, where Keynes had ‘assumed that we shall continue our existing exchange controls after the war, and that we do not propose to return to laissez-faire currency arrangements on pre-war lines by which goods were freely bought and sold internationally in terms of gold or its equivalent. . . . In the last six months the Treasury and the Bank of England have been building up for this country an exchange system which has borrowed from the German experience all that was good in it. If we are to meet our obligations and avoid chaos in international trade after the war, we shall have to retain this system.’ Horrified, Robbins handed Shackle’s note to Meade, commenting: ‘You should read this as soon as possible. . . . It confirms my worst fears about J.M.K.’ Fortunately after Keynes returned from Washington in August he started to draft proposals much more acceptable to Robbins, Meade and Shackle. In Washington in July 1941 representatives of the UK, the largest wheatimporting nation, and the four major wheat-producing countries, the US, Canada, Australia and Argentina, met to draft a postwar wheat agreement. They were resuming negotiations begun in 1939 to replace the shortlived International Wheat Agreement of 1933, which had attempted to deal with chronic overproduction and collapsing wheat prices by export quotas and acreage reductions in the exporting countries and restriction of domestic production in the importing countries. The draft Wheat Agreement produced in August 1941 followed the lines of the 1939 draft in proposing minimum and maximum export prices for wheat as well as export quotas and an undertaking by the exporting countries to keep their stocks between limits so as to maintain an ‘ever-normal granary’. It went even further in favour of the exporting countries by setting a high minimum price and requiring the importing countries not to exceed their prewar acreage under wheat. When the proposals reached London, there was an outcry, and not only from the Minister of Agriculture and the Ministry of Food (Hammond 1951, 347–52). Keynes, who was a member of the official committee on export surpluses chaired by Sir Frederick Leith-Ross, wrote a blistering attack on it when Leith-Ross, in favour of the agreement, circulated it to his committee (Leith-Ross 1968, 290–1; JMK 27, 32–6). Lionel attended the committee’s meetings which attempted to draft new instructions to the UK delegate in Washington on 20 and 29 August (EP(ES)(O)(41)13th and 14th meetings, CAB72/16). After the first of these meetings Robbins prepared a note for the second. He commented that ‘the draft as it stands is a montrosity, an invitation to consolidate an exporters’ paradise for no return whatever – save the

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satisfaction of not offending the Americans’, but the proposed amendments would simply eviscerate the draft without providing an acceptable substitute. Would it not be better to suggest a constructive alternative, ‘something which may actually benefit the world, instead of simply whittling away the more iniquitous features of an old-fashioned restriction scheme’? He suggested the development of the idea of an ‘ever-normal granary’ into an international ‘buffer stock’ of wheat owned and controlled by the exporting and importing countries jointly. This could eliminate large short-term fluctuations in the price of wheat without preventing longer-term price changes in response to secular changes in consumption or production (ES(O)(41)150, Note by Mr Lionel Robbins on the present stage of the discussions concerning the Wheat Agreement, 28 August 1941, CAB72/17). Keynes had floated the idea of buffer stocks for internationally traded primary products before the war and mentioned it in his discussions with State Department officials in Washington (JMK 21, 456–70, and 27, 22). At the meeting of Leith-Ross’s committee on 29 August he and Robbins together criticized the draft instructions as ‘unintelligible’ and inadequate. After Keynes left the meeting early Robbins went on to advocate the development of the proposal for an ‘ever-normal granary’ into one for an international buffer stock. The committee did not take it up, but Keynes (and Robbins) were to put it forward again with more success later. In Washington the UK delegation agreed to the creation of an International Wheat Council, but the British members of the Council subsequently managed to postpone the fixing of a minimum wheat price, and further negotiations on a new wheat agreement, until after the war (Hammond 1951, 352–6). In August 1941 the government set up an interdepartmental committee ‘to formulate the chief problems of post-war external economic policy with special reference to forthcoming discussions with the United States of America’. A committee on postwar internal economic problems followed three months later. Its assignment was ‘to formulate the chief problems of post-war internal economic policy’ and to arrange for memoranda to be written for the consideration of ministers (USE(41)1, Official Committee on Post-War External Economic Problems and Anglo-American Cooperation, and USE(41)1st meeting, 7 August 1941, CAB87/60; IEP(41)1, Official Committee on Post-War Internal Economic Problems, 31 October 1941, and IEP(41)1st meeting, 11 November 1941, CAB87/54). The Economic Section provided the secretary (A.S.J. Baster) for both committees, and also provided the secretary, in the person of Norman Chester, for the Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services which Greenwood had set up in June 1941 with Beveridge as chairman. Anderson later wrote to Lionel (19 February 1943, Private Letters War Period, RP) to thank him, the

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Section and especially Chester for ‘the ample & most helpful’ briefs they had supplied. When the Beveridge Committee was appointed Meade wrote Chester a note on the points where he thought the reform of the social services might be relevant to employment policy, identifying them as the method of financing social insurance, unemployment benefit and the mobility of labour, and the timing of the extension of social services, suggesting to Jewkes that if their colleagues agreed on any of these points the Section could make a formal presentation to Beveridge (15 June 1941, T230/100). At the same time he wrote the first of a series of papers on employment policy, entitled ‘Internal measures for the prevention of general unemployment’ (JEM 1, 171–83). Jewkes sent it to Anderson along with the Section’s comment on a paper by Shackle, pointing to Meade’s argument that a liberal international trade policy of the kind advocated by the Board of Trade would not be enough by itself to prevent major depressions. ‘Our view is, therefore, that trading policy, with which the Board of Trade document is concerned, cannot be divorced from unemployment policy.’ Greenwood and Anderson subsequently agreed Meade’s paper should be discussed by the new Committee on Post-War Internal Economic Problems (Jewkes to Brook, 10 July, Greenwood to Anderson, 22 July, Anderson to Greenwood, 25 July 1941, CAB123/53). By the time Lionel took over from Jewkes, the Section had also taken on the task of forecasting the postwar balance of payments. Austin Robinson undertook this with the assistance of James Meade and, when she joined the Section in November, Nita Watts (Balance of trade, The terms of trade (Some preliminary reflections by E.A.G. Robinson), 21 August 1941, ROBN 1/12/2; Cairncross and Watts 1989, 70). A first draft of the first comprehensive survey of ‘The United Kingdom’s Post-war Balance of Payments’ was ready by November, and the first ‘final version’ circulated early in the new year. Lionel, as head of the Section, was a member of the small group which went through the document before that ‘final version’ – which assumed the war would end by the end of 1943 – was prepared (The United Kingdom’s Postwar Balance of Payments, 31 January 1942, T230/5). As the war continued there were several more final versions. The main argument of all the forecasts was that there would need to be a 50 per cent increase in the volume of exports to restore current account balance and that until there were such an increase there would be a deficit on the order of £1000 m (Pressnell 1986, 440–1). On 7 October 1941 Keynes wrote Lionel (T230/37) sending him copies of several documents then circulating in the Treasury: the latest version of Shackle’s memorandum on postwar trade policy, a paper on the 1930s by

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Hubert Henderson, a ‘paper in two parts (or, if you like, two papers by myself)’ and a draft Treasury memorandum on postwar trade and financial policy. The second part of Keynes’s document contained his ‘Proposals for an International Currency Union’ (JMK 25, 21–40), in which, assuming the continuation of comprehensive exchange controls operated by central banks, he proposed the creation of an international clearing bank to clear all international transactions between central banks. Central bank accounts with the international clearing bank would be denominated in a new international currency, against which individual currencies would each have a fixed value and which would itself have a fixed value in terms of gold. Each central bank would be given a quota, based on the country’s prewar trade, and would be allowed to borrow on overdraft up to the amount of its quota at increasing interest rates. A deficit country could alter its exchange rate once its overdraft had reached one quarter of its quota and should do so once it reached half the quota; creditor countries were similarly supposed to appreciate their currencies as the balances with the clearing bank rose, but would not receive interest on their balances. As he explained in his first, introductory paper, these arrangements were intended to overcome the problem inherent in all previous fixed exchange rate systems that they threw the burden of balance-of-payments adjustments onto the deficit countries. As Lionel knew, Meade had seen Keynes’s proposals a couple of days earlier and had told him on 6 October that he was ‘naturally personally extremely attracted by your plan’ (T230/37). Meade proposed an amendment Keynes readily accepted: countries should provide convertibility for current account transactions and control only payments on the capital account of the balance of payments (Keynes to Meade, 7 October 1941, T247/118). At the beginning of October Chester thought Meade had been ‘very fed up (mainly with LCR re reconstruction . . . )’ but he was soon reassured (Chester 13/3). Robbins wrote to Keynes on 15 October (T247/33) that it had been ‘disquieting’ to learn from Meade that in a conversation with Hopkins enquiries had been made of the Section’s attitude to a policy of deflation after the war. He asked Keynes to ‘assure all concerned that we should be unanimously opposed to anything so foolish’. He could defend ‘small local contractions’ under a properly functioning gold standard but ‘to urge that, when one is free, one should contract merely to achieve or maintain an arbitrary rate of exchange seems to me the extremity of folly, and I have always said so – both before 1925 and after 1931. . . . How many evils we should have prevented, how much misery we should have been spared, had we had the good sense to devalue and cut our losses when the pound was at a low level after the last war.’ He concluded that he

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was ‘strongly attracted’ by Keynes’s plan and hoped to discuss it with him soon. When he received Keynes’s second draft a month later, he told him (26 November 1941, T247/116) it was ‘a treat to read and a real release of fresh air in this surcharged and stale atmosphere. I do hope that whatever happens to it at the hands of the Church of Laodocea & other more perverse influences, some means may be found of getting a copy directly to the notice of the Prime Minister.’ Keynes, who had found Lionel’s first letter ‘consoling’ (15 October, T247/33), was ‘extremely glad’ to receive his second (26 November, T230/37) since ‘If the scheme is to have a chance, it will certainly need all the support it can get, – not merely support, but enthusiastic support.’ Lionel was soon given an opportunity to support Keynes. Sir Arthur Salter, in Washington as head of the British Merchant Shipping Mission, wrote to Anderson on 18 October (T230/93) warning him that the Americans, who ‘combine suspicion and magnanimity, hard bargaining in detail and generosity in broad policy, to an unequalled degree’, were currently suspicious that after the war the British might ‘not just drift into, but rush into with some relish, a combative bilateralism in economic policy – directed in effect against the U.S.A. as the country in the strongest position’. He himself was convinced bilateralism was the wrong policy. ‘I am writing to you . . . ,’ he went on, ‘because I’m pretty sure that the only real chance of negotiations of the kind required – touching so many departments, with their specialised and limited points of view – is that you, with the band of able economists behind you should make this your own subject and handle it. Lionel Robbins would I believe be invaluable.’ Norman Brook showed this letter to Robbins, who read it ‘with great interest and complete agreement’. He feared that Salter’s suspicions ‘regarding the “relish” with which certain quarters over here regard the prospect of “combative bilateralism” are not without foundation’ and sent Henderson’s paper on the 1930s as evidence. The pessimistic Henderson had argued that the long-term decline in Britain’s economic position since the First World War meant exchange controls and imperial preference would have to remain more or less permanently to cope with chronic balance-of-payments difficulties. Henderson had written his paper for a committee of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and Meade had written a critical commentary on it: Lionel sent that up to Anderson too (LCR to Brook, 10 November 1941, T230/93). Brook recommended Anderson read both papers; when he had done so, Anderson commented on 24 November (T230/93) that he had read them with great interest and his instinct ‘leads me to favour multilateral arrangements’.

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Over the next three months Keynes engaged in extensive discussions with Bank of England officials and Roy Harrod as well as his Treasury colleagues, redrafting his plan for a ‘Clearing Union’, as it came to be known, twice more. It eventually went to ministers as a small part of a much larger Treasury document which included the Section’s estimates of the UK postwar balance of payments (Moggridge 1992, 676–8; JMK 25, 66–139). But this is running ahead of the story. There were more immediate problems of wartime economic policy to attend to in the winter of 1941–2. At first Lionel was still worried about the ‘perennial livestock question’, as he told Ruth Cohen on 19 September (T230/89). He feared there might not be enough feeding-stuffs available to prevent a meat shortage during the winter: if nothing else there needed to be a change in relative prices in favour of milk and against meat. But, as he complained to a MAF official (Hugh Gardner) on 22 September (T230/89), ‘I know that it is rank heresy to suppose that farmers have any regard to relative profitability and rank sacrilege to suggest that fat cattle prices should be kept down.’ But the livestock policy controversy petered out. It was possible to bring in more frozen meat than previously anticipated from the southern hemisphere (especially lamb from New Zealand and beef from Argentina), and by the end of the second year of war the imported meat position had recovered from the earlier crisis (Hammond 1962, 228–37). This did not affect the validity of the economic argument for appropriate agricultural prices but it did weaken the argument for slaughtering domestic animals in order to build up stocks of home-produced meat. Also, the Ministry of Agriculture turned out to be right that there was no shortage of feed, even though, as Lionel continued to complain, they only produced anecdotal evidence from farmers to support their claim (Hancock and Gowing 1949, 310; LCR to Gorell Barnes, 16 July 1942, T230/89). Until January 1942 Lionel continued to brief Attlee as chair of the Food Policy Committee. ‘I always used to go and brief him about twice a week,’ he recalled (transcript of Economists’ Dinner, Reform Club, London, 5 March 1973, RP). But one’s opening gambit was political gossip, or gossip about military operations, and then gradually you’d get him round to the little bit of paper that you’d handed in at mid-day for him to read. Perhaps he’d read it, perhaps he hadn’t. . . . [He] was most extraordinary, because he could argue a case in an absolutely masterly way, and he could conk out just like a car whose battery has run out . . . [Then] there was nothing more to do. Again and again at the critical period when food policy was evolving, for instance, James and I spent infinite trouble briefing Attlee as chairman

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of the Food Policy Committee. And sometimes he would speak up like a man; and at other times he would just sit there doodling. You couldn’t tell.

Briefing Anderson, and Bridges, was a different matter. As well as its regular briefs to Anderson on economic topics coming up for discussion at the Lord President’s Committee, the Section was asked for its views on other issues with an economic aspect. Lionel often delegated the task of analysis to the member of the Section whose area it fell into; sometimes he took it upon himself. He spent 18 October 1941, for instance, ‘trying to clear my mind on the next step as regards the Bomber Programme’ (LCR to Brook, T230/47). After the fall of France the only way Britain could take the war into Germany was by bombing. Hence the strategic air offensive, urged by Churchill in September 1940, and by the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshall Sir Charles Portal, after German bombing of Britain’s cities had begun in October 1940 (Webster and Frankland 1961, 152–6). The entry of the Soviet Union into the war on the Allied side in June 1941 had if anything only strengthened the argument, in spite of the evident failure of Bomber Command to exact much damage on the German war machine: as Terraine (1985, 282) put it, ‘as the First World War had shown, the disciplines of an alliance demand something more than for one ally to do all the fighting and dying while the other makes admiring noises from the ringside.’ But to step up the air offensive would require many more aircraft. The Air Staff began to argue for a force of 4000 heavy bombers, in spite of – but also to a large extent because of – the mounting heavy losses of aircraft and highly trained aircrew on operational missions and the ineffectiveness of socalled ‘precision’ bombing revealed in the Butt Report of August 1941 (Webster and Frankland 1961, 177–87).5 In the ensuing controversy, before Bomber Command operations were scaled back following a disastrous raid on Berlin on the night of 6/7 November, Lionel attended the meetings Anderson held with one or two ministers (with Lord Cherwell and with the Minister of Aircraft Production and the Minister of Labour separately) in response to Churchill’s demand for increased production of medium and heavy bombers (notes of meetings 5

Cherwell had commissioned one of the economists on his staff, David Butt, to examine the photographs taken by bombers on missions in June and July: Butt calculated that of all the aircraft recorded as having attacked their targets, only one third had got within five miles of them. As for the losses, between October 1940 and July 1941 Bomber Command lost a number of aircraft almost equal to its operational strength in October 1940 (around 500 aircraft), and it lost as many again in the next four months (Middlebrook and Everitt 1990, 93, 122, 130, 173, 219).

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on 29 September and 2 October 1941 in CAB123/130). When he wrote to Brook on 18 October, he focussed on two questions: ‘A. Is the general objective attainable or should something more modest be put in its place? B. If it is attainable what special measures are necessary in order that it may be attained?’ The answer to A. was Yes, as long as the necessary administrative measures were taken. This did not mean that MAP’s demands should receive ‘supreme overriding priority’ over other claimants for labour and other scarce resources. ‘The case against supreme overriding priority is clear. It makes hay of every other plan, throws into chaos the priority arrangements which have been so laboriously built up in the last twelve months and can be represented as a blank cheque for inefficiency.’ He suggested Anderson should argue: ‘The recommendations which I have put forward are based upon the best information which I have been able to obtain. But it is only right that I should point out to you that much of this information is highly conjectural. M.A.P. are now actively developing the kind of statistical planning department [under Jewkes] adequate to deal with the tremendous complexities with which they are faced. But this sort of thing takes time; . . . I have been led to recommend that the programme should go forward not so much from any great conviction that the figures on which it is based are correct, or that all the promises made will be fulfilled, but because I have become convinced that it is only by aiming at a target of this magnitude that we shall carry out that extension of productive power in the aircraft industry which somehow or other will give us final strategical supremacy.’ It would be necessary, therefore, to allocate more labour to aircraft production and to obtain more aircraft engines, both from domestic production and from the USA. Bridges briefed Anderson accordingly (Draft marked by LCR ‘Draft for L.P. Used by Secretary as a basis for his minute’, 22 October 1941, T230/47).6 The severe manpower shortage that had developed by the autumn of 1941 began to lead to demands for wage increases, which worried the Cabinet. Briefing Anderson on a paper by the Chancellor of the Exchequer which drew attention to the danger of inflation, and sending a copy of his brief to Keynes, Lionel pointed out (Wages and Inflation, 8 December 1941, T230/110) that the increase in spending power created by higher money wages could not generate much price inflation when so many prices were controlled nor would it lead to shortages of goods that were already rationed. The pressure of the extra spending power would thus fall on other goods, 6

The new planning department of MAP did eventually get the problems of coordination inherent in aircraft production under control (Devons 1951). The difficulties in obtaining labour for aircraft factories persisted (Hancock and Gowing 1949, 441–2).

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to some of which rationing could be extended. The real disadvantages of wage increases would be felt later, after the war, in the increased costs of export industries. But wartime wage rates had not risen inordinately. They had so far risen by less than the cost of living, which indicated that the trade unions had ‘shown a decent and reasonable attitude’, and the cost of living was now not rising thanks to the government’s stabilization policy. It might therefore be better to rely on the persuasive powers of the Minister of Labour (Ernest Bevin). Keynes, who thought Lionel’s paper ‘sound’, commented on 15 December (T230/110) that ‘It is very difficult in talking to Ministers to find the right position between alarming them too much on the one hand and making them too complacent on the other. Possibly this paper leans a little bit in the complacency direction, though I am sure you did not intend this.’ He agreed the main objection to wartime wage inflation was the aggravation of postwar difficulties. When Lionel had written to Caroline on 4 July, shortly after Hitler invaded Russia, he had commented: ‘It seems quite futile to talk about the war doesn’t it? The situation changes so from day to day. If the Russians can hold out for more than a month & if they can destroy their oilwells, then I shan’t regard the present episode as telling against us – indeed if we do not utilize the breathing space to make ourselves finally safe against invasion, it will be our own fault.’ The problem was how to do it. He had ‘no doubt that sufficient aid from the States could do the trick even without a declaration of war’ but he did not know and had given up predicting ‘what your people [the Americans] are going to do – the vicissitudes of opinion are too bewildering’. In October 1941 Hitler’s forces were within sixty miles of Moscow and besieging Leningrad. Some in England feared that Hitler would succeed where Napoleon had failed. Like Napoleon’s army before them they were halted by the winter, and then the Red Army under Marshal Zhukov struck back outside Moscow on 5 December. Two days later the Japanese attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor and Roosevelt declared war on Japan. Germany and Italy then declared war on the USA. But in Britain relief at the entry of the US as a belligerent was tempered by the report on 10 December of the sinking by Japanese aircraft of the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse (Hodgson 1976, 189). Worse was to come. On Christmas Day the British garrison at Hong Kong, under seige since 8 December, surrendered. The British defence of Malaya collapsed in the face of numerically weaker Japanese forces – ‘one of the most shameful Allied defeats of the war’ (Keegan 1997, 212) – and Singapore was soon threatened: it fell on 15 February 1942. The war in the Middle East was not

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going well: there were many reverses and no real victories for the British and Commonwealth forces until El Alamein (November 1942). Churchill made several changes in his government in February 1942, first making Beaverbrook Minister of Production. When Beaverbrook resigned after only two weeks Oliver Lyttleton was recalled from Egypt to take his place. After the fall of Singapore Churchill appointed Stafford Cripps, who had returned from eighteen months as HM Ambassador in Moscow, Lord Privy Seal in place of Attlee, who became Secretary of State for the Dominions while remaining Deputy Prime Minister. Greenwood was dismissed, Kingsley Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer, dropped from the War Cabinet, and Dalton appointed President of the Board of Trade. The most immediate impact of US entry into the war on the British economy was the aggravation of the Battle of the Atlantic: escorts were needed in the Pacific and for Russian convoys as well as for Atlantic convoys, while German submarines could now operate on the American side of the Atlantic. British shipbuilders could not keep pace with the resulting losses of merchant vessels. Britain’s imports of food and everything else were again under threat. In February 1942 the import programme for the year had to be cut from 33m tons total anticipated in October 1941 to 221/2m tons, of which the Ministry of Food’s share would be 101/2m tons. In the Lord President’s Committee it was argued that the cut in food imports would be possible only with a rise in the extraction ratio for wheat (which made bread more nutritious but an unappetizing grey colour) and an intensification of the ploughing up campaign to produce more wheat and other grains such as oats. The former step was particularly contentious: wholemeal bread was thought to be unpopular; the Minister of Agriculture also objected, initially with the support of the Minister of Food, because a higher extraction ratio would mean less wheat offal for feeding animals and could therefore mean less home-produced meat, milk and eggs (Hancock and Gowing 1949, 412– 16, 422–3; Hammond 1951, 259–61). As usual Lionel, briefing Anderson (Milling ratio, 5 February 1942, CAB123/201), vigorously objected to the MAF arguments: ‘Why shouldn’t we obain greater quantities [of oats] from the farms? . . . An issue of war winning importance is at stake; and there is no more economic justification for the doctrine of the self-sufficiency of the farm than for the very similar doctrine of the self-sufficiency of the nation.’ As for the alleged unpopularity of wholemeal bread, ‘if they [the public] were asked, “Would you be prepared to eat wheatmeal bread to facilitate the transport of troops and to shorten the war?”, there seems little doubt that the answer would be, “Yes”.’ At the next day’s meeting (LPC(42)11th meeting, CAB71/6) Anderson put the case for raising the extraction rate

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strongly. The Minister of Agriculture refused to budge. The matter had to go (twice) to the War Cabinet, who agreed to the rise in the extraction ratio in March (Murray 1955, 149–50). Some food rations raised in November 1941 were cut again in January 1942. Points rationing of previously unrationed foodstuffs was rapidly extended. The assistance of the Economic Section was not now needed with points rationing of food. During 1942 this became, Robbins later told Keith Hancock (26 October 1949, Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950, RP), ‘entirely a Ministry of Food matter and it was only through the most informal talks with people like Roland Wall and John Maud that from time to time I heard of what was going on’. Lionel briefed Anderson on other issues relating to food that came before his committee, for instance, the dilution of bread flour with oats, barley or potato flour, bread rationing, and restrictions on restaurant meals, all of which were considered in the spring and summer of 1942. He naturally favoured feeding oats to humans rather than to cattle; he supported a combination of straight and points rationing for bread, which the Ministry of Food opposed in the spring but admitted was workable in August when the Prime Minister himself called for a bread rationing scheme to reduce waste; and as for restaurant meals, he pointed out that the 5s limit on their price introduced in April would not ‘involve any perceptible real economy of man power or shipping’ and urged the surrender of ration coupons instead.7 Robbins continued to battle with MAF over wartime agricultural policy. A rise in agricultural wages at the end of 1941 led to a second wartime review of agricultural prices, since the government had pledged in November 1940 to maintain a system of fixed prices for the duration and one year after and to adjust prices for ‘any substantial changes in the cost of production’ (Nash 1951, 211–12). Bridges helped to arrange for the Section to be involved in the discussions (Bridges to LCR, 29 November 1941, T230/2). The Ministry of Agriculture on behalf of the farmers asked for a large price rise more than sufficient to cover the wage increase. Treasury officials, however, were 7

The dilution of flour, agreed to in July 1942, was not put into practice until 1943 and abandoned later in the year when the oat crop was poor; the government did not resort to bread rationing during the war; a rationing scheme for restaurant meals was never brought into operation (Hammond 1951, 263–70, 284–8 and 288–93). LCR’s briefing notes include: Bread rationing Memorandum by the Minister of Food LP(42)174, 4 August, Flour dilution and bread policy, 15 September, and Flour dilution, 13 October 1942, CAB123/201; Restriction of meals eaten in public, 1 April, Restriction of meals eaten in public Memorandum by the Minister of Food, 9 April, Restriction of meals in restaurants Memorandum by the Minister of Food LP(42)106, 7 May, and Meals in Establishments Order, 1942, Memorandum by the Minister of Food, 3 September 1942, CAB123/74.

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well aware that farmers’ incomes had risen considerably with increased output and higher prices since 1940. They argued that the November 1940 pledge meant the government had undertaken to raise farming to a certain standard of profitability and to keep it there for the duration (and one year after), not that it would automatically raise agricultural prices every time there was an increase in costs (Fergusson to Barlow, 15 December 1941, T230/2). Lionel, trying out his arguments on Ruth Cohen (Changes in the costs of agricultural production, T230/2), pointed out that since it was impossible to distinguish the separate average costs of joint products produced on mixed farms, ‘The only sensible interpretation is that the total receipts of farmers as a whole shall cover total costs (including normal profits) for that collection of foodstuffs required by the Government. So long as this condition is fulfilled the Government must be free to attain its other objective of stimulating the production of certain foodstuffs and of depressing the production of others by varying relative prices.’ In the first of many briefs to Anderson (Agricultural prices, 6 January 1942, T230/2) he also considered alternative interpretations of the pledge. That when any item of cost rose there should be a commensurate addition to gross receipts would ‘surely be one of the most complete realizations of the “Heads-Iwin-tails-you-lose” principle ever achieved in public business’. That when aggregate costs rose there should be a commensurate addition to receipts, even when receipts had already risen more than costs, would be a principle of ‘“Unto him that hath shall be given”.’ That when aggregate costs rose more than aggregate receipts there should be an offsetting increase would also be too generous if price increases had already raised farmers’ profits by more than anticipated. That when costs rose so as to reduce profits below a level that had been considered reasonable then there should be an offsetting increase in prices was the ‘only interpretation which does not involve the inadmissible assumption that the Government has made a promise which is neither reasonable nor prudent’. Looking at the present position, MAF’s own figures showed that farmers’ net incomes in 1940–1 were 60 per cent higher than in 1939–40, and in 1941–2 would be 85 per cent higher if there were no wage increase. The estimated £19 m increase in the wage bill would still leave farmers’ profits 65 per cent higher than in 1939–40. The only argument for an increase in prices was expediency, so that if there was an increase it should be as small as possible. The LPC accepted this interpretation of the pledge, but the Ministry of Agriculture challenged the figures. Lionel produced further calculations for Anderson (Agricultural prices, 14 January 1942, T230/2) from which ‘The general conclusion . . . seems to be still unshaken, that, if any general advance

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is given, the main justification must be political, namely that farmers have interpreted the pledge in so absurd and extravagant a fashion hitherto, that to bring them completely down to earth and to deny them any increase would cause really serious resentment and disaffection in the farming areas.’ He reinforced his arguments by sending Anderson a copy of the paper on agricultural price policy he had prepared for Greenwood eighteen months earlier (see Chapter 11), and obtaining improved estimates from the CSO; he also suggested an enquiry by a committee including outside experts to look into the ways of reimbursing marginal producers for their higher costs, a suggestion the LPC and the War Cabinet accepted (Agricultural costs and prices: alternative methods of recouping costs of marginal production, 22 January 1942, T230/2; Murray 1955, 169). The War Cabinet decided farmers’ returns should be increased by no more than the estimated increase in the wage bill and agreed on a compromise price schedule with lower prices for milk and potatoes than the Minister of Food wanted and lower prices for fat cattle, pigs and eggs than the Minister of Agriculture wanted. The NFU rejected the package as too low, and by the time the government had made concessions the total of the price increases amounted to nearly £24 m (Hancock and Gowing 1949, 342; Murray 1955, 166–7). But the next time agricultural wages were raised, in November 1943, prompting another agricultural price review, and it was again found that farmers’ receipts had been higher than anticipated at the time of the previous review, the government refused any general increase in prices, balancing an increase in the prices of milk and fat cattle with a reduction in the price of barley (Nash 1951, 213). During the protracted discussions the Minister of Agriculture put forward a note on the ‘principles’ of agricultural policy. Robbins dissected it paragraph by paragraph, using arguments with which Anderson must have by now been thoroughly familiar (Agricultural prices, 3 February 1942, T230/2). He noted that for once the Minister had not relied on his usual argument that a more or less constant population of beef cattle and sheep was necessary to maintain soil fertility; ‘elsewhere it is always appearing, and there can be little doubt that, if pressed on the issues involved in this paper, the Agricultural Departments would once more bring it into play.’ The Minister had instead produced ‘an entirely new principle’ that his Ministry should have ‘a predominant say’ in fixing agricultural prices: ‘In peace-time prices are fixed by the market – in the last analysis by the willingness of consumers to buy what supplies are available. By analogy, therefore, it might be supposed that, in war-time, they would be fixed by the Ministry of Food – the political representative of the consumer. The claim of the Ministry of Agriculture to be arbiter in this matter may, or may not, be justified by

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appeal to constitutional responsibility. But it is certainly a complete reversal of the time-honoured principle that he who pays the piper calls the tune.’ The November 1940 pledge made by the Minister of Agriculture in the House of Commons had not only committed the government to the wartime system of fixing agricultural prices. Hudson had stated that the coalition government ‘recognises the importance of maintaining after the war a healthy and well-balanced agriculture as an essential and permanent feature of national policy’ and claimed that the guarantee was ‘meant to secure that stability shall be maintained, not only during hostilities, but during a length of time thereafter sufficient to put into action a permanent post-war policy for home agriculture’. The desire to maintain ‘balance’ in UK agriculture lay behind the Ministry’s unwillingness to acquiesce in the livestock slaughter policy and its objection to changes in relative prices. It also wanted to maintain or even enlarge the subsidies and agricultural protection introduced in the 1930s, which Lionel had been vigorously criticizing since their inception. In its first contributions to postwar planning in 1941 it had tried to justify agricultural protection on grounds of military security, the maintenance of the fertility of the soil and the attractions of the countryside (Memorandum on Problems for Consideration in connection with Post-war Agricultural Policy, March 1941, T230/1). Economists in government (Baster and Durbin as well as Robbins) had no difficulty disposing of these arguments, mainly on the basis of the theory of comparative advantage. In an interesting exchange in December 1941 and January 1942 Austin Robinson challenged Lionel’s interpretation of the theory on the ground that he might be implicitly assuming full employment. Lionel firmly denied this, but Austin was not entirely convinced by his reply.8 Lionel’s relations with Keynes were changing. In 1940 and 1941 he had turned to Keynes when the Section’s projects threatened to come in conflict with the Treasury’s priorities (see Chapter 11). By now (early 1942) Keynes was turning to him as the influential head of the Economic Section for assistance, for instance in the coal crisis. The winter of 1942 was the third cold winter of the war, made harder to bear by a shortage of coal. This was partly a manifestation of the manpower shortage: many young miners had 8

Office Council, Post-war agricultural policy, nd but August 1941, Durbin, Post-war prosperity, 27 August 1941, LCR, Memorandum by the Ministry of Agriculture on Post-war Agricultural policy, Robinson, The MAF memorandum on post-war policy and the principle of comparative advantage, 30 December 1941, LCR to Robinson, 7 January, Robinson to LCR, The theory of international trade and post-war agricultural policy, 15 January 1942, T230/1. Robinson’s two notes are also in ROBN 1/12/9.

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left the pits for the armed forces and the productivity of those remaining was lower. The decline in productivity was also aggravated in 1942 by increasing labour unrest and strikes in several coalfields (Hancock and Gowing 1949, 440, 470–1; Supple 1987, 519–20). On 5 March, Keynes, on looking through various papers on coal that had come before the LPC, wrote to Robbins (T247/77), noting that ‘the one idea which seems to me prima facie a good one seems never to have been mentioned. Why should there not be a concentration of miners on the more up-to-date pits and better seams?’ Although he conceded there would be practical difficulties, they were not insuperable, and ‘Is it not perhaps being held up because in some people’s minds it bears too close an affinity to the nationalisation of the mines? I fancy that the owners may oppose it on that ground, and the Trade Unions may oppose it because they do not like to disturb a coalminer from his habitual village.’ He asked Robbins to put the idea before the Lord President. Lionel replied the next day (T247/77) that he would certainly pass Keynes’s letter to Anderson. On the merits of the proposal, he ‘agree[d] completely that it would be craven in the extreme to oppose it on the ground that it bears too close an affinity to nationalization – and you will not suspect me of any excessive partiality for that form of organization’. His hesitation was about the attitude of the unions: he doubted whether even with complete nationalization of the mines they would be willing to accept transfer. ‘However, it may prove that the Miners’ Federation is not like the Farmers’ Union.’ Anderson summoned Dalton to see him, ‘to discuss a prodding letter. . . . We go over a good deal of ground’ (Pimlott ed 1986b, 394). As President of the Board of Trade Dalton had responsibility for fuel and power. Gaitskell, his principal private secretary at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, had moved with Dalton and Lionel kept in touch with him (ibid., 1986b, 380, 404). On 12 March Dalton asked Beveridge to devise a scheme for fuel rationing. On 17 March he informed the Commons that such a plan was in preparation. This was calmly received, but a Conservative backlash surfaced when Dalton announced on 21 April that the government would introduce fuel rationing on 1 June (ibid., 393–4, 397, 413–15). When Beveridge’s scheme was published and debated a couple of weeks later there was violent opposition. At a time of low public morale, with the war going badly in the Far East and North Africa, the government backed off, postponing coal rationing and turning to reorganization of the coal industry (Court 1951, 160–75; Supple 1987, 523–31). As usual the Economic Section provided briefs for Anderson, Chester taking the main responsibility. In

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June the government took over operational control of the mines for the rest of the war, leaving financial control with the mine owners. It also set up a separate Ministry of Fuel and Power, relieving Dalton of that responsibility. Dalton could henceforth devote more of his ministerial time to the much more congenial task of postwar planning. Lionel’s closest collaboration with Maynard Keynes was over postwar international economic policy, a collaboration that began in the winter of 1941/42 and lasted until after the war was over. On 23 February the British government, after prolonged dithering over Article VII, which contained the ‘consideration’ for lend-lease, finally signed its Mutual Aid Agreement with the USA. This concluded: ‘At an early convenient date conversations shall be begun between the two governments with a view to determining, in the light of governing economic conditions, the best means of attaining the above-stated objectives by their own agreed action and of seeking the agreed action of other like-minded Governments.’ In February and March 1942 the Treasury was, therefore, finalizing the draft of its massive memorandum on External Monetary and Economic Policy, the ‘Treasury sandwich’ as it was nicknamed. It had been commissioned by the official Committee on Post-War External Economic Problems and Anglo-American Co-operation but in the event went directly to ministers. Lionel was one of a select group of senior officials who met to discuss the draft in detail (Hopkins to LCR, 17 February 1942, T247/119). His first comment on the full Treasury draft (Note on the Treasury draft, marked ‘Prof. Robbins, Probably written in early Feb. 1942’, T247/119) was that ‘it still bears in its body marks of controversies and discussions which took place before the decision to sign the Consideration Agreement’: this was especially true of Section X (on trade policy) which discussed measures that were now definitely ruled out. He also criticized the suggestion that ministers should now decide between the various types of international economic policy whose pros and cons were exhaustively detailed in the excessively long memorandum: ‘Is it impertinent’, he asked Hopkins, ‘to ask whether . . . it would not be possible to reshape the document so as to present to Ministers, not so much the advantages and disadvantages of a number of courses, but rather a number of policies (Keynes [ie the Clearing Union], Harrod [a proposal for an international investment scheme], Hansen [the Hansen-Gulick scheme for an international investment board], etc.) from which we think good might proceed if they could be put over and on which we think discussion [with the Americans] would be fruitful?’ Although he could ‘detect a certain slight sway of the argument in favour of the

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Keynes-Harrod-Hansen projects’ in the Treasury memorandum this was unlikely to be clear to ministers. Lionel made his own views clear. On postwar policy it was ‘a red herring to speak as if it were a question of state trading or Laissez Faire’. The real issue was between ‘forms of organisation which introduce diplomacy and national interest in trade and those which do not – that is to say, national or supra-national collectivist organisations. Speaking as one who has still much partiality for private enterprise and decentralized initiative, I would like to say that while I am unalterably opposed to any large extension of forms of dealing which make trade a matter of national politics, I would be prepared to experiment to almost any degree with international collectivism – international buffer stocks, international investment boards, etc. etc.’ He was also prepared to contemplate state trading if it could be carried out without discrimination between suppliers, as he told Hopkins on 25 February (T247/119). At the meeting to discuss the draft (Note of meeting held on 25th February 1942, T247/119) he was ‘alarmed at the idea of the conversations taking the form of bargaining’. Even after its redrafting he still thought (LCR to Hopkins, 6 March 1942, T230/38) that some paragraphs ‘carry a certain penumbra of arriere pens´ee regarding our signature of the Consideration Agreement, which I hope will not be so strong when the conversations actually take place; for I do most sincerely believe that, if we do not approach this problem with open minds, and a sincere desire to keep our undertaking both in the letter and in the spirit, we may miss one of the great opportunities of history.’ At a meeting of the ministerial Committee on Reconstruction Problems on 31 March (RP(42)1st meeting, CAB87/2), the Chancellor of the Exchequer introduced the Treasury paper as ‘an attempt to reconcile varying views and provide material for the discussions under Article 7 of the Mutual Aid Agreement’. (Lionel put it more accurately when he described it to R.J. Stopford on 14 April [T230/39] as ‘speak[ing] with two voices – one expounding bold and spacious schemes for the reconstruction of the world, the other elaborating with lavish detail all the reasons why any action which does not perpetuate the status quo, or turn back to a narrow bilateralism, is beset with innumerable dangers’.) When Bevin proceeded to ‘denounce the whole paper . . . [as] an Anglo-American bankers’ conspiracy against the working class [which] would doom us to two million unemployed’, Dalton, briefed by Gaitskell that the Clearing Union proposals were ‘most enlightened and reasonable’, proposed that Keynes and Hopkins be summoned to defend the proposals, which they did (Pimlott ed 1986b, 406; JMK 25, 139–42). The committee eventually agreed that the Clearing Union proposals could

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be used in the forthcoming ‘informal, non-commital and exploratory’ talks with the Americans. But although the talks were thought to be imminent, by May there was uncertainty as to whether they would happen in the summer. A year and a half passed before ‘conversations’ took place in Washington in September and October 1943, thanks to ‘a succession of delays, disappointments, and seeming prevarications’ (Pressnell 1986, 79). For one thing, ‘In 1942 it seemed to many [in the USA] that the war position of the Allies was so unfavourable that no risks of disunity among political parties should be run by stirring up public discussion of the social and economic questions of the future peace’, especially since postwar planning was often associated with the New Deal (Penrose 1953, 11). In the early months of 1942 Keynes was drafting a commodity plan. He envisaged a series of buffer stocks for each of the main internationally traded primary commodities, whose controlling bodies would buy or sell the commodity so as to reduce short-term price fluctuations without disturbing longer-term price trends and while maintaining a roughly constant stock in reserve rather on the lines of the ‘ever-normal granary’ advocated by US Vice-President Wallace (JMK 27, 112–33). Lionel received his copy on 30 April from Hopkins (T230/30), who asked for the Section’s comments. Lionel assigned the task to Marcus Fleming. Sending Fleming’s comments on 14 May (T230/30), he told Hopkins he ‘very much favour[ed] . . . commodity controls of this type’ as far preferable to quantitative restriction schemes. ‘In particular, it seems essential, in the words of . . . [Keynes] to “aim at combining a short-period stabilisation of prices with a long-period price policy which balances supply and demand and allows a steady rate of expansion to the cheaper-cost producers”.’ Another virtue of the scheme was that it could overcome some of the difficulties posed for international economic relations by the state trading of countries such as the USSR, in the case of those primary products for which a single world price could be set by the buffer stock controls. When Keynes revised his draft to meet the objections of Sir Frederick Leith-Ross and Sir Donald Fergusson, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, Lionel and his colleagues (and Harrod and Robertson for that matter) thought Keynes had gone too far (JMK 27, 135). He wrote to Keynes on 17 June (T247/9): The point about which we are most uneasy in the redraft . . . is the use of the ‘reasonable international economic price’ . . . We do not dissent from the view that in those cases in which an acute maladjustment between supply and demand has developed quantitative restriction may be inevitable to prevent prices from falling to ‘cruelly’ low levels, while other measures . . . are being explored in order to restore

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equilibrium. Moreover, we agree that the criterion whether the price has fallen to ‘cruelly’ low levels or not must be something on the lines of the ‘reasonable international economic price’. We are, however, disturbed by the long-term implications of the criterion . . . [if quantitative restrictions were used to maintain prices which kept high-cost producers in business]. This point is perhaps, in effect, met by [the] clause . . . which lays it down that so long as a restriction scheme is in force, the quotas of the low-cost producers should be expanded in relation to the quotas of the high-cost producers. We should, however, feel much more reassured on this point if some express reference could also be made to the fact that in such circumstances the price should be gradually reduced even below the existing “reasonable international economic price”.

Keynes’s revisions, however, were not enough for Fergusson and LeithRoss. He was obliged to make more revisions, and even then Fergusson succeeded in attaching a minute of dissent. The proposals did not reach the Cabinet until April 1943. As Moggridge (1992, 681) remarked, ‘Fergusson, and his Department, remained in a minority of one to the end. As a result, more so than with the Clearing Union, there remained a strong undercurrent of hostility to the commodity proposals which would resurface later in the war once the Anglo-American discussions on the post-war world had progressed further.’ The Committee on Post-War Internal Economic Problems had been only slightly more active than the Committee on External Economic Problems in the winter of 1941–2. In November 1941 it had allocated studies of particular reconstruction problems to the relevant departments, except that the planning and timing of public investment had been referred to a special subcommittee, chaired by Hopkins, of which Robbins and Meade were both members. Meade had introduced his memorandum, ‘Internal measures for the prevention of general unemployment’, which was ‘generally approved’ (whatever that meant) (IEP(41)1st, 2nd and 3rd meetings, CAB87/54). The subcommittee met once on 17 December 1941 and not again until 24 July 1942 (PT(41)1st meeting and PT(42)1st meeting, T230/84). On the first occasion Lionel pointed out that ‘the timing of public works expenditure could best be decided by reference to the quarterly estimates of national income which could be extrapolated so as to show the rate of public investment necessary to provide a stable flow of money demand and to prevent inflation’. On the second he reiterated that ‘we ought to consider the appropriate variation in public works expenditure against the wider background of general stabilisation policy’. He and Meade were very critical of a draft report produced by Bernard Gilbert in the summer of 1942, which was, in Meade’s words, ‘a very useful and able presentation of many of the problems

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and of the difficulties of investment policy . . . [but] alarmingly negative and complacent’, and they tried hard to get it improved (Meade to LCR, Draft report of the sub-committee on the planning and timing of investment, 16 September, LCR to Gilbert, 2 October 1942, T230/94). They found Gilbert’s revised draft only a slight improvement, its major omission being any discussion of the control of private investment (Meade to LCR, 27 November 1942, T230/84). In the intervening months Lionel had many discussions, often over lunch at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, with Sir Frank Tribe, Deputy Secretary of the Ministry of Labour, who had been commissioned to write papers for the main committee on the future of labour controls, on postwar wages policy and on demobilization. Tribe sought Robbins’s help particularly on the wages policy paper, where Robbins thought it ought to be stressed that a postwar employment policy could not be really successful without a moderate wages policy (Tribe to LCR, 27 January and 14 February 1942, LCR to Tribe, 4 May 1942, T230/110). As we see it, it is not enough merely that suitable financial measures should be taken to expand and to stabilise at a high level the general demand for goods and services. This is an essential feature, in our view, of any successful anti-depression policy. But the favourable effects of any such financial policy would be offset, if (i) it were accompanied by restrictive and monopolistic devices in industry and distribution which caused an increased demand for goods and services to be met by a rise in prices rather than by an expansion of production, or (ii) money wage-rates began a rapid upward rise whenever the demand for labour were really good. For, in this latter case, the financial policies of expansion would have to be abandoned in order to avoid the vicious spiral of inflation.

When Greenwood left the government, Sir William Jowitt, PaymasterGeneral, had taken over the ministerial Reconstruction Problems committee, Sir Alfred Hurst the official reconstruction committees. After Robbins and Meade had attended the first meeting of the Internal Economic Problems Committee under Hurst’s chairmanship on 9 April (IEP(42)2nd meeting, CAB87/55), Lionel went to talk to him about the work the Section could do for the committee. When Hurst said ‘he was particularly interested in the way in which the various particular enquiries undertaken by the different Departments were connected with each other’, Lionel saw his opportunity. He readily agreed to provide a short paper on ‘the way in which we felt that our own general enquiries could throw light upon the different aspects of this problem’. Meade prepared this note; Lionel also asked James to take over the coordination of the Section’s work on reconstruction. The Section drafted a survey (largely factual) of the internal economic problems of the immediate postwar transitional period, which, with revisions, went

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up to the ministerial committee on 1 July 1942 as the official committee’s interim report. It went, however, with a Treasury memorandum written by Henderson, who was characteristically pessimistic about Britain’s postwar prospects.9 Robbins and Meade attended the frequent meetings of the official committee, usually together, for the rest of the year. In his ‘Internal measures’ paper Meade had suggested four types of countercyclical policy: monetary policy, the control of public investment, measures to influence private consumption expenditure and budgetary policy. In contrast to Keynes (1936, 378), who had thought that ‘a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment’ might be necessary to produce full employment, he particularly favoured countercyclical measures to influence consumption, which he had been advocating before the war (Meade 1938). When the Section was invited to express its views on the economic aspects of Beveridge’s outline of a comprehensive scheme of social insurance, whose many benefits, financed by compulsory contributions from employers and employees, included family allowances, old age pensions, disability and unemployment benefits, Meade took advantage of the opportunity to put forward a scheme for varying the rates of employers’ and employees’ social insurance contributions in accordance with the state of trade (The economic aspects of the proposed reforms of social security, Memorandum by the Economic Section, T230/101). At the same time Keynes, who had been tackled by Beveridge for assistance in sorting out how to finance his scheme, asked to meet Meade and Robbins to talk about Beveridge’s proposals and Meade’s paper. The three met on 12 May (Harris 1997, 398–400; JMK 27, 203–7). They discussed the same issues many times in the next five months. Keynes had been critical of Meade’s proposal before the war (JMK 11, 439–44), but he was now ‘converted’ (JMK 27, 208). Meade went on developing his proposal in more detail (JEM 1, 184–92) and discussing it with Keynes and with his Section colleagues. But there was the problem of financing Beveridge’s comprehensive social insurance scheme, with or without Meade’s addition, a problem that much exercised Keynes and Hopkins in the Treasury. Lionel was worried about this too, as he indicated when he gave evidence to the Beveridge Committee on 24 June (SIC(42)21st meeting, T230/101). He did not think it would be possible, or desirable, to maintain 9

LCR, Reconstruction Inquiries, 15 April 1942, T230/34; EC(S)(42)15, Draft survey of internal economic problems in the post-war transitional period, 27 May 1942, T230/18; IEP(42)22, Draft Interim Report ‘The Internal Economic Problems of the Post-war Transitional Period’, 4 June 1942, CAB87/55; RP(42)21, Papers submitted by the Official Committee on Post-War Internal Economic Problems, CAB87/2.

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the high wartime tax rates after the war, and he was alarmed by the cost of the proposed old age pensions, which could squeeze out government expenditure on, for instance, education. ‘If it were to be a choice between children and old persons . . . he would prefer to see the money used for children.’ He was all in favour of a system of family allowances. He also urged that the Beveridge scheme should be introduced in stages. ‘He envisaged a period of difficulty in the two or three years after the war when it would be necessary for the Government to maintain certain forms of financial and economic control, and for the community to continue to exercise a certain measure of austerity and self-sacrifice. If we tried to achieve a whole social insurance programme immediately after the war was over, it would hamper the transitional problem. He would prefer, therefore, to see a plan developed by stages, full implementation being deferred until it could be seen that the rate of recovery and the trend of the national income were favourable.’ Meade followed Robbins and explained his own proposal for countercyclical variation of contributions. The next day Keynes wrote to Beveridge: from the criticisms he had heard he too was alarmed by the cost of pensions. He suggested to Hopkins and to Beveridge himself ways of reducing the total cost and persuaded Beveridge to meet a small committee consisting of representatives of the Treasury, the Section and the Government Actuary and no one else (JMK 27, 219–22). Keynes, Robbins and Sir George Epps (the Government Actuary) met Beveridge several times and succeeded in reducing the overall cost of the scheme and in modifying the proposals for family allowances so as to concentrate them on larger families (ibid., 234–53). In the last version of his proposals Beveridge included Robbins’s suggestion of paying less for a second child than for subsequent children (Beveridge to Keynes, 21 October 1942, Beveridge IXa). Lionel also talked to Hopkins, who thought Meade’s proposal would have a better chance of eventual acceptance if it was kept separate from the Beveridge plan (Keynes to Meade, 3 July 1942, T230/101). It did not, therefore, appear in the Beveridge Report published on 1 December. When the Section discussed Meade’s proposal, they agreed that a reduction in employees’ social security contributions would by increasing their incomes increase the demand for goods and services. They disagreed at first over whether and to what extent a reduction in employers’ contributions would increase demand, with Lionel enquiring how this was supposed to come about (JEM 1, 193–8). In seeking an answer he wrote to his former student Asik Radomysler in Cambridge, on 10 August (T230/101):

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A problem in the pure theory of wages and employment, not, however, unconnected with practical policy. In the past, I fancy we have all been in the habit of regarding the employers’ contribution to social insurance as a tax on employment; and we have, therefore, been inclined to argue that if it were removed, employment would be stimulated. Is this true, and if so, why? My own feeling is that it probably is true, but that the theoretical basis of the assertion is probably more complicated than we have been apt to assume. The removal of the tax on wages is surely a reduction of costs and on pure Keynesian theory, in a closed system should be accompanied by a commensurate fall of prices. Any effect on employment, therefore, would appear to come via the propensity to consume rather than a direct stimulus to employ more labour.

When Radomysler confirmed (13 August) that the effect via the propensity to consume would only occur if there was a commensurate fall in prices, Robbins responded (17 August): ‘Clearly in a regime of imperfect competition, the commensurate price fall is improbable. But even under perfect competition, is the Keynesian assumption of a commensurate fall in prices absolutely certain? Dennis Robertson, whose hunches in these connections must always be deserving of respect, says that it is not so, and, in the brief conversation I had with him the other day, stated quite dogmatically that, apart from any effect via propensity to consume, there must be the more direct effect on employment, since, as he put it, every reduction in the money cost of employing labour tends to an increase in employment.’ But when he read Radomysler’s further analysis (21 August), which concluded that a removal of employers’ contribution ‘probably will not’ increase employment, he was not sure he agreed (27 August): ‘My own view would be that a removal (or lowering) of workers’ contributions certainly would increase employment and that a removal (or lowering) of employers’ contributions would probably do so, but not nearly so powerfully.’ His conclusion was similar to that of other members of the Section. Although Keynes argued the effect of changes in employers’ contributions would be insignificant, the final version of Meade’s paper, which Lionel sent to the Treasury early on 7 October (LCR to Eady, T230/102), included equal variations in employers’ and employees’ contributions in order to make the scheme politically more acceptable. It is time to note the evolution of Robbins’s views on macroeconomics, which can be seen in his comments on Meade’s and other papers. Although he would not have described himself as a Keynesian, he did not regard himself any longer as a classical economist, let alone an Austrian one. As for the influences leading to his change of position, he told Radomysler

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in his 17 August letter that ‘In the present epoch of truce among leading economists so many outstanding issues are being cleared up by friendly and informal discussion.’ Meade’s comment on the Section as a ‘seminar’ is revealing. Lionel had envisaged his LSE seminar as a means towards arriving at the truth, or at least consensus, and had been disappointed by the acrimony of the debates. Now the discussions were even more serious but amicable and productive. An important factor was the development of national income accounting in Whitehall by Meade and Stone. Before the war Lionel was sceptical of the utility of any economic theory running in terms of aggregates; now there were measurable aggregates that could help in the formulation of practical policy. A couple of years later he tried to explain his current views in relation to those he had held before the war in, for instance, his 1937 article on ‘How to mitigate the next slump’ (draft letter to Dr Alfred Beesly, Private Letters War Period, RP). The difference between my views now & then is not one of kind but one of degree. I would take more risks. I don’t think one can watch during two wars the immense gain in wealth (& labour mobility) which comes from the elimination of deflationary drags & the maintenance of a brisk level of aggregate demand without feeling that it is worth while taking some risks to secure this goal. I think many of us – certainly I was one – were too scared of the inflationary effect of expanding expenditure in a state of underemployment & consequently we handled with gloves instruments we should have grasped with bare hands. The fact is that while you have unemployment on any large scale (I don’t mean anything so ambitious as Beveridge’s [1944] 3% which I think is pure windowdressing) expanding expenditure is not likely to turn into harmful inflation and if employment is reasonably high (6% unemployment would be nearer my guess of what is possible in a ‘free society’) every step should be taken by intelligent forecasting and planning the government outlay to guard against a falling away of [aggregate demand].

Needless to say, this position was a long way from that of his friend Hayek. When Hayek was still working on business cycle theory, he had published an essay in which he made use of ‘the familiar Ricardian proposition that a rise in wages will encourage capitalists to substitute machinery for labour and vice versa’ (1939, 8). Other economists having not found it so familiar, Hayek wrote a paper on the ‘Ricardo effect’ which was published in Economica in May 1942. When Lionel read it he wrote a long letter to his friend on 15 July (Miscellaneous Correspondence, RP). He had ‘read [the] article with great interest’ but he was ‘a little puzzled. For, while you start from a position which seems incontrovertible, it seems to me that you arrive at conclusions which are in the highest degree disputable.’ He could accept the propositions that a rise in the cost of labour relative to the price of the product would, other things being equal, lead to a substitution of capital

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for labour, that if in a state of full employment there were such a change then either the money rate of interest would have to rise or there would be inflation, and that if there were a switch from saving to consumption in a state of full employment there ‘must somehow come about a falling off in investment’. He could not accept, however, that such propositions, ‘which apply essentially to a state of relatively full employment, are applicable without much embellishment and qualification to the interpretation of the ups and downs of trade’. Such application would have the paradoxical implication that at the bottom of a slump a rise in real wages would increase investment – a conclusion ‘in flagrant conflict not only with common experience but also with the general theory of investment’. He thought Hayek had fallen ‘into a fallacy which is just the opposite of that which is to be deplored in the argument of some of the more extreme Keynesians . . . namely, that while they neglect changes in relative prices and concentrate wholly on changes in aggregate money demand, this line of thought neglects changes in aggregate money demand and concentrates excessively on changes in price relationships.’ He also doubted the empirical relevance of the Ricardo effect at the top of a boom, when a rise in real wages was more likely to increase consumption than investment. And as for the appropriate policy at the upper turning point, he disagreed with the idea that ‘if there has been a boom, final demand ought to be allowed to fall in order that consumers’ prices may fall and so, via the Ricardo effect, promote a revival of investment.’ He found that ‘very hard to swallow’, as he went on to elaborate. He made one last comment: ‘On the broader question of the relative field of public and private investment, I won’t dilate at length at this moment. I will only say that it seems to me an empirical question. If there is a large field of low yielding investment which can only be exploited if the state grants wayleaves and purchase rights, etc, then it seems to me clear that, at low rates of interest, whether we like it or not, the state must play a more active part if investment is not to be hampered.’ When Fritz replied to Lionel on 19 July (‘Correspondence’, RP) he first congratulated him on his election as a Fellow of the British Academy, announced in The Times on 16 July. At Keynes’s instigation, Keynes, Robertson, Hawtrey, Pigou and Clapham had nominated Robbins and Hicks, Robbins ‘on account of his important works . . . [his five books] and his distinction as a teacher as Professor of Economics in the University of London since 1929’. Keynes had elicited an order of preference from the other economist fellows, namely ‘Robbins, Hicks, with almost unanimous support for both of them’ (Keynes to Beatrice Webb, 31 December 1941, Keynes

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to Clapham, 13 April 1942, Keynes BA/1). Lionel was unaware of Keynes’s initiative but Hayek heard, and told Lionel, that at the election meeting (Robbins and Hicks were elected) Beatrice Webb had abstained from voting on the ground that it was time to elect non-capitalist economists. Two years later Pigou, Robertson, Keynes and Robbins nominated Hayek (Keynes to LCR, 8 March 1944, Keynes BA/1). Hayek’s defence of his paper was that, first, he had indeed been assuming full employment and, second, he had been concerned with the effect of a rise in real wages on the ratio of investment to output not on aggregate investment. Hence the paradox did not follow. But he admitted he did think that consumption should not be maintained at its boom level once the boom had broken. ‘Your attitude on all this really involves what seems to me to be the basic fallacy of all underconsumptionist doctrines, the belief that every decline in final demand must have deflationary effects.’ He did not believe this, so that ‘the maintenance of the excess final demand seems to me to have the most undesirable effect in that it will reduce not only the volume of private investment, but that it will make unprofitable a whole class of investment, and that probably the most important one, namely that connected with a transition to more capitalistic methods of production.’ Hayek then turned to his current work, sending Lionel a copy of ‘the still unfinished manuscript of what I used to call my “pamphlet”’ and asking him to read it ‘pencil in hand’ and make drafting suggestions especially for shortening it. The typescript was that of The Road to Serfdom – the road from socialist economic planning to totalitarianism – which was to make Hayek famous when it was published in March 1944. In sending it to Lionel, and to Machlup on 8 August 1942 (Machlup 43–15), he thought he had two more chapters on postwar prospects still to write. He asked Machlup for criticism and whether he might be able to arrange for publication in the USA (on which see FAH 2, 15–18). Unfortunately his friends’ comments on the draft chapters have not survived. Life in dreary wartime London was brightened somewhat by visitors in 1942, including William Rappard from Geneva, Herbert Feis, adviser on international economic affairs at the State Department, whom Robbins had met in London in the 1930s, and his sister Caroline’s fellow historian Conyers Read.10 Robbins and Meade had many contacts with American officials working in London, including the Ambassador, John Gilbert Winant, who had been the director of the ILO, and his special assistant, E.F. Penrose, a 10

Rappard to LCR, 10 July 1942, Private Letters War Period, RP; Memorandum for Mr Feis, 16 June 1942, Feis Papers Box 21 Folder London Trip 1942, Library of Congress; LCR to ICR, 10 October 1942.

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Cambridge-educated economist who had also worked at the ILO (Penrose 1953, 36). Lionel often met Alan Steyne, also at the Embassy, and he met Paul Appleby the Undersecretary of Agriculture when he was in London in 1942 (Steyne to LCR, 25 August, LCR to Steyne, 27 August 1942, T230/93). Lionel had met Leo Pasvolsky, also an economist and special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, ‘at a lunch every year or so for many years’ (WD, 18); on 12 January 1942 he passed on to Bridges (T230/93) a memorandum from Pasvolsky to Hull, which ‘exemplifies more vividly than I could hope to put it, the state of perplexity and bewilderment at our present attitude [about Article VII] which obtains in the minds of the more enlightened officials of the Department of State’. In July 1942 Meade produced a proposal for an International Commercial Union as a complement to Keynes’s International Clearing Union (JEM 3, 27–35). Members of the Commercial Union would undertake not to grant tariff or other preferences to other members without extending them to all members, to remove quantitative restrictions or prohibitions on imports from other Union members and to reduce to a defined maximum the amount of tariff protection they afforded their own industries. There could be exceptions in certain circumstances and state trading would be allowed, but there would have to be an international institution to interpret the rules and arbitrate complaints. Gaitskell made sure the proposal reached Dalton, who took it up enthusiastically. He had a version of it, written by Gaitskell, circulated as a Board of Trade official paper: ‘This might be better than a ministerial paper, since it is rather free trade and might, therefore, provoke outbursts from more than one quarter.’ He proposed an interdepartmental committee of officials on postwar commercial policy, and by the time it met he had arranged, with Lionel’s whole-hearted support, that James should be seconded parttime to the Board of Trade to work on the proposal (Board of Trade, Project of a commercial union, 5 November 1942, T230/125; Pimlott ed 1986b, 476, 501, 507). There Meade worked closely with Percivale Leisching, whom Dalton had managed to move from the Dominions Office after hearing (Pimlott ed 1986b, 476–7) that Liesching was ‘Middle forties, energetic, intelligent, knowing something of external economics, and . . . the one rising light of the Dominions Office’, who was reputed to be able to ‘hold his own in a battle of wits with the Treasury and the Foreign Office’. Dalton did not only have strong, free trade views about postwar commercial policy. He also had strong views about the postwar treatment of Germany. At the end of August 1942 he wrote a memorandum on the subject, sending it to the Foreign Secretary and to Anderson, requesting an interdepartmental committee of officials on reparations (Dalton to

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Anderson, 29 August 1942, CAB123/215; Cairncross 1986, 18–19). Given that Britain and Germany were each other’s main competitor in export markets, he thought it would be useful for ‘some of our officials to play at being Nazi-German experts advising a victorious Hitler, . . . to work out a German plan for dealing with a beaten Britain, on the assumption that only German interests counted; then to turn this plan round to fit the case of a beaten Germany and a victorious Britain; then to consider what amendments should be made in this plan to meet the interests of the other United Nations; finally to suggest any reasons why this plan, as thus amended, should not be adopted.’ As he said, this would be ‘a great aid to clear and uninhibited thinking’. He attacked the idea that reparations were ‘rationally and morally disreputable’ and that this was one of the lessons of interwar experience: ‘The truth, it seems to me, is simply that we Europeans made an unnecessary muddle of reparations, as of many other economic and political questions, in that ignoble inter-war period.’ We ought to be able to do better this time. He noted that reparations had moral, economic and political aspects. ‘Morally there is no limit to what it would be just to claim, just as there has been no limit to German wickedness, wholesale and retail, before and during the war.’ Economically, the effects of reparations on the recipients had to be clearly analysed. Politically, it had to be recognized that ‘all those tough Slavs lying to the east of [Germany] . . . will expect very solid compensation indeed for all the unspeakable maltreatment they have suffered’ and that the British public would expect at the very least that Germany bear the costs of occupation (RES6, Reparations, Memorandum by the President of the Board of Trade, 28 August 1942, T230/121). Lionel told Harcourt Johnstone (1 September 1942, T230/121) that he ‘like[d] this paper. It blows away a vast fog of confused ideas regarding common equity and our own interest and leaves the field clear for systematic discussion.’ He agreed with its main conclusions, especially that the economic consequences of reparations had to be analysed in conjunction with proposals for the military and industrial disarmament of Germany, since too much deindustrialization would be harmful to the world economy. He wrote a long paper on the subject to clear his own mind on the economic issues, which he circulated to the interdepartmental committee when it was appointed in November (see Chapter 13). After a week’s leave in late September Lionel wrote to Caroline on 10 October, for the first time in many months. He could not ‘plead the incessant preoccupation & fatigue which is perhaps a reasonable excuse at most other times. But . . . the mood to talk as one would and the opportunity to do so, so seldom coincide, that an almost endless regression of procrastination

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results. Add to which that we are not allowed central or any other kind of heating in the office nowadays which is a strong inducement to go to bed & get warm if there is nothing very pressing to do late at night . . . ’ Some of his letter was about India, where the Congress Party, having rejected the British government’s offer of Dominion status after the war, had begun a campaign of civil disobedience to force Britain to quit India immediately. Lionel did not think he agreed with his sister: he was ‘all for clearing out when the war is over’, even though he feared it would be followed by communal violence, but he thought Britain could not leave now, ‘with the Japanese just over the border’. ‘I simply cannot see why we should be expected to jeopardize the whole strategic position – for believe me that is what it would mean – just because a set of shallow & very touchy Congress politicians – I hope I don’t need to persuade you that Gandhi is not one of the great saints of history – simply can’t wait a few months or years before we are in a position to carry out our perfectly genuine promises.’ There was family news: Anne had left school for a secretarial college in Oxford; Richard was at boarding school and had joined the Air Training Corps. As for his own work: ‘I see the economic side of the war more completely, I fancy, than almost anybody else. Nothing in the world, however, would tempt me to continue as a government servant once the war is over: the moment I can get away without feeling that I am shirking essential duties you won’t see me for dust. I was not born for the twilight of bureaucracy; and the prospect of one day once again being able to call a spade a spade (and a fool a fool) without rocking someone else’s boat is for me one of the main hopes of peace.’

THIRTEEN

Anglo-American Conversations

By the autumn of 1942 the ‘conversations’ called for in Article VII of the Mutual Aid Agreement had still not taken place. Several more months elapsed before they began in an informal way. In those months – the period of this chapter – much of Lionel’s work revolved around postwar planning: monetary policy, commodity policy, commercial policy, reparations and domestic employment policy. Progress was uneven. On the international issues the UK government had invited the Dominions and India to official talks in London, which opened at the Treasury on Friday 23 October, the day General Sir Bernard Montgomery began the battle of El Alamein. Sir Richard Hopkins chairing the first meeting explained that they were an opportunity for the other governments’ representatives to consider the current British proposals for postwar international economic reconstruction (PET(42) 1st meeting, DO35/1014/7, TNA). These included Keynes’s plans for an International Clearing Union – which had been disclosed informally to the US Administration by the UK Treasury representative in Washington, Sir Frederick Phillips – and for International Regulation of Primary Products. Phillips chaired most of the meetings in London. According to Hume Wrong of the Canadian delegation, ‘The chief figures in these talks are Keynes (the main promoter of ideas and debate), Prof. Robertson of the Treasury, Prof. Robbins of the War Cabinet Secretariat, [Roland] Wilson of Australia, Sir Ramaswami Mudaliar and Sir Theodore Gregory for India, [Richard] Campbell for New Zealand’ and his own colleagues Louis Rasminsky and W.A. Mackintosh (Wrong diary, 26 October 1942, MG30/E101/4/23, LAC). After Keynes outlined his Clearing Union plan the delegates spent three meetings going through the plan paragraph by paragraph. They did the same with the commodity plan. Lionel made occasional contributions to the former discussion; he had more to say in the latter, answering many queries from the Dominions delegates, who 424

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had only just received a written version of the plan. He supported Keynes on several points, for instance over the management and financing of the buffer stocks; he also made drafting suggestions, especially to enable the plan to accommodate the differing needs of wealthier and poorer countries (PET(42) 2nd-8th meetings, 26–30 October and 2–3 November 1942, DO35/1014/7). After the talks Keynes revised both the Clearing Union and the commodity proposals, the latter drastically. The Canadians dined with Robbins at the Reform on 2 November. Rasminsky had been a graduate student at LSE in 1928–30 before going to work for the League of Nations in Geneva, where Lionel met him again in 1939 (Muirhead 1999, 9–10, 43–4). Wrong had been an historian at the University of Toronto before being enticed into the diplomatic service in 1927 (Bothwell 1991, 80); Mackintosh was in peacetime professor of economics at Queen’s University. Gregory joined them after dinner. ‘A good evening’s talk,’ Wrong wrote in his diary (MG30/E101/4/23, LAC), ‘centring round the prospects of a sensible postwar world. Robbins is sensibly optimistic that we may get agreement on sound economic policies of an expansionist nature. We all were blue about the calibre of politicians to direct the complicated business of gov’t on other than purely opportunistic lines. Gregory is more destructive in outlook, but agrees that we must try new methods. General puzzlement over the future of Europe and the prospect of constancy in international matters from the U.S.’ Wrong ‘like[d] Robbins’ mind and outlook – the best sort of “intellectual” Englishman, broad minded, well informed, constructive and with a fine sense of values. On the whole the consensus was on the gloomy side – a sort of hesitation to believe that we can devise means of running decently the modern world.’ Before the talks concluded on 9 November one meeting was devoted to commercial policy (PET(42)12th meeting, 6 November 1942, DO35/1014/7). Sir Arnold Overton, Permanent Secretary of the Board of Trade, explained it was to be ‘an informal discussion’. The Americans might want to begin talks under Article VII in January and then it would be necessary to consider ‘the elimination of all forms of discriminatory treatment in international commerce and the reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers’. He warned that ‘discrimination, in American eyes, meant above all Imperial preference, and that excessive trade barriers, in British eyes, meant chiefly the United States tariff ’. In the ensuing discussion Keynes argued that free trade was more to the advantage of the UK than to almost any other country. Robbins followed him by remarking that he ‘thought it would be a mistake to discuss with the Americans only questions which concerned trade with them. It was also necessary to deal with the economic chaos in

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Europe since the last war, which would require remedies of an entirely different order of magnitude.’ At the end of the meeting, however, Sir Donald Fergusson put forward his personal views on future UK agricultural policy: referring to the government pledge on agricultural prices, he ‘said that in fact the character and scale of war-time food production might have to be continued for some time after the cessation of hostilities and that the adjustment to peace-time conditions might be slow’. A couple of hours later Fergusson was defending the latest version of the Ministry of Agriculture’s plans at a joint meeting of the official committees on Post-War External and Internal Economic Problems – ‘in view of the international implications’ and because of criticism from the Board of Trade, the Ministry of Food and the Treasury (IEP(42)21st meeting, CAB87/55). When Sir Wilfrid Eady commented that some of the MAF proposals ‘did not seem to him very alarming’, Lionel quickly responded. He pointed out, according to the minutes, ‘that the proposals might be an embarrassment in international discussions if we had to say that we were going to maintain a given volume of production whatever the terms of trade might be and that we were determined to give whatever consequential degree of protection proved to be necessary. Would not this condition introduce an unnecessary element of rigidity into the negotiations?’ Even more worryingly perhaps, the next day Eady wrote to Lionel (T230/1): ‘For the second time I was unable to follow your argument yesterday about your objection to the objective of the agricultural policy paper, and this makes me nervous.’ Lionel had known Eady as an assistant secretary in the Ministry of Labour in the 1930s (see Chapter 9). Eady had been promoted to joint second secretary of the Treasury in August 1942. He met Lionel again when Lionel gave evidence to the Beveridge Committee, when ‘it was pleasant once again to see and hear you in action’. With his lack of knowledge of economics he had sought Lionel’s help in explaining Meade’s proposal for countercyclical national insurance contributions. Lionel suggested dinner at the Reform (as well as sending Eady an explanatory note from Meade) (Eady to LCR, 29 June, LCR to Eady, 3 July, Eady to LCR, 4 July 1942, T230/101). Now Eady wanted ‘to get clear how real are the risks in Fergusson’s policy, upon which you and Meade were touching’, pointing out that the Dominions representatives ‘[did] not assume that anybody will regard it as practical politics to have a complete free trade system, or even to aim at it’. He claimed that he could not ‘find that Fergusson’s proposals are such a challenge [to Article VII] and at present I do not see how we at the Treasury could advise the Chancellor that Fergusson’s scheme, quite apart from its cost to the Exchequer, is dangerous to the negotiations with the Americans.’

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Lionel replied at length on 9 November (T230/1). He conceded he was ‘a quite unrepentant free trader’ but he ‘hope[d] that, while I am in Whitehall, I can subordinate my private predilections to the requirements of the business of the day’ and admitted it was politically necessary to support agriculture, so that ‘The only practical question is how.’ He thought Eady would agree that a commitment to high tariffs would indeed be an ‘embarrassment’ in the Article VII conversations. Fergusson’s scheme involved a commitment which would be ‘much more rigid ’ than tariffs. ‘It seems to be unobjectionable and flexible. But, by taking as its objective the maintenance of the fertility of a certain acreage, it involves an objective which, in fact, is more rigid and less flexible than a system of fixed protective tariffs.’ It was ‘analytically much nearer to a general quota system than to a general protective system, only here the quota relates, not to quantities of product, but to quantities of the factor of production, land’. It was true that if world agricultural prices rose after the war the degree of protection would be small, but, equally, it would be very great if prices fell. ‘We should be in the position of saying “so long as prices are high and you people are doing moderately well, our protection will be small. But if prices fall and you seek an enlargement of your markets, our protection will necessarily be higher”.’ Leaving aside for the moment (he returned to it later in the letter) ‘the economic folly of thus insulating our economy from the effects of agricultural progess’, ‘can it really be argued that this would be thought a helpful attitude in international negotiations?’ As he noted, it had emerged in the course of discussion that the object of bulk purchase of food imports was to provide a concealed subsidy to farmers via higher prices to consumers. He had suspected this was the real rationale of import boards ever since his controversy with Frank Wise in 1931 (see Chapter 7), but he had been reproached for being cynical. A better way of supporting agriculture would be to assist dairy farming, for example by a subsidy to milk production, which would be desirable on nutritional grounds. He had tackled Fergusson on what his objection would be: it was only that ‘it would foster dairy farming at the expense of the mixed farms for which he has such an affection.’ Fergusson’s policy would also require the limitation of imports of cheap feeding stuffs, on which many farmers had come to rely before the war. When Eady replied a fortnight later (23 November, T230/1), he said he now understood Robbins’s point of view, but he still did not agree with it. James Meade came to regard Eady as the ‘real menace to the effectiveness of the Economic Section’ (COD, 138), but for now his good relations with Lionel were useful. During 1942 the US Treasury Department had been

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working on its own plan for postwar monetary stabilization. Its author was the economist Harry Dexter White, like Jacob Viner a former student of F.W. Taussig, who had joined the Treasury to work for Viner in 1934. Robbins met him when White was visiting London in 1935 (White, Personal report on London Trip, April-May 1935, and Summary of conversations with men interviewed in London, 13 June 1935, Morgenthau Correspondence Box 312, Roosevelt Library). His plan for a Stabilization Fund and a Bank for Reconstruction and Development had been leaked to Keynes via Phillips in Washington in July 1942 – a month before Phillips was allowed to give Keynes’s plan to White – and Keynes had discussed it with White in London in October. After several redrafts the January 1943 version of the Stabilization Fund plan was officially transmitted to London at the beginning of February (Moggridge 1992, 682–8). When the Economic Section had not received a copy by 23 February Lionel wrote to Eady (T230/39), who responded immediately with copies of the White plan, Keynes’s analysis of the differences between the Stabilization Fund (SF) and the Clearing Union (CU) and telegrams from and to Phillips in Washington, also informing him that Keynes was going to explain CU to the finance ministers of the European Allies the next day. He suggested another ‘quiet dinner together, because there is a good deal about this and other matters I want to discuss with you’. While the two plans had similar objectives, especially to provide stable exchange rates and promote balance-of-payments adjustment, under White’s plan countries would subscribe to a Stabilization Fund, made up of contributions of gold and domestic currencies from members and totalling at least $5 billion (Horsefield 1969, 18–25). A fixed proportion of the initial contribution had to be paid in gold. On joining the fund each country would have to commit itself to abandon exchange restrictions other than those approved by the fund, to fix its exchange rates against other members’ currencies and not to make changes without the consent of the fund, and also, in various specified ways, to facilitate multilateral trade. Each country could then borrow other countries’ currencies to meet a temporary balance-of-payments deficit but (as in CU) only up to the limit of its quota. Exchange-rate changes could be made only to correct ‘fundamental disequilibrium’ in the balance of payments and would require the consent of four-fifths of the members’ votes (which in both CU and SF were determined by countries’ quotas). Both schemes required convertibility of current account transactions but allowed controls on capital movements. They were both published, the Clearing Union as a white paper, on 7 April 1943.

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In November 1942 the Eighth Army under Montgomery succeeded in breaking out of El Alamein; by 4 November Rommel’s Afrikakorps was in retreat. In the East the Red Army was holding Stalingrad. And on 8 November Anglo-American forces landed in Casablanca, Oran and Algiers. Churchill warned, in his famous phrase, that this was only ‘the end of the beginning’. Nonetheless church bells, silenced in June 1940, were rung on Sunday 15 November to celebrate the victory in Egypt. On 18 November Sir William Malkin, the legal adviser to the Foreign Office, chaired the first meeting of the official Committee on Reparation and Economic Security set up at Dalton’s instigation (see Chapter 12). The members included Keynes and Playfair from the Treasury, Gladwyn Jebb and Nigel Ronald (Foreign Office), Percivale Leisching, Lionel Robbins and James Meade. In asking Robbins to serve, Anderson had said he could have a colleague from the Section if he wished; Lionel asked for James (note by Anderson 29 October, LCR to Burke, 29 October 1942, CAB123/215). Dalton was not keen on having Keynes on the committee: Kingsley Wood pointed out that the author of The Economic Consequences of the Peace could hardly be left off. Liesching and Jebb both reported to Dalton after the meeting (Pimlott ed 1986b, 516, 520). ‘Liesching says that discussion today was nearly all on procedure, and that he and others urged that they should begin by considering broad questions of “Economic Security” before “Reparations”. This seems to have been more or less agreed. Keynes, towards the end, “showed signs of putting on his old racing colours”, declaring that we should consider nothing except British interests, and that any payments of reparations by or to anyone could not fail to damage us. . . . I can see that we are going to have the sort of trouble I anticipated, but I think there are enough good men on the Committee to get through it. Robbins, apparently, said that he intended to put in a paper on his own. I think that this should be the right sort of stuff. . . . C.R.E.S. is to meet at least once a week, and oftener if required.’

In the next few days Robbins wrote up his notes on reparations and economic security, sending them to Anderson on 26 November (CAB123/215) as well as to the members of the committee. When Dalton saw them, he approved (Pimlott ed 1986b, 522–3): ‘on the whole, I like [Robbins’s paper]. It contains positive proposals for the repair of damage by the Germans after the war, while recognising that most of the benefit of this will go to others and not to us. . . . I decide to see Robbins, after a long and deliberate interval, and seek to line him up with other members of the Committee, who are, on the whole, of my mind.’ When Dalton saw Robbins, he was, according to Dalton, ‘slightly uncertain at the beginning of our relationships, but after a while we settle down to discuss C.R.E.S. . . . I tell him that, on the whole,

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I agree with the line of his paper.’ Dalton invited Robbins to dinner three weeks later; again he found him ‘slightly self-conscious. But he talks sense on the whole, and is quite amusing’, entertaining Dalton with anecdotes of Cherwell and Beveridge. Dalton thought that now they had renewed relations, ‘we shall, no doubt, meet from time to time, and, on the whole, in harmony, at least during the war’ (ibid., 525, 538). Robbins, like Dalton, was clear on the moral aspect of reparations (Notes on reparations and economic security, T230/121). About this there was ‘no real ambiguity. . . . It is not repugnant to good morals that he who does damage to others should make good the losses; and although, of course, there are complications in passing from the case of individuals to the case of communities, such difficulties are a minimum where a community has been so united in evil doing as Germany under the Nazis. . . . Whatever may be our doubts concerning the exact degree of German responsibility for the outbreak of the War of 1914/18 . . . there can be no doubt concerning the responsibility for the present conflict.’ At the same time it was practically impossible for Germany to pay the full cost of the war, not even by payments over a long period. Hence there had to be some arbitrary principle to determine which of the competing claims should be met. It followed that the British claim would be small: ‘No doubt excellent arguments could be devised to support the view that a community which has spent so much and afforded such extensive assistance to others should be entitled to a large share. But it is frivolous to suppose that such arguments would not be outweighed by others. The urgency of the claims of the devastated areas, the poverty of their inhabitants and the spectacular nature of the outrages to which they have been submitted – all these would have much more compelling power than any financial computations.’ This was ‘not the only snag’ of reparations from a British point of view: there was the fact that Germany could only pay reparations (to any country, not just Britain) by increasing its exports which were directly competitive with British exports. ‘Now at any time this would be inconvenient. At a time when we were struggling to remedy an unprecedented deficiency in our own balance of payments, it might be a disastrous embarrassment.’ But it would be a mistake to conclude that the UK should support the policy of the clean sheet, if only because it would be ‘living in a fool’s paradise’ to assume that its Allies would not ask for reparations. Robbins then turned to the question of the disarmament of Germany. As well as the destruction of weapons and the armaments industry, including the aircraft industry and possibly the machine tool industry (which Paul Einzig [1942] advocated), this would require the reduction of stocks of

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foods and raw materials to normal levels and the reduction of the trade barriers which had enabled Germany to build up ersatz industries such as synthetic oil plants before the war. (If Germany were more reliant on imports for food and raw materials, it would be more vulnerable to the threat of economic blockade.) This did not mean the deindustrialization of Germany, which would seriously harm the world economy. He suggested instead that an international body should acquire the majority of shares in German industries easily converted to armaments production. He also supported Dalton’s proposal of an Allied commissioner in the Reichsbank. Returning to reparations, Robbins suggested that after the restoration of all stolen property the principle should be the repair or replacement of material damage. This had the advantages of ‘some flavour of rough justice’ and being able to be paid in a relatively short period. As he had commented in his earlier note to Harcourt Johnstone (1 September 1942, T230/121), ‘I favour reparations which are sharp and short rather than lenient and long drawn out. We have solid justification for wishing to punish the present generations of Germans. I don’t feel so strongly about the Germans that are not yet unborn – at any rate, if before they arrive we can arrange for a better educational tradition.’ By allowing payments in kind, including labour services, it also minimized the transfer problem of cash payments. Lionel hoped reparations on this basis would ‘at once avoid long drawnout arrangements which are unlikely to be politically stable, and . . . byepass general monetary disturbances and embarrassment to our own trade by requiring that the main part of the payment be made in kind suitable for the repair of material damage’, although he did not think there would be much ‘positive gain’ to the UK. He thought his proposals for German economic disarmament would be more beneficial, but these were essentially for the period of Allied occupation; for the longer run there must be an international settlement, into which Germany could gradually be fitted, to secure peace and prosperity. In other notes (Notes on the international settlement, Note on security in post-war Europe, T230/121) he admitted he still saw the ultimate solution in some form of international government, for which a federation of the English-speaking world plus Western Europe would be a good beginning. He imagined too a postwar European Union, with a European defence force composed mainly of British forces in the early postwar years. Keynes was more critical of Dalton’s views but his proposals to the committee were not very different from Robbins’s, since he too emphasized payments in kind rather than financial transfers. But he also proposed that

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a demilitarized Germany should be permanently taxed on its export earnings as its contribution to international peacekeeping (JMK 26, 335–46). Lionel was concerned about the possible adverse economic repercussions, especially on Britain’s exports, of such a levy (draft letter to Keynes, T230/121). The Malkin Committee completed its report in August 1943 (Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Reparation and Economic Security, 31 August 1943, T230/124).1 Following Dalton’s remit and the preoccupations of its main contributors, it focussed only on Germany and devoted as much attention to economic security as to reparations proper. It also considered at length restitution, Germany’s contribution to peacekeeping (adopting Keynes’s proposal) and the treatment of prewar claims on Germany. Lionel’s contribution can be detected in some of the wording (for instance, on the moral issue and on the need for a simple criterion to determine the apportionment of claims as between the Allies) as well as in the specific recommendations (for payments in kind, etc), although most of these were on lines he shared with Keynes and other members of the committee. As Cairncross (1986, 21–2) pointed out, Lionel’s idea of international shareholding did not win the support of the rest of the committee, but the idea of requiring freer trade did appear in the report. Dalton’s other committee, on Post-War Commercial Policy, also began meeting in late November 1942, chaired by Sir Arnold Overton. Liesching, Meade and Shackle represented the Board of Trade; S.D. Waley and Henderson the Treasury; Nigel Ronald and P.A. Clutterbuck the Foreign and Dominions Offices respectively; Robbins the Economic Section. Whereas the reparations committee met once a week over several months, the Overton Committee met twice a week for six weeks and produced its report in January 1943. (The minutes and the report are in T230/171.) It took as its starting point the Dalton-Gaitskell memorandum on Meade’s proposal for a Commercial Union (see Chapter 12). The committee interpreted its terms of reference to be ‘to prepare in the light of the President’s [Dalton’s] note, and with due regard to the terms of Article 7 of the Mutual Aid Agreement, the outline of a scheme for discussion with the U.S. authorities as a possible basis for agreement between the two Governments on the principles which should govern commercial policy in the post-war era’ (Report, paragraph 2). The scheme it recommended explicitly assumed both a multilateral international payments system and international cooperation to prevent worldwide 1

Although copies of the committee’s many papers survive in Keynes’s and LCR’s office files, the minutes of most of the meetings do not.

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depressions: ‘Either the Clearing Union project or proposals of similar effect form the indispensable preliminary to any restoration of multilateral international trade’; the Clearing Union and the commodity proposals should help to prevent depressions, ‘and we hope that further projects . . . such as those for enlarged international investment, may be suggested by the Americans themselves’. It advocated a multilateral approach to creating a freer and non-discriminatory trading environment in place of the bilateral negotiations favoured by the US Administration (and enshrined in the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934). This would produce quicker results in terms of reducing trade barriers generally and could get round the immovable obstacle that the US was looking for a drastic modification of imperial preference: ‘any concessions that we could secure from the United States under a bilateral agreement supplementing the 1938 [AngloAmerican] Trade Agreement would provide a wholly inadequate return for this sacrifice. . . . it is only as part of a large-scale multilateral agreement that we could justifiably undertake to make any considerable modification of Imperial Preference.’ The recent talks with the Dominions also suggested the UK ought to take a bold initiative in discussions with the US and ‘to make a positive attack on high tariffs rather than to adopt a merely defensive line in regard to Imperial Preference.’ The main specific recommendations were that existing tariff preferences should be reduced by 50 per cent of their prewar level, except that no preferential margin need be reduced below 5 per cent ad valorem, and no new preferences should be created; all protective tariffs should be subject to a ceiling of 25 per cent ad valorem and those below the ceiling should be reduced by 25 per cent of their level before the war, except that no duty need be reduced below 10 per cent ad valorem; subsidies to exports which reduced export prices below domestic prices should be prohibited; existing import quotas should be gradually increased by a specified amount each year, starting two years after the end of the hostilities, except when the protective effect of the quota would be below the 25 per cent ad valorem tariff ceiling or when a country could show it was in balance-of-payments difficulties; state trading would be allowed subject to the same rules; and the rules should be enshrined in a multilateral convention, which would establish the Commercial Union and set up a commission to oversee and enforce their operation. There were serious disagreements within the committee, especially but not only over the use of quantitative restrictions on imports. The Commercial Union was supported by the representatives of the Board of Trade, the Foreign Office and the Dominions Office, but not by the two from the

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Treasury. Waley argued at the seventh meeting on 14 December against the multilateral approach to reducing trade barriers that the ‘most hopeful approach was that of bilateral agreements spread by m.f.n.[most favoured nation] clauses.’ He nonetheless went with the majority in signing their report. Henderson objected to the specific proposals on tariffs, preferences, subsidies, import restrictions and state trading, as well as to the multilateral approach as a whole, and prepared his own minority report, reflecting his pessimistic conception of the postwar world in which Britain, and other countries in economic difficulties, would need to rely on exchange and import controls, economic planning and state trading for many years to come. (His report was later published: Clay ed 1955, 209–19.) As Robbins commented to Anderson on 14 January (T230/171), ‘Sir Hubert [Henderson] . . . has never made any secret of his opposition to Article 7 and all that it stands for; and his hope is that we shall eventually be able to evade the obligations of our signature.’ But Keynes, too, thought the Overton Report had too strong a free-trade bias (JMK 26, 253) and had ‘considerable sympathy’ with Henderson that quantitative restrictions had some advantages over tariffs. The problem with them was that it was hard to avoid discrimination between suppliers (JMK 25, 198). Robbins made no secret of his own belief in the ‘desirability of eliminating obstacles to trade on as large a scale as possible’. But even without the ‘overwhelming’ intellectual arguments, ‘the fact is that we have signed Article 7.’ He told Anderson that in his view the report did not go far enough in some of its recommendations and in others left loopholes for undesirable trade practices, but ‘I accept my share of responsibility for what is said.’ In the meetings he argued, for instance, for tighter restrictions on subsidies to exports on 8 December. He argued on 14 December, when tables had been produced to show the probable effects of different tariff ceilings, for opening discussions with the Americans on the basis of a 15 per cent ceiling and 50 per cent reduction in preferences, in the hope of settling on 20 per cent and 60–65 per cent. The others thought such a ceiling too low and quite unrealistic. On import restrictions, when Henderson protested on 18 December that it was being assumed that tariffs were somehow less objectionable than quantitative restrictions, he and Meade counterattacked vigorously (5th, 7th and 8th meetings). Outside the committee Meade, aware of Keynes’s views, tackled the issue of quantitative restrictions partly as a result of a conversation with Keynes in which Keynes challenged him to devise a nondiscriminatory basis for import quotas (JMK 26, 272–82). He subsequently produced a very long series of memoranda, extending to the end of 1946 (T230/9), which came to concentrate on the formulation of rules for the use

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of quantitative import restrictions on balance-of-payments grounds under the proposed Commercial Union. When Robbins briefed Anderson on the Overton Report he concentrated his fire on Henderson’s note of dissent (Report of the committee on commercial policy, 14 January 1943, T230/171). In his best polemical style he demolished Henderson’s criticisms of the specific recommendations one by one before turning to Henderson’s strategic and tactical objections to a multilateral approach. When Henderson characterized the majority report as seeking to return to nineteenth-century methods of trade policy, he countered with evident relish not just that ‘The economic policies of the age in which I was born and brought up, although doubtless not all that might have been wished, do not seem to me to compare unfavourably with the policies of the inter-war period’, but that nineteenth-century methods had usually been bilateral agreements with most favoured nation clauses. Quantitative restrictions, on the other hand, were typical of the eighteenth century, the age of mercantilism. ‘For a man whose Utopia lies so far in the dark backward and abysm of time, to describe the present proposals as old fashioned has the charm of audacity; but it is unconvincing.’ He concluded: ‘If the proposals of the author of the Majority Report have more relation to the 19th century than Sir Hubert’s, this is not because they look backwards, but because while he rediscovers with supererogatory zeal the practices of economic barbarism, they seek to restore what was good in the practice of the 19th century, while combining it with techniques which are the product of more recent advances in knowledge.’ Eady ‘greatly enjoyed’ this ‘U.X.B.’ [unexploded bomb] when Robbins tossed it to him for his private eye (Eady to LCR, 29 January 1943, T230/171). Anderson read it with great care. The signatories of the Overton Report, meanwhile, met again to draft a rejoinder to Henderson’s note of dissent, which was also circulated to ministers (note by Gorell Barnes, CAB123/221). Ministers had decided on 19 January to refer the Overton Report to the official committee on Post-War External Economic Problems, instructing its chairman to obtain the views of all the departments not represented on the Overton Committee. Not surprisingly, these departments raised objections, some wanting to retain quantitative restrictions, others export subsidies (Pressnell 1986, 102–6). Needless to say the Ministry of Agriculture disliked the Overton proposals. With the tide of war beginning to run in the Allies’ favour there was a new mood of optimism in London and Washington in 1943. It is perhaps appropriate that Lionel should have to find time in January to prepare a long paper on the role of the economist in the future machinery of government,

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which he ‘dictated and sorted out at all sorts of odd moments in the busy weeks since Christmas’ (LCR to Barlow, 26 January 1943, T230/283). He had been asked to write it for a small official committee on the Machinery of Government which reported to a larger ministerial committee on the same subject appointed in November 1942. He later appeared before the committee on 15 July. He included in his ‘Notes on the role of the economist in the future machinery of government’ (MGC1, 25 January 1943, CAB87/72) a brief historical survey and an account of the present working of the Economic Section, but began with a disclaimer, that he had no sympathy with the idea of a ‘gigantic economic staff, consisting of professional economists and statisticians, who should draw up plans, and then, presumably with some authorisation from the Cabinet, proceed to issue orders to the various departments, as the Supreme Command is said to issue orders to the various armies under its direction’. Fortunately, such an idea had not a ghost of a chance of being accepted. There was scope nonetheless for ‘a central organisation on the official level, whereby general ministerial review and co-ordination of economic policy can be facilitated. . . . The economic problem by its nature is essentially a single problem, although it has many facets.’ From his own experience in Whitehall he drew the conclusions that such an organization must be an official organization, within the civil service, staffed in the main by professionally trained economists, that something more than an interdepartmental committee of high officials, or even departmental economists, was necessary, and – ‘this is fundamental’ – the group had to be attached to a minister or a department directly responsible for policy. There was the question, though, of where in government it should be located. At the time he wrote the first draft he was, Chester recorded on 14 January (Chester 14/1), ‘very tired & depressed & nothing like his real self’ and had not seen Anderson for several weeks. In the paper he submitted he argued that if a committee as powerful as the Lord President’s Committee remained in existence in peacetime, it would make sense to leave the Section attached to it, but in the first draft he leant towards moving the Section into the Treasury to ensure the Section worked for a powerful minister. This would also fit in with the way that Treasury policy was moving: ‘Already, in the development of the war-time economy, Treasury policy has come to be framed more and more against a background of computations of national income and expenditure. We should only need to travel a little further along this road before the transformation of the nature of the policy becomes fully manifest, and the Treasury would emerge, not a ministry for Government book-keeping in the narrow sense, but rather as a Ministry of general

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economic policy – a Wirtschaftsministerium as the Germans would call it.’ He told Robert Hall later (22 June 1953, Economists Correspondence, RP) that Bridges and Brook asked him to take this out: they ‘thought that it was premature and might cause embarrassment, and as a dutiful civil servant I accepted the exhortations of my chiefs.’ After the war the Section moved into the Treasury, but not until 1953. Bridges otherwise agreed with Robbins (21 January 1943, T230/283) except that he thought Robbins ‘gravely over-estimat[ed]’ the difficulties of continuing the Section in peacetime when he wrote in his first draft ‘The continued existence of such an organisation as ours is, I think, bound to be a perpetual tight-rope performance, poised between the abysses of subservience and over-obtrusiveness; and perhaps it is only in the special conditions of war that such acrobatics have any chance of success. Certainly I have often found myself asking whether, in peace-time, it would be so easy to evoke the somewhat peculiar frame of mind necessary to the continuous performance of such a role.’ At Bridges’ request Robbins removed this. He also took the opportunity to emphasize that he would not be staying in government service after the war. Keynes agreed with Lionel that a distinction had to be made between professional economists and persons who had taken a degree in economics before entering government service but drew a different conclusion, telling him on 1 February (T230/283) that he envisaged academic economists who would become professors spending a few years in Whitehall en route to their professorships – which is what in fact happened to most of the members of the wartime Economic Section. The Beveridge Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services received an unexpectedly enthusiastic public reception in December 1942. Meade suggested to Keynes that ‘there really ought to be a similar publication on the subject of post-war employment’, indeed a ‘Keynes Report’: Keynes disagreed (JMK 27, 314–15). Nonetheless Meade and his colleagues persisted in their efforts to keep employment policy at the top of the postwar planning agenda, Robbins arranging with Anderson that the Section should prepare a memorandum which would go to a new ministerial Committee on Reconstruction Priorities. Lionel also told Anderson in no uncertain terms that Beveridge should not be invited to undertake an enquiry on employment (14 January 1943, CAB123/43): ‘I do not think it is too much to say that his knowledge of the scientific discussions of the subject in the last 25 years is not much greater than that of the average layman. . . . I speak in this respect as one who has been intimately associated with Sir William for the last 20 years.’ Meade began by circulating an outline to his Section

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colleagues. When they discussed it on 16 February 1943, Lionel argued for ‘a clear and simplified exposition’ but James believed the paper should not be too abstract. He circulated a revised outline, as did several of his colleagues including Lionel. The outlines differed largely in the order of presentation and Meade took his colleagues’ advice in, for instance, moving international economic policy ahead of domestic economic policy in the methods section when he wrote his first draft in March.2 Robbins sent a copy of this first draft to Keynes on 11 March (T230/66): ‘As you know, it was decided that we should bear full guilt for anything that was submitted. I am not asking you, therefore, to pronounce on it from the Treasury point of view. But the subject is so much your own, that I should feel it was altogether wrong not to consult you informally at the earliest possible stage.’ He asked Keynes to bear in mind that it was written for ministers, who would need many concepts explained. On this point Keynes, who had ‘few criticisms of substance’, responded that he thought the draft was too long: Anderson was the only minister who might be able to read it through without his attention wandering (JMK 27, 316–17). In the Section the critical and (usually) constructive comments of his colleagues obliged Meade to produce a second and third draft (JEM 1, 199–232). Then Lionel took over. He sent round his ‘first shot at a somewhat drastic redraft of our paper on Employment’ on 30 April (EC(S)(43)5 (Third revise), T230/15): ‘Consultations with friends whose judgment I am compelled to respect, convinced me that in order to provide the basis for a manageable discussion . . . [by ministers], it was necessary very drastically to curtail and rearrange the paper which had been prepared with such labour. After all that he has had to put up with from us, it would have been a last indignity to ask J.E.M. to do this. I have therefore shouldered the guilt myself.’ By this stage the paper conformed to the order Lionel had suggested and fell into four parts: the nature of the problem of unemployment, methods for its solution, immediate postwar problems and a summary of proposals for further investigation. Lionel cut back the account of the different types of unemployment, frictional, structural and depression unemployment, to state boldly and succinctly that ‘The main conditions which give rise to widespread and long lasting unemployment are two-fold, a deficiency of aggregate demand and an absence of labour mobility.’ Since ‘the aggregate demand for labour depends almost directly on aggregate expenditure on goods and services’, ‘the broad problem of maintaining employment appears 2

The outlines by Meade, Chantler, Fleming and LCR and Meade’s first draft (EC(S)(43)1–5) are in T230/15.

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to be essentially a problem of maintaining expenditure. We should endeavour to maintain consumption and investment . . . at that level at which, save for frictional influences, unemployment is absent.’ He stressed two qualifying assumptions: adequate labour mobility was needed to ensure that the maintenance of a high level of demand did not involve inflation; so were ‘moderate’ price and wage policies. He pruned the long section on ‘Methods of solution’, which included international action (for instance, Keynes’s commodity plan), the stabilization of private domestic investment by monetary policy and of public investment by proper timing and planning of public works expenditure, and the stabilization of consumption by hire-purchase regulations, countercyclical variation of social security contributions (Meade’s scheme was outlined in an appendix) and perhaps by an extension of the wartime deferred income tax scheme. He trimmed Meade’s lengthy discussions of budgetary implications, profit margins and wage rates, and labour mobility, and reduced the summary section to a single sheet. At this point Lionel left the office for North America. He passed the task of further revision of Meade’s paper to Fleming, telling Meade (T230/66): ‘I think he well understands your point of view & my intentions; and I trust he possesses your confidence in his intellectual probity. At any rate I hope it will commend itself to you as the best thing to do in the circumstances.’ Durbin commended the result to Attlee on 24 May (Maintenance of employment PR(43)26, Piercy 8/24, BLPES): not only was it ‘beautifully written’ but ‘it bears out my contention, with which I fear I may have wearied you in the past, that economists are now able to agree on interesting and important propositions. The Economic Section contains economists of almost every persuasion, from extreme faith in capitalism to membership of the Fabian Society and the Labour Party. Yet they have been able to produce an agreed document of great interest.’ For the official discussions of the paper see Chapter 14. The coalition government was still dithering over postwar commercial policy, with, roughly speaking, Labour ministers inclined to support the Overton proposals, Conservatives, particularly those with an attachment to the Empire and imperial preference, against. But the prospect of AngloAmerican talks remained and some decisions had to be taken. Briefing Anderson for a meeting of ministers on 23 March, Robbins noted that the ‘volume of papers [on this subject] has now become so great that I am sure that you would not wish me to ask you to read yet another paper attempting to cover the whole field’. He thought he should nonetheless ‘set down certain salient considerations relating to the particular problem of the quantitative

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regulation of trade’, since he suspected, correctly, that this would be ‘the main stumbling block’. Stating bluntly that the ‘most general objection to quantitative regulation on grounds of principle is simply this: that, much more than tariffs, it is likely to insulate the national economy and thus bring it about that goods are procured at higher cost than otherwise would have been necessary’, he expounded this argument and its ramifications at some length (Commercial policy and quantitative regulation of imports, 19 March 1943, T230/9). The ministerial meeting decided the Dominion governments should be consulted. When Churchill was ‘a little unhappy’ about this taking place before the Cabinet had reached any decisions, Attlee and Dalton agreed to put up a joint memorandum which would summarize the differing ministerial views and the main issues to be decided as well as suggest a draft telegram to the Dominions (Bridges to Lord President, and Anderson to Prime Minister, 26 March 1943, CAB123/221). Meade briefed Cherwell on 31 March (T230/125) on ‘the essential questions’ in the controversy. When the War Cabinet met on 8 April it had before it a note, drafted by Dalton, listing three options: (A) a multilateral approach on the lines of the Overton Report, (B) a multilateral agreement without a commitment to limit quantitative restrictions and (C) a permanent policy of trade controls and bilateral agreements. The discussion lasted 21/2 hours. From Dalton’s point of view it seemed to be going badly. ‘But, after much meandering and trite talk, the P.M. puts to the vote the question who is in favour of “View A as amended by Lord Cherwell”. (The latter merely suggested that we should reserve the right to use quantitative import restrictions when our balance of payments was in danger, and not when some international authority declared that it was in danger.) Both Kingsley Wood and I said that this quite met our view. The vote was 15 or so to 2,’ with even the Minister of Agriculture, to Dalton’s surprise, voting in favour. Dalton suspected that ‘The deus ex machina was Lord Cherwell. He had clearly briefed the P.M. right, having himself been briefed by Meade.’ Dalton also recorded that the Cabinet, ‘after further rambling’, agreed that a committee of ministers, to include Cherwell and Dalton among others, should be appointed to elaborate on View A as amended and to suggest procedure. The committee would also consider the commodity plan (Pimlott ed 1986b, 572, 577–8; Pressnell 1986, 106–7). It met on 20 and 21 April, with Bridges and Robbins acting as secretaries, recommended the next step should be another set of talks with the Dominions and India and finalized the telegrams that, after Cabinet approval, were dispatched on 22 April (GEN5/1st and 2nd meetings and GEN5/3, 20 April 1943 (with marginal comment by LCR), T230/128).

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The MAF memorandum on postwar agricultural policy also reached the Cabinet in April. Lionel had tried and failed in the Internal Economic Problems committee on 1 January (IEP(43)1st meeting, CAB87/57) to delay its circulation until ministers had settled ‘the main lines’ of postwar policy. His latest brief for Anderson was lengthy and he sent with it both his earlier critique of the memorandum in December 1941 and a copy of his November 1942 letter to Eady. In the new paper (Post-war agricultural policy, 1 April 1943, T230/1) he dealt first with practical implications – the policy would involve a substantial limitation of the import of cheap feeding stuffs, a retention of the wartime system of bulk purchase and a more or less fixed production plan regardless of changes in international conditions – before expatiating on the ‘fundamental misconception’ that the ultimate objective of agricultural policy should be the maintenance of the fertility of the soil. This was a confusion of means with ends (consumer welfare and national security) which would be better served by cheap food imports. He argued for his alternative policy of subsidizing milk production but concluded by making the point that any satisfactory policy for postwar agriculture must not jeopardize postwar commercial policy. It would be premature to make any commitment to the agricultural sector, and as for any objection from the Ministry that the matter was urgent and farmers were impatient: ‘it is quite easy to believe that farming opinion is impatient. I have long private connections with the National Farmers Union, and I can well understand that the officials of that body regard this as the grand opportunity for consolidating a position of exceptional privilege for ever.’ The version of the commodity plan that the Cabinet briefly discussed on 8 April was the latest version of the radical redraft Keynes had undertaken after the talks with the Dominions and India in October and November 1942 (JMK 27, 166–94). It had been circulated to the War Cabinet on 5 March. The issue then acquired urgency: President Roosevelt suddenly announced a United Nations conference on food and nutrition to be held in the USA at the end of April. This came as much of a surprise in Washington as in London: Lionel learned from Dean Acheson in May that Roosevelt, ‘probably as a result of a certain amount of wire pulling by [Sir John Boyd]Orr and [F.L.] McDougall and their friends, had suddenly flung the thing into the open and the State Department had been as confused as we were’ (WD, 9). Orr, a well-known British expert on nutrition, and McDougall, economic adviser to the Australian High Commissioner in London, had both been advocating international action on food and nutrition before the war; McDougall has been said to have engaged the interest of Mrs Roosevelt and Vice-President Wallace during a visit to Washington early in 1943

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(Penrose 1953, 116–19). It provided an opportunity for Roosevelt to invite the United Nations to a first conference on postwar questions on a relatively non-controversial topic. But, as one participant commented (J.P.R. Maud, The United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, Hot Springs, Va, 13 July 1943, Redcliffe-Maud 2), ‘I do not believe that any international Conference has been called, at any rate in the middle of a great war, with roughly speaking, a month to make all preparations, and to collect delegates of forty-four nations from every part of the world.’ Lionel’s initial reaction to Roosevelt’s initiative was that it was inconvenient: as he told Bridges on 22 March (Proposed international conference on food, CAB123/145), a food conference would either have to confine itself to a ‘superfluous and academic’ exchange of views on general nutrition policy or deal with the larger and more immediate problems of food policy, which would raise ‘all the grand unsettled issues of international economic relations’. In the latter case the UK would be in an awkward position, in which ‘having listened to a flood of roseate uplift from the convenors of the conference, our own delegates will be compelled to maintain an attitude of extreme reserve . . . [and thus] our reputation for just that reticence and negativeness of which we have been so often and so unjustly accused in the past’. If the conference could not be postponed, a UK delegation would need instructions covering the unsettled issues, including postwar financial policy, commodity policy, commercial policy, agricultural policy, and the relief and rehabilitation of Europe. On several of these the government would have to make up its mind immediately. Bridges told Anderson the next day he should read Robbins’s note before he went to that afternoon’s ministerial meeting on commercial policy (CAB123/145). Two days later, having had further discussions with Bridges, Keynes and others, Robbins bluntly pointed out to Anderson before that day’s Cabinet meeting that ‘complete confusion reigns on the official level’ (Proposed conference on food, CAB123/145). The Foreign Office had accepted the invitation without consulting other departments, some of whom had reasons of their own for favouring (the Ministry of Food) or fearing (MAF) a conference, and ‘Nobody seemed to worry that the question had not yet been examined on the Ministerial level. If it had not been for the vigilance of Sir Edward Bridges, weeks more might have elapsed before Ministers were asked to come to any conclusions.’ The Cabinet agreed to put Anderson in overall charge of preparing instructions for the UK delegation. Although the conference, to be held at The Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, was postponed from 24 April to 18 May, this left precious little time for preparations. In Whitehall they began in earnest with meetings of

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officials from all the interested departments chaired by Nigel Ronald at the Foreign Office at the beginning of April. After lengthy discussion of what they would and would not want the conference to discuss, Waley pointed out that they had better concentrate on formulating instructions on the items of the US agenda, if only ‘so that our delegates would be given something constructive if possible, to say on each’. And since they could not know what subjects other delegations would raise, they should start by drafting the opening speech of the leader of the delegation and get ministerial approval of that. It was agreed Robbins would prepare the first draft (GEN8/2nd and 3rd meetings, 1 and 6 April 1943, CAB123/145). Lionel’s draft was circulated two days later (GEN8/13, CAB123/145). It drew criticism from the Ministry of Agriculture, as usual, but with revisions after another meeting of the group of officials, it went to the War Cabinet on 22 April (Comments by the Ministry of Agriculture on Professor Robbins’ paper of 8th April about the Food Conference, 9 April, GEN8/19 Preparations for international food conference, 19 April, and Memorandum on Policy to be adopted at the Forthcoming International Food Conference, 22 April 1943, CAB123/145). He stressed that if the conference was to be conducted with any sense of reality it had to concern itself with practical and urgent problems. Hence he began with the severe international food shortages the Ministry of Food and others feared would arise at the conclusion of hostilities. The UK delegation could direct the attention of the conference to this problem and suggest it look for a solution in an agreement to maintain the wartime Combined Food Boards during the period of shortages. Recognizing that if the primary producing countries represented at the conference entered into such an agreement, they would inevitably demand some quid pro quo, he warned that the UK delegates would have to be ‘vigilant’ in avoiding any commitment to output restriction schemes, but he hoped that they would not be content merely to stonewall. Instead, ‘We should attempt to shunt the discussion of this problem on to new and more fruitful lines by putting forward positive suggestions of our own.’ He saw two possibilities, the first that the delegation could put forward at least the broad principles of Keynes’s commodity plan. The second was nutrition policy, where the UK had ‘a very powerful hand to play’: the delegation could argue for the desirability of measures designed to raise standards of nutrition and provide examples of UK policy measures either already taken or planned (school meals, cheap milk for children, family allowances). The delegation would, however, have to point out that final decisions on individual or joint action on postwar problems of food and nutrition would not be made until at least provisional solutions had been found to all the other

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unsettled postwar problems. This conference was not the place to discuss them. ‘But it is to be hoped that, having approached the general problems of food policy in the positive spirit suggested above, and having indicated the dependence of satisfactory solutions in this field upon the achievement of satisfactory solutions of these other wider problems, the representatives of H.M.G. would command the support of the Conference if they proposed that, for this reason, the discussion of these matters should be speedily put in hand by other more appropriate bodies.’ Similarly, it would be premature to set up a permanent food organization; the UK delegates should try to persuade the conference only to set up technical committees for specific purposes of research on food and nutrition. Before Lionel prepared a second draft the War Cabinet had agreed that the delegation could ‘expound . . . the broad principles’ of Keynes’s commodity plan. The questions for ministers now included whether the delegation should advocate preliminary steps towards creating a permanent food organization. Unlike the first draft the second draft argued that there was ‘a good case on merits’ for such an organization and a good case for taking the initiative and proposing the most effective steps to set it up. As with commodity agreements, ‘If we are not ready to take the initiative with proposals on lines which do not conflict with our own long-term interest, we may very well find ourselves confronted with others which do.’ At the same time that Robbins was preparing his memorandum John Maud in the Ministry of Food was preparing a sketch of the proposed international food organization (note by Maud, 17 April 1943, CAB123/145). The War Cabinet approved the instructions and decided that Richard Law, Parliamentary Undersecretary of State at the Foreign Office, who was currently in Bermuda at a conference on refugees, would lead the delegation. The commodity plan still had to be vetted by the ministerial Committee on Post-War Commercial Policy (which did not do so until 30 April). Anderson asked for comment on criticisms that had been made of the commodity plan, in particular that buffer stock schemes always broke down if they were not accompanied by output restriction. Lionel readily conceded interwar schemes had broken down, and quoted himself (1935a) as evidence that economists had predicted they would. Keynes’s scheme was different in that its raison d’etre was not to maintain prices: its ‘fundamental feature’ was that prices would be adjusted up or down so as keep the size of the buffer stock approximately constant. In exceptional circumstances there might be a need for some quantitative regulation; this Keynes had allowed for, ‘although it is also arguable that the least said about these cases the better, at this stage of negotiations’: to go any further in this direction would

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be inconsistent with the expansionist theme of the rest of UK postwar international economic policy. Finally, it was not in Britain’s own interest to support schemes like the draft Wheat Agreement which raised import prices for food and raw materials (Buffer stocks and restriction of output, 23 April 1943, T230/30). The UK delegation to the Hot Springs Conference was announced in The Times on 27 April. It comprised Maud and Drummond from the Ministry of Food, R.R. Enfield from the Ministry of Agriculture, G.L.M. Clauson from the Colonial Office, Robbins from the Economic Section, J.H. Magowan, Commercial Adviser at the British Embassy in Washington to represent the Board of Trade, and Sir Kenneth Lee, Director-General of the Raw Materials Control, representing the Ministries of Production and Supply, with W.J. Hasler of the Cabinet Offices and J.E. Wall of the Ministry of Food as secretaries. Edward Twentyman of the British Food Mission in Washington was subsequently added to the delegation. Richard Law (later Lord Coleraine) was the son of Andrew Bonar Law and a little younger than Robbins; a Conservative MP, he had first been elected to Parliament in October 1931. Lionel told his sister on 10 May that he found Law ‘a very sympathetic creature’ and they became good friends. With Maud Lionel already ‘[got] on famously’ and he had liked and admired Twentyman since he first met him in 1940. As far as one can tell the party left London on Saturday 1 May. Iris came to town to lunch with Lionel before they left. Since Lionel had not taken up the various offers he had received in the 1930s, the trip was his first visit to North America. It was also his first flight. Transatlantic aviation was in its infancy during the Second World War. Pan American Airways had started a weekly commercial service using flying boats in the summer of 1939, but for much of each year could use only the southern route via Bermuda and the Azores. Wartime transport of new military aircraft built in North America provided the first regular flights on the northern route across the North Atlantic. The first delivery flight took place in November 1940 from the recently completed airfield at Gander, Newfoundland, to Aldergrove in Northern Ireland. In May 1941 a Return Ferry Service began with the westbound flight of a B24 Liberator bomber carrying five crew and two passengers to Gander and, a few days later, the first nonstop flight from the UK to Montreal in Canada (Christie 1995, 25–31, 47–57, 89). From then until the end of the war the Return Ferry Service carried important passengers and freight to the UK and returned ferry crews to Montreal, where a new airport (Dorval) was built. In the frequently adverse weather conditions flights were often delayed and the

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aircraft often had to make intermediate stops, at Gander, other new airfields in Labrador (Goose Bay) and in Greenland, or Reykjavik in Iceland. Given the prevailing winds the westbound flights were even more dangerous than the eastbound (ibid., 1995, 247): ‘Whatever the hazards of the delivery flight, they [returning aircrew] invariably looked upon the trip back to North America as even worse. . . . If they had to fly as passengers with the Return Ferry Service, they worried about the discomforts of the long, cold journey packed into the modified bomb-bay of a Liberator. The prospect of reclining on the hastily installed wooden floor, bundled up against the subzero temperatures and sucking on an oxygen tube offered little attraction. They also worried whether the heavily laden aircraft would get off the ground.’ On both westbound and eastbound flights many aircraft crashed on takeoff or landing, or went missing in flight, with the loss of up to nineteen lives when passengers were on board. Edward Twentyman lost his life on a Liberator flight in March 1945, as did Sir William Malkin a couple of months later (ibid., 328–9). Robbins may have been expecting to travel by sea, but at short notice Churchill decided to visit Washington to discuss the war in the Pacific and on 5 May he and his party embarked on the Queen Mary from the Clyde (Gilbert 1986, 393–6). A few days after Lionel left London, Iris received the following communication from ‘Somewhere on this [eastern] side of the Atlantic’: ‘You will be mystified to get this note, and I am afraid that I am not yet in a position to clear up the mystery. But by the courtesy of the censorship authorities where I am, I am allowed to write a line just to say that there have been further changes of plan & further delays & that you must not think that anything has gone wrong if you do not hear from me that I have arrived safely for several days to come. I have had at least one most interesting adventure which I shall be able to relate later on & much opportunity for rest & recuperation after the arduous days of last week and I am now fit to face any international conference, however difficult.’ Once he was in North America and before he returned to England, he also told his son on 23 June that he would tell him later about his ‘adventures in aeroplanes’. In another letter to Iris (16 June) he reported that during ‘the mysterious period of my journey’ he was ‘run out to a ship standing well away from shore in a fast air force launch’. In the event he and Maud flew in a Liberator, lying on mattresses in the bomb bay, at the second attempt, from Prestwick to Dorval with a stop in Reykjavik (Redcliffe-Maud 1981, 42). In the Hot Springs diary that he kept for Anderson, Bridges and his Section colleagues, he casually wrote (WD, 8): ‘Suffice it to say that, after one abortive start in which we flew the greater part of the Atlantic only to be turned back by headwinds, we landed in fine style this morning [Friday

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7 May] at Montreal Airport (Dorval) having evaded our headwinds of the day before by a detour via Iceland.’ They then flew via New York to Washington, where they arrived thirty hours after taking off on the successful flight from Prestwick. The unsuccessful flight had been a nerve-wracking experience: the turning back was necessitated by the limited supply of fuel (information from Richard Robbins). Twentyman met Maud and Robbins on their arrival in Washington and immediately took them to the house of Redvers Opie, the Oxford economist who was economic adviser at the British Embassy in Washington, where there was a party for Dean Acheson and Richard Law and where Lionel was staying while he was in Washington. Law left at 10.30 but Lionel and Opie and Acheson talked well into the night (WD, 8–9). The next day, a Saturday, Lionel telephoned his sister and, after a day spent in ‘sundry conferences chiefly at the Food Mission’, he took the train to Philadelphia in the evening to visit Caroline and Joe at their home in Ithan, Pennsylvania, remaining with them until 6 a.m. on the Monday (WD, 10–13): ‘A short spell in an earthly paradise’, where he found at the end of Sunday that ‘“I haven’t thought about the war all day.” Of course I had talked about it, told stories, exchanged wisecracks, rejoiced in the fall of Tunis and Bizerte [to the Allied forces on 7 May, which ended the war in North Africa], weighed soberly the prospects of struggles to come. But it had all happened somewhere else.’ Lionel found the Pennsylvania countryside ‘quite as lovely as the best of Buckinghamshire (which in some respects it resembles) but the greater richness and varieties of the trees and flowering shrubs and the quiet distinction of the domestic architecture give it a character all of its own . . . ’. Washington, he told Iris on 10 May, was ‘a lovely town & this apparently is one of the best times of year in which to see it. The fine civic architecture is enshrined in the most opulent greenery & at this time, with the leaves just out, the the effect is enchanting.’ But his days and evenings on this first visit to Washington were taken up with preparatory work for the conference and lunches and dinners with American and other officials. As he told Iris (12 and 18 May), the hospitable Opies provided ‘a quiet and friendly atmosphere to return to each night’, but ‘apart from breakfast, I had precisely one private meal with them. I have lunched & dined with the Vice President, with the Under Secretary for Agriculture, with the Under Secretary of State, with all sorts of other people of greater or less importance, and between whiles, except when I have got up at six & written in my bedroom I have had absolutely no respite from committees, meetings & emergency drafting.’ Lionel ‘liked Henry Wallace. His face is the face of a visionary gradually being tamed by facts. . . . he has the quality, rare among public men, of

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being able to listen to an argument and concede that he has been wrong.’ His first impression of Dean Acheson was of ‘clear headedness and goodwill’ but he was ‘not quite clear how strong he is’. Will Clayton, Assistant Secretary of Commerce, a successful southern businessman and founder of the cotton brokers Anderson, Clayton & Co (Garwood 1958, 78), was ‘the most impressive’ of the Americans he had met so far in Washington (WD, 22, 9, 16). There were, of course, several others he knew already, such as Appleby, Penrose and Pasvolsky, with whom he talked at length. He greatly enjoyed an evening he and Maud spent with R.H. Brand – then head of the British Food Mission and, in Lionel’s view, ‘one of the really wise men in high places’ – and Walter Lippmann (WD, 15–16). ‘The more I know Lippmann the more I like and respect him. He is the only journalist of my own generation who gives me the same feeling of integrity and high culture as the men of the generation before – Scott, Massingham, A.G.G. and pre-eminently Spender.’ He told Iris on 12 May that Lippmann ‘is much the same as when we saw him years ago – a man for whom I have a really high liking and respect. We spent the evening discussing the most exalted topics – the future of democracy, the failures of education, the problems of administration, the treachery of intellectuals. It was all very like the carefree evenings of long ago.’ Aaron Director saw Lionel walking in the street. As Lionel reported to Iris on 18 May, ‘He phoned up and asked very tentatively if I could spare time . . . [so] I took the evening off and spent the time in his company yarning about friends & the general situation. He is still the same sensitive wise creature that we knew back in 1937 [at LSE] and I found his talk very agreeable & reassuring.’ The UK delegation had to decide on their tactics at Hot Springs, especially with respect to the commodity plan. The Cabinet had just conceded that if it was needed to forestall any restrictionist schemes that might be put forward at the conference it could be communicated to the State Department before the conference (Telegram 3057, 7 May 1943, T230/30). Maud was in favour of producing the document, Robbins, Opie and Phillips inclined to wait until others had made a first move. When the delegation learned the Americans might produce a document of their own on the lines of the draft Wheat Agreement (see Chapter 12), it quickly decided to mention to Acheson that ‘we had ideas of our own on this subject which we hoped to develop at the Conference and that we should welcome an opportunity to explain them informally before the Conference begins’ (WD, 10–11, 13). Lionel cabled Eady (13 May, T230/30) that Acheson ‘welcomed this’. When it became clear that there would not be opportunity for another official conversation with Acheson before the conference, Opie, Phillips and Robbins delivered a

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short note, drafted by Lionel, to Pasvolsky the day before the delegation left Washington for Hot Springs. Lionel also took the opportunity to indicate the UK ‘expansionist’ views – as distinct from the restrictionist views of some members of the US Administration – at a meeting chaired by Will Clayton to discuss the agenda for the conference Section at which buffer stock schemes would be discussed (WD, 23, 16–17). The delegations were taken to Hot Springs on 17 May by a special train – Lionel marvelled at its length (WD, 24). Maud (The United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, Redcliffe-Maud 2) had imagined ‘The Homestead’ as ‘a rather small, snug place with an acre or so of garden. In fact it was an American hotel rather than an English one, to accommodate a thousand people with a bathroom apiece, a Casino, two swimming pools, a couple of Golf Courses and some Stables.’ He thought it was ‘almost ideal for our purpose’: there was no time to use all the amenities but the 400 delegates and their advisers and secretaries were under the one roof and ‘the fact that no tables were reserved in the very large and capacious dining room meant that if you had any sense you had a meal with someone of a different nationality every day; so that by the end of the Conference you really had eaten, as well as worked, with the people of forty-four nations.’ (Lionel commented on the food [WD, 24]: ‘We dine austerely on six courses.’) As to the participants, ‘Most of . . . [them] when you tackled them as to whether they had been to England or not, had been; had they been to London? yes; to London University? yes; to the London School of Economics? yes again.’ (Maud, Master of Birkbeck College, found one former member of his own college, the head of the Abyssinian delegation.) The conference opened in full plenary session on the evening of the 18th. The next day it divided itself into its four sections, each of which had several committees. Lionel attended mainly those of the section (III) concerned with ‘distribution’. At the end of that first day Lionel attended one of the many parties given by the Russian delegation, which made up in vodka what they lacked in conversation, and which feature in almost all the firsthand accounts of the conference.3 An unofficial ‘section V’ developed after a few days, ‘consist[ing] of those who meet in the lobby after the evening 3

WD, 27, 37–8, 41; Acheson (1970, 73–5); WP(43)275, Mr Law’s report on the Food Conference, 28 June 1943, CAB123/145; Lester Pearson Diary, entry for May 26, 1943, MG26/N8/Pearson (4), LAC; Maud, United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, Redcliffe-Maud 2. According to Maud, ‘The Russians told me that when they received their invitation they could not make out what on earth it was all about. They meditated as to whether to cable and ask for some advice from their Washington representative, but they decided that the simplest thing would be to get into an aeroplane and see for themselves; so they selected fifteen people, twelve of whom did not speak anything but Russian, and

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movie and, over gallons of beer, settle the state of the world’ (Lester Pearson Diary, May 26, 1943, MG26/N8/4, LAC), including Twentyman from the UK delegation but not Lionel, who liked to get up early. For Robbins personally the most important discussions came in Section III, Committee 4, whose discussion of commodity regulation commenced on the third full day of the conference. ‘It was very clear as the discussion developed,’ he wrote in his diary early the next morning (WD, 29–30), ‘that we shall not be batting on a very favourable wicket. One by one, the representatives of Latin America . . . arose and testified to their belief in strict quantitative regulation, both as an accompaniment to buffer stocks and as an instrument for achieving “justice” for the producer, i.e. higher prices. This is what I always said would happen at this conference.’ The British record of the proceedings (Resum´es of Section meetings, MAF151/170) described it as ‘a field day’ for the exporting countries, commenting that it was ‘interesting to note that there was a round of applause when it was stated that a buffer stock scheme without production regulation was “economic suicide”. The applause seemed to come mainly from the Latin American Section although the Indian Delegate appeared to be enthusiastic.’ Lionel did not speak at this meeting, preferring to hold his fire for the time being. Lionel never managed to swim at Hot Springs but he did ride. (Others, like Opie, played tennis.) On that Friday afternoon, as he told Iris a few days later (27 May), ‘I had a treat. Richard Law & I took out horses for an hour & rode through the woods up the mountainside. It was not very thrilling riding, for the paths were narrow & circuitous. But it was all very pleasant, and then suddenly, emerging from a leafy avenue, we came to an opening & there stretching far far away were miles & miles of valleys & mountains fitting into one another, vertically, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The mountains here are not mountains in our sense. That is to say they are wooded up to the peaks & there are no great heights – the hotel is 2300 and I suppose our ride took us up another five or six hundred feet. But I shall always remember that moment. It was so much more exciting on horseback than it would have been on foot.’ The next day, at the next meeting of Committee 4, Section III, Lionel made his major intervention. He had prepared notes for a statement on commodity policy (T230/30) but he deliberately did not make a speech, hoping to sound ‘less academic and less pretentious if I spoke perhaps a three who spoke very good English, and put a good deal of vodka and Russian cigarettes into the ‘plane and came to Washington . . .’

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little hesitantly’ (WD, 31). As he described it to Leith-Ross later (18 August 1943, T230/30), ‘I simply, so to speak, thought aloud as if I were still a free citizen sitting with my legs on the table, as in the old days at my graduate seminar in the University.’ Law thought he had succeeded. In his official record of the conference he reported that ‘Professor Robbins deployed the principles of the Commod plan without giving any indication that such a plan existed. Professor Robbins (in a manner delightfully unprofessorial) developed his thesis as if his ideas were as fresh to him as they were to his audience or, at most, as if he had thought of them in his bath that very morning.’ But Lionel made sure that the verbatim record of the stenographer was corrected and sent back to London, for Eady in particular to read. In it he adumbrated the general principles of commodity regulation on familiar lines.4 According to the official journal of the conference (Extract from Journal No. 6, MAF151/170): Mr. Robbins (Great Britain) believed that the subject assigned to the Committee should be considered within the broad terms of reference of the Conference, which envisaged increased consumption and world-wide expansion of economic activity. He pointed out that international machinery, such as buffer stocks, for dealing with individual commodity problems should aim to prevent excessive price fluctuations, which are useless and harmful to the smooth operation of the price system, but, at the same time, should not stand in the way of longer-run changes in the level of prices of individual commodities which might be required to bring about a stable adjustment between demand and supply. Mr. Robbins stated that, in exceptional cases and for limited periods, it might be necessary to maintain in connection with buffer-stocks machinery some regulation of trade or production in respect of individual commodities if no better means could be found for dealing with problems involved. Another important function of international buffer-stocks machinery should be . . . to counteract forces of depression at the start by resisting cyclical declines in the prices of agricultural and other primary products. Mr. Robbins proposed that to carry out these purposes provision should be made in international buffer-stocks and other commodity arrangements for effective representation of importing countries as well as exporting countries, that the international arrangements should be worked out and administered in accordance with an internationally accepted body of broad principles, and that an international authority should be established to supervise such international commodity machinery and coordinate it with other international economic programs designed to expand world consumption and production. 4

WP(43)275, Mr Law’s Report on the Food Conference, 28 June 1943, CAB123/165; WD, 31–6 (which includes the corrected record of the speech); Section III, Committee 4, May 22, 1943 STATEMENT BY MR. ROBBINS (GREAT BRITAIN), MAF151/170.

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Robbins and the British secretary present were amused by the reactions of the other delegates. According to the secretary’s report (Section III, Committee 4, Meeting held at 11.30 a.m., 22nd May 1943, MAF151/170), His statement was greeted with applause and he was asked to prepare a paper setting out what he had said. After a Brazilian delegate had urged again the necessity for quantitative regulation in the case of coffee, the Chairman of the Brazilian delegation went out of his way to express his agreement with the soundness of the principles enunciated by Professor Robbins.

Similarly, Leslie Wheeler of the US Department of Agriculture claimed to agree with the need for consumer representation. Lionel had also opened the discussion in Committee 3 of Section III, on 20 May, when he found his opportunity to point to redistributive measures that were being tried in Britain. ‘The U.K. authorities had found that the most frequent causes of inadequate nutrition were chronic unemployment and large numbers of children in a family. Thus it would be most helpful if measures could be found for maintaining a high level of employment. General economic measures such as unemployment insurance went some way in the right direction by relieving poverty and giving the poorer people purchasing power, and also by mitigating the downward swing of depressions.’ He was particularly pleased to be able to say that the UK government had agreed to introduce a system of family allowances (Note on 1st meeting of Section 3 Committee 3 Thursday May 20th, 4.30 p.m., MAF171/150; WD, 28). Other delegates at this and the next meeting of this committee then took turns to describe their countries’ efforts. As Lionel described it (WD, 36), ‘One by one the delegates of the lesser Powers arise and tell the most palpable lies about the measures which they have taken to relieve poverty. This is all very boring.’ The Russian delegate, however, ‘made a statement in the course of which he said that while Russia had done much to correct malnutrition, it would be a mistake to believe that this had been done in the interests of agriculture. . . . Nutrition policy was based on the requirements of the consumer – For the first time for 25 years, my heart warmed to a statement on economic policy emanating from this quarter.’ On the Sunday the Russians showed their film of Stalingrad. The British reciprocated with Desert Victory five days later. Lionel admitted to Iris (27 May) to being ‘disappointed’ with the Russian film, although the photography was good and ‘you get the idea of a nightmare right enough’. He was not disappointed in Desert Victory: he was ‘thrilled to the marrow. The

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barrage scene is terrific, and the whole thing is [on] quite a different plane of excellence from the Stalingrad.’ A Canadian commented that he could not think of a better contrast of the Russian and British temperaments than that exhibited by the two films (Lester Pearson Diary, May 28, 1943, MG26/N8/4, LAC).5 When Committee 4, Section III, met again on 24 May Appleby made a long speech which clearly revealed the division between the US Department of Agriculture, with its concern to keep up farm prices and farmers’ incomes, and the State Department. Although Robert Marjolin of the French delegation supported Robbins, the Australian and Cuban delegates followed with statements of the need for output regulation. Fortunately for the British the meeting agreed on a drafting committee which included Emilio Collado of the State Department, Marjolin and Robbins (Section III, Committee 4, 3rd meeting held at 11.30 a.m., 24th May 1943, and Section III, Committee 4, Drafting Committee, Meeting of Committee held at 11.30 a.m., 26th May 1943, MAF151/170). When the drafting committee met, it was, in Robbins’s words (WD, 43), ‘confronted by a draft by the secretariat embodying resolutions of the utmost banality on which we could all agree without any difficulty whatever. . . . All sides greeted this with enthusiasm. . . . I, taking a very positive part, actually drafted a section saying that excessive seasonal and deflationary influences on commodity prices were harmful and should be eliminated.’ In the draft Lionel ‘[saw] very clearly the hand of Will Clayton and the officials of the State Department’. The full committee agreed the report a couple of days later. The Australian representative, H.C. Coombs, Director-General of the Department of Postwar Reconstruction, ‘expressed disappointment’ but had to be content with mention of this in the report. The Cuban delegate (Arturo Manas of the Cuban Sugar Stabilization Institute) made a last-minute intervention but had to be satisfied with a reference to fair prices to both consumer and producer (Section III, Committee 4, Meeting held at 11.30 a.m., 28th May, 1943, MAF151/170). Lionel told Harold Wilson later (11 December 1946, Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP) that afterwards Manas had given him ‘three very beautiful cigars’ adding ‘“My principles of economics, Professor, are . . . three points up in the price of sugar is good, three points down is bad”.’ 5

Cf Fussell (1989, 189–90): ‘One of the British hits of 1943 was the official documentary, Desert Victory – a young pilot officer saw it in Alexandria, where it was so popular that it was showing in two theatres simultaneously. “I have never seen such a fine film,” he told his diary. “No actors, no romance, no plot, just a fine story taken entirely in action in the desert of desert rats. . . . I really felt proud to be English”.’

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Coombs had been at LSE in 1932 and 1933 for a PhD in economics, supervised not by Hayek or Robbins but by John Coatman, Professor of Imperial Economic Relations. Lionel later recommended him for an honorary fellowship of LSE on the grounds that he was the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia and had had ‘a raw deal’ at LSE (Rowse 2002, 52–9, 65–70; LCR to Sydney Caine, 10 May 1961, Director Correspondence Jan 1955-April 1963, RP). In his memoirs Coombs (1981, 42–3) recalled that at LSE he had found Lionel ‘arrogant and dictorial in style’ although a superb lecturer but at Hot Springs ‘there was no sign of the cocksure infant prodigy. Contact with the realities of Government had mellowed him greatly.’ In wartime government service Coombs was the chief advocate if not the original author of the Australian ‘positive approach’ to international economic collaboration, namely to require the US and UK to commit themselves to maintaining full employment before Australia would commit itself to relaxation of trade, capital and exchange controls under Article VII (Turnell 2002, 114–16; Rowse 2002, 116–20; Coleman, Cornish and Hagger 2006, 199–200). From the Australian point of view high employment was the positive aspect of Article VII, removal of discrimination, reduction of tariffs etc the negative aspect. This approach was to create much difficulty at later UN conferences but at the time Coombs thought Robbins was sympathetic, even a ‘convert’ to it. He was also impressed with the UK delegation (Coombs to Melville, 24 May 1943, RBA C.3.20.2.1): ‘They are better prepared than anybody including the Americans. They are always sitting in the most strategic position in the room, they issue copious subtly worded documents and they have handled the members of the press far better than anybody else. On the whole the line they are taking is good.’ Lionel and his colleagues took part in a lot of behind the scenes diplomacy. On the first occasion, for instance, he and Opie sought an interview with Collado, ‘a very decent fellow’, following an unexpected outburst from Acheson to Law after one of the Russians’ vodka parties (WD, 37–40). Later he and Law tackled Leroy Stinebower, chief of the Division of Economic Studies in the State Department, who was ‘at once one of the ablest and one of the most honest men’ Robbins had met in America, when Acheson, telephoning from Washington, asked Maud for a reconsideration of the general declaration for the conference that the relevant drafting committee had just agreed. Lionel and Dick Law managed to persuade Appleby to accept a new version prepared by Stinebower (WD, 45–7). Maud played a major role in the conference, chairing the committee (1) of Section III that was concerned with the general economic background of food policy, where, according to Lionel (WD, 44), he had, with ‘energy and

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zeal [which] have to be seen to be believed’, been ‘indefatigable . . . devising resolutions which bring out the main points which are relevant’, and in drafting the conference resolutions more generally. Like Lionel he was singled out for special mention by Law in his report to ministers. Law himself, and indeed the UK delegation as a whole, had in fact saved the conference from disaster (Hammond 1951, 359). At the outset the press was hostile, and resentful at having been excluded from the meetings; Law helped to change this by holding a press conference, with Robbins who answered questions. Throughout the conference, which had begun, in Law’s words, ‘in that atmosphere of fog-bound chaos to which we had become accustomed’, the UK delegation worked with the secretariat provided by the State Department to lift the fog, to lay down rules of procedure and agenda for the sessions and to prepare draft resolutions for discussion, so that ‘anarchy gave way to something like order’ (WP(43)275, Mr Law’s Report on the Food Conference, 28 June 1943, CAB123/145). Towards the end of the conference, the Americans were complaining to the Canadians (Lester Pearson diary, May 30, 1943, MG26/N8/4, LAC): ‘The Americans are getting the feeling that the British are playing too big a part in these closing days and taking charge of too many things. One of them said that the Americans called the Conference, but the British have captured it.’ When the conference ended, Isaiah Berlin reported to London (Nicholas ed 1981, 202): ‘Food Conference is considered to have ended in a success after its shaky start. This is of some political importance here since it is an augury for future United Nations conferences. Many tributes have been paid to British delegation and Mr. Law.’ By 28 May, the day Committee 4 of Section III agreed its report, the other committees were doing likewise. The last week of the conference was spent in ‘committees, drafting, diplomatic cocktail parties & again committees, all day from 8 oclock in the morning until often 1.30 a.m. at night’. As he told Iris on 4 June, Lionel’s ‘hopes of frequent swimming & riding vanished into thin air’, and he only had a second ride with Richard Law the day the conference ended. The Canadians held a very successful dinner party for the American and British delegates and a few others (Lester Pearson diary, May 29, 1943, MG26/N8/4, LAC): ‘The wine flowed freely, including American champagne. The British also lent us some rye! As a result, when most of the Delegates had to adjourn at 9:30 to a meeting of Section III, some of the speeches became more fluent and wittier than usual. I believe the very British Maud and Robbins were positively scintillating.’ At the meeting, called to consider the report for Section III as a whole, Robbins and Maud managed to get the unsatisfactory draft, ‘a series of turgid general observations’

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written by the Dutch chair of the Section, referred to a drafting committee which met most of the next day (WD, 45). But when the revised report came back to Section III, the Indian and South African delegates objected to the changes. ‘Considerable discussion ensued, in the course of which Mr. Robbins stated that the question at issue involves the thousand-yearold search, extending back to the Scholastic philosophers, for the meaning of “just” and “fair” prices and that to try to solve it at the present time would mean only prolonged discussion and controversy.’ The dispute was resolved, according to the official record, by ‘a small ad hoc committee’ – in fact Robbins and one of his former students, Josue Saenz, professor of economics at the National University of Mexico – who recessed to return with a form of words to satisfy everybody: ‘national and international action to eliminate deflationary influences on agricultural income, in order to maintain equitable balance between the purchasing power of agriculture and industry’ (Resum´e of Section meetings, Section III, Facilitation and improvement of distribution (June 1, 10 a.m.), MAF151/170; WD, 49). The conference ended with a grand plenary session on 3 June. Lionel reflected that the delegation had kept faithfully to its instructions and had had a diplomatic success, but he remained apprehensive about the prospect of a world food organization (WD, 50–3). The most immediately practical of the thirty-three resolutions of the conference recommended the establishment of an Interim Commission to draw up the constitution of a permanent organization for food and agriculture, the British delegation having succeeded in ensuring that no attempt was made to do so at Hot Springs. Twentyman represented the UK on the Interim Commission, which began work on 15 July 1943: ‘consistently fulfill[ing] his instructions in a liberal spirit, steering skilfully between the rash enthusiasms of the “wild men” and the recurrent tendency of London to raise a hue and cry after the implications of some drafting point in the Constitution’, he was still involved in the long and tedious negotiations when he died in March 1945 (Hammond 1951, 362–5). The Food and Agriculture Organization came into existence a few months later. The delegations left Hot Springs by train on Friday 4 June. On reaching Washington, Lionel immediately took the train to Philadelphia for a long and restful weekend with Caroline and Joe. Again he enjoyed their warm hospitality and her excellent cooking, which had greatly surprised Lionel’s old friend Jacques Kahane when he had visited them in 1937 (Kahane to LCR, 4 June 1937, Letters from Economists 46 – [sic], RP). Having taken Monday off, he agreed to accompany Caroline to the graduation ceremony at Bryn Mawr and to shake hands with the parents of her students. ‘I

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volunteered readily enough,’ he told Iris on 10 June, but ‘as I neared the campus & saw these dense masses of damsels & families my heart nearly failed me. Shades of Bertie Wooster at the Girls school.’ He managed to survive the ordeal. He was favourably impressed by the college: ‘I met many of Caroline’s colleagues, male & female, and thought them a very agreable & talented set. There are only 500 girls in the college & the staff is a very strong one. I don’t doubt that the standard is as good as anywhere in the Englishspeaking world, at the undergraduate level. But the atmosphere is by no means unbearably high brow and some of the girls at least are remarkably good looking.’ Lionel arrived back in Washington late on the Tuesday morning. He found Dennis Robertson and Redvers Opie ‘deep in confabulation about information received to the effect that the Canadians are likely to put forward a new plan at an informal meeting of experts, to be held at the US Treasury next week. . . . The US Treasury is really quite incredible. Suddenly, out of the blue, without any prior consultation with us, they call this meeting which, although at first to be confined to representatives of three or four countries, now appears likely to embrace at least a dozen’ (WD, 58). As Robertson had reported to Eady on 3 June (JMK 25, 289–91), Harry White had invited Phillips to an ‘informal’ gathering of any experts who happened to be in Washington. Phillips thought it best to accept, suggesting at the same time that the discussion should be on postwar international monetary policy in general not just on White’s Stabilization Fund plan. The Canadian plan had been drafted by Louis Rasminsky as a sort of compromise between the CU and SF plans (Muirhead 1999, 91–7). Lionel had expected to remain in Washington for a fortnight and then to visit New Haven, where Viner was visiting professor, and Ottawa (LCR to IER, 4 June 1943). Besides trying to learn how the Canadians managed their war economy so well he hoped to see his former student Honor Croome, whose husband Lewis was head of the British Food Mission in Ottawa. In Washington he spent the first couple of days with his fellow members of the Hot Springs delegation discussing their report before they went home; by Thursday he reported to Iris that he was in ‘an incredible whirl of interviews and social activities. I am booked up for all meals save one till far into the middle of next week & the telephone is ringing incessantly.’ He had already lunched with his old friend Fritz Machlup and his former student Rifat Tirana and dined with Harold Butler, head of the British Information Service in Washington. In the next few days he dined with R.H. Brand and Chester Davis, the US War Food Administrator, lunched with Herbert Feis, with Robert Hall of the UK Raw Materials Mission, and

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with Caroline’s friend Conyers Read, dined with Opie at the Pasvolsky’s house and at that of Adolf Berle Jr, Assistant Secretary of State (WD, 59– 70). The last was a memorable evening, which he recorded at length in his diary. In a passage that he omitted from some of the copies of his diary he circulated, Lionel wrote that ‘Berle is indeed an extraordinary man. Someone has said that he is an American Laski. Knowing Laski very well, I can declare without hesitation that this is not true. However much one may distrust Adolph Berle, however much one may feel that he is a dangerous man [which ‘On the whole’ Lionel did], he must be acknowledged to have quality.’ Berle was ‘quintessentially an intellectual with an inner life of his own’, not a publicist playing to the gallery; moreover, ‘for all its rather Jamesian preciousness his is good conversation, and original – which could not be said of Laski’s’ (Hot Springs Diary, RP). Berle recorded the meeting too (Memorandum, June 15, 1943, Berle 215, Roosevelt Library): ‘Last night, Redvers Opie brought Lionel Robbins to dinner. He is a nice Englishman. He thinks that the logic of circumstances calls for a politically divided Germany which is possible only if there is an economically cooperating Western Europe.’ With this view Berle had agreed, but Lionel found that this made him begin to have doubts (WD, 70). Phillips asked Robbins to join the monetary conversations with the US Treasury (WD, 68). Lionel missed a weekend with Caroline and Joe in order to prepare for them, and abandoned his plans to visit New Haven and Ottawa. But Viner, who was still advising US Treasury Secretary Morgenthau on a parttime basis, was at the talks and they spent an evening together (WD, 75–7). Lionel told Iris (16 June) that he thought Viner had changed little over the years, ‘although perhaps he is slightly mellower’; since he also thought Viner was ‘incomparably the ablest & the most farseeing’ of the American experts,’ he ‘derive[d] great comfort & pleasure from his company’. He also lunched with Machlup and other economists at the Brookings Institution (Machlup to Hayek, 9 August 1943, Machlup 43–15; WD, 73). As he also told Iris, the previous day he had been unexpectedly rung up by Gitta Sereny, Ludwig von Mises’s stepdaughter. He had not met her before, but he had helped her to regain contact with her English fianc´e when she was stranded in occupied Paris in May 1940, before she managed to escape from France through Spain and Portugal eighteen months later (Sereny 2001, 10–21), and he went to visit her at her hotel during the evening. She had reassuring news of Mises (who had managed to leave Geneva for New York in July 1940). Mises had himself written to Robbins in 1942 but Robbins had not received the letter (Mises to Hayek, 18 March and 20 November 1942, Hayek

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38–24); he also sent the Robbins family a Christmas parcel which they did receive (H¨ulsmann 2007, 828n). Robbins’s account of the opening of the monetary conversations on 15 June is too good to resist quoting (WD, 71). Seventeen or eighteen nations, most represented by at least two or more experts, were crowded into a comparatively small room at the Treasury with the tables so arranged that it was impossible, however one turned, to avoid sitting with one’s back to at least half the audience. The acoustics were dreadful. A corrugated ceiling absorbed one’s words almost before they were uttered; and a very noisy air conditioning apparatus added to the difficulties of delivery. Phillips, I am sure, was completely inaudible, save to a very small circle near the chair; while Harry White, who has a very resonant and penetrating voice, shouted all day like a man directing the movements of a ship without a rudder in a hurricane. No doubt at the back of the room his voice sounded just right.

No papers had been circulated in advance. The bundle of documents handed to the participants when they arrived included copies of the White plan and the Canadian plan. White wanted to discuss his own scheme, the Canadians theirs, while the rest did not want to get bogged down in technical details. Lionel soon came to the conclusion that the talks would get nowhere, although the quality of the discussion improved in the afternoon of the first day when Viner made ‘a characteristically independent speech’, provoking a ‘quite lively debate’ in which Lionel participated. At the end of three days he thought they had ‘accomplished precisely nothing beyond allowing for the release of a Babel of individual opinions’. There was one good result in that the Americans agreed to continue the talks on a bilateral basis with the British the following week (WD, 71–5; Robertson, Monetary discussions June 15–17 (notes of some opinions expressed), T230/39). Robbins had also had the opportunity to learn the views of Rasminsky and the other Canadians who had come down from Ottawa for the talks. The Canadian record reports Robbins’s contributions fairly fully, especially his questioning of Viner who was critical of both the British and the American plans (International stabilization of currencies, Informal expert discussions, U.S. Treasury, June 15–17 1943, RG19/3447, LAC). The round of social engagements continued, usually with fellow economists in government service, but not always: he lunched en famille with the Agent-General for India, Sir Girja Bajpai, with whom he had become friendly at Hot Springs; he dined at the Opie’s with Joe Davis, the director of the Food Research Institute at Stanford; and he met Walter Lippmann again. Before he left Washington he managed to escape to Philadelphia for an evening and a Sunday with Caroline and Joe (WD, 79–82).

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Before the bilateral talks, Phillips, Opie, Robbins and Robertson heard the views of the European financial experts in Washington on the UK and US monetary plans (Robertson, Meeting of European Experts at British Embassy June 21, 1943, T230/39). Lionel judged that the Europeans would prefer the Clearing Union but would readily go along with the American scheme if necessary (WD, 81). When the British and Americans met they tackled the differences between their plans – especially the provisions for changing exchange rates, the crucial issue of subscriptions versus overdrafts, and whether and to what extent contributions should be paid in gold (a matter which had exercised some of the European experts) – and tried to find out where there was room for compromise. On the first morning the British explained the need for some exchange-rate flexibility after their experience of the return to gold in 1925. According to an American record (Memorandum of a Meeting on the International Stabilization Fund in Mr. White’s Office, June 22, 1943, 10:30 A.M., Berle Box 69 Folder Stabilization Fund (April-July 1943), Roosevelt Library), ‘Sir Frederick [Phillips] announced that there was a political insistence in Great Britain on adequate flexibility while Mr. Berle stated that among the public in this country there is insistence against too great flexibility.’ When Pasvolsky pointed out that ‘flexibility means little unless there is assurance that other countries won’t depreciate competitively’, Phillips responded that ‘the British public is not much concerned with what other countries do so long as they have the right to change their own rate. . . . Mr. Robbins said that the fear of the British public was one of being caught in a deflationary position with a fixed rate and not being able to do anything about it. Mr. Opie said that there was a fear of making a mistake again and not being able to rectify it.’ By the end of the morning, after the Americans had proposed that during the first five years after the war exchange rates might be changed by majority vote of the members of the fund with permission for a 10 per cent unilateral change after consultation with the fund, it appeared to both sides that a compromise was possible (WD, 82–3). But on subscriptions versus overdrafts White made it crystal clear the next morning that there was no hope of compromise (Memorandum of a Meeting on the International Stabilization Fund in Mr. White’s Office, June 23, 1943, 11:00 A.M., Berle 69 Stabilization Fund (April-July 1943)): ‘Mr. White stated that . . . We must have a contributed Fund in this country for several reasons. In the first place our public is not familiar with the overdraft principle. We must be able to say that each member country puts in so much as it can whereas under the Clearing Union nobody puts in anything.’ Later in this discussion, ‘Mr. Robbins pointed out that the British public thinks of stabilization as being

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restrictive. Mr. White suggested that the term equalization might well be used. Mr. White stated that we would like to correct the opinion prevailing in England and in the US that the Fund plan is a gold-standard plan while the Clearing Union represented a severe departure from the gold standard.’ Lionel was quite sure, at the time and later, that White and Edward Bernstein, Assistant Director of Monetary Research at the US Treasury, were perfectly sincere when they argued that they could not get an overdraft scheme through Congress (LCR to Boothby, 25 March 1969, Personal Correspondence 1965–70, RP). But, given their frankness, he was also ‘convinced that there exists the basis of a settlement. The difference between our scheme as we should have to modify it and their scheme as they are prepared to modify it, ought not to consitute an insurmountable obstacle to men of goodwill. The last two days have been easily the most significant and important of my whole stay in America, and I leave for home with much greater hope than I came.’ Pasvolsky for the Americans summarized the talks: ‘The British experts expressed a desire to report on these [White’s] points to their Government and to ask for an indication as to their acceptability, as well as to whether or not the British likewise might want to put forward certain minimum requirements from their point of view.’ On exchange-rate adjustment, ‘There was a feeling on both sides that . . . a formula might be acceptable to everybody concerned.’ On voting powers, ‘The British indicated their belief that this matter can be easily adjusted in our sense, once decision is reached that the Fund should operate on a contribution basis.’ It was agreed that discussions would be resumed, ‘perhaps in a month or six weeks’, after officials on both sides had had time to consider their positions. If there were then agreement there might be a single document drafted and an international conference to discuss it (Summary of discussions with the British monetary experts, 24 June 1943, Berle Box 70 Folder Stabilization Fund (June-July 1943)). Lionel left immediately for England to report on the talks (WD, 84). After a night at the Windsor Hotel in Montreal, he flew home again in a Liberator bomber: as he had told Iris on 27 May, it is ‘not very comfortable 20,000 feet up with an oxygen mask over one’s nose but it’s incomparably the best way of getting over’. He recalled (1971a, 168–9) that from the aircraft he saw ‘with a sudden lump in my throat, a convoy of our ships sailing intact into Halifax [Nova Scotia] harbour and realized that the tide had turned in the all-important Battle of the Atlantic’.

FOURTEEN

The Law Mission and the Steering Committee

Lionel Robbins was soon on his way to North America again. After he left Washington in June 1943, discussions on the Stabilization Fund continued between Robertson and Bernstein, while Keynes in London tried to combine his and White’s plans, taking as his starting point the minimum American requirements outlined by White to Phillips, Opie, Robertson and Robbins (JMK 25, 300–14). On the commercial policy front there had been developments while Lionel was in America. The renewal of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in June made it likely that the US Administration would soon ask for talks under Article VII. In London there had been discussions on postwar commercial policy with representatives of the Dominions and India which concentrated on the Meade plan for a Commercial Union (Pressnell 1986, 108–9; PCP(43)5, Summary of Discussions between Officials of the United Kingdom, the Dominions and India held in London in June 1943, T230/129). After the diplomatic success of the British delegation at Hot Springs the time seemed ripe for ‘an attempt to reach preliminary agreement with the United States Government on all the subjects covered by Article 7 of the Mutual Aid Agreement, principally monetary policy, international investment, the regulation of primary products and commercial policy’, as Eden, Wood and Dalton advised their fellow ministers (Memorandum by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the President of the Board of Trade, T230/92). The War Cabinet agreed on 27 July to take the initiative in proposing ‘informal and exploratory talks’ with the USA in September. The Americans agreed early in August. While Robbins was away, ministers had considered the Economic Section paper on postwar employment policy (PR(43)26, The maintenance of employment, 18 May 1943, CAB87/13). It had provoked a strong and hostile reaction in the Treasury. Hopkins characterized it to the 462

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Chancellor of the Exchequer on 26 May (T161/1168/S52098) as ‘unlike all their other products . . . a bad paper, academic, misleading and dangerous’. It was dangerous (from the Treasury point of view) because it left the ‘general impression . . . that the Economic Section think that the maintenance of full employment can be taken care of almost entirely by Treasury policies alone’: the Chancellor should not ‘pass it over with an initial compliment and no qualifications’. Hopkins’s colleagues, especially Henderson, produced numerous objections, which Keynes and Meade tried to counter without success (JMK 27, 320–6; Meade to Henderson, 25 May, Henderson to Meade, 27 May 1943, T230/66). Wood accordingly told the ministerial Committee on Reconstruction Priorities on 31 May (PR(43)11th meeting, CAB87/12) that he ‘thought that the Memorandum went too far in the direction of treating unemployment as a single problem for which one solution could be found’, that he intended to circulate his own memorandum, and that he did not accept the assumptions or the conclusions of the Section paper. Other ministers, notably Bevin and Dalton, were more sympathetic. At the same time they thought the Economic Section had not taken sufficient account of the problem of unemployment in the depressed areas of Britain. There was ‘general agreement’ only with the proposition that ‘every practicable step’ should be taken to encourage investment as soon as depression threatened. It was not until another meeting of the Reconstruction Priorities committee six weeks later (PR(43)13th meeting, CAB87/12) – ‘Two hours of it, but the results are not too bad’ commented Dalton (Pimlott ed 1986b, 617) – that a compromise was reached: the appointment of another committee. Anderson, briefed by Robbins, proposed a ‘Steering Committee’ on postwar employment of five officials only, from the Treasury, Ministry of Labour, Board of Trade, Economic Section and Reconstruction Secretariat, to coordinate the work done by different departments and to produce a single report for ministers. It was a high-powered committee: Sir Richard Hopkins chaired it and the five were: Sir Alan Barlow or Sir Wilfrid Eady from the Treasury; Sir Alfred Hurst; Sir Arnold Overton; Sir Thomas Phillips, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Labour; and Professor Lionel Robbins (EC(43)1st meeting, T230/71). Lionel missed the early meetings of the Steering Committee. At Hot Springs he had resolved that he and Iris should have a holiday together, their first since the outbreak of war, asking her on 16 June to ‘go on thinking of somewhere to go to. Wales or Scotland or the Lake District . . . How lovely to walk in high valleys with no sound but running water & stones falling or once more to stand by the sea.’ When Hopkins summoned the first meeting

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for 30 July, the day Lionel and Iris were going to Wales, Robbins told him firmly the day before (T1230/71) that ‘my wife is already on the train which will bring her to London for the purpose of proceeding northwards, and since she has not had a holiday of any sort for four years, . . . I must ask you . . . to excuse my absence.’ He missed the next few meetings because he was in North America. Robbins and Meade represented the Section in the many discussions preparing for the Washington talks. Before Lionel went on holiday he attended a Treasury meeting on Keynes’s attempted synthesis of the American and British monetary plans, as well as commenting on other Keynes memoranda at Keynes’s request. He had not yet returned to the office when he was asked to attend further meetings in the Treasury in preparation for the Steering Committee. The Malkin Committee on Reparation and Economic Security was meeting frequently to finalize its report.1 He was also concerned in ministerial and official wranglings over Allied plans for postwar relief. The preparations for a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) were well advanced in July 1943. In London and in Washington there were disagreements within government as to its exact functions and scope. In Whitehall, according to Penrose (1953, 146–56), the ‘big UNRRA’ forces at the official level were led by Leith-Ross and the ‘little UNRRA’ forces by John Maud. At the ministerial level Dalton had backed Leith-Ross, who had moved with him from the Ministry of Economic Warfare to the Board of Trade in 1942. When Bridges and Barlow, asked to review the role of the various organizations dealing with relief, recommended on 21 June that commodity policy should be separated from relief and ministerial responsibility for the latter should pass to the Foreign Secretary (GEN(43)6/7, Relief and related supply organisation, CAB123/225), Dalton protested to Anderson. Before Anderson saw Dalton on 29 June, Gorell Barnes, who was now the Lord President’s personal assistant, warned him (CAB123/225) (a) That, according to my information, the Supply Departments are disappointed with the Bridges/Barlow report in that they feel that it does not treat the relief problem as what it really is, namely, above all a problem of procuring supplies for liberated territories, and 1

C.U. and S.F. Discussion at the Treasury on 28th July, 1943, on two notes by Lord Keynes, dated 19th and 26th July 1943, T230/40; Keynes to LCR, 16 and 21 July 1943, T230/5; Eady to LCR, 9 August 1943, T230/67; Gilbert to LCR, 13 August 1943, T230/71; RES 31st, 32nd and 33rd meetings, 18, 27 and 31 August 1943, T230/124.

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(b) That Professor Robbins has come back from Washington with the very distinct impression that, unless very definite action is taken from this end to prevent it, control over the allocation of supplies will pass from the Combined Boards to U.N.R.R.A. with the active support of those of our representatives who are interested in the latter body.

When Anderson asked for a fuller briefing Gorell Barnes sought Lionel’s assistance on 8 July. As well as helping Gorell Barnes with his brief, Lionel asked Fleming for a paper on the subject and then briefed Anderson himself the day before a ministerial meeting on 21 July (T230/139). He was concerned that the big UNRRA conception could get in the way of the commodity policy plan. At Hot Springs he had heard ‘no less a person than Mr. Paul Appleby’ expound the widest conception of the relief organization. ‘This conception is obviously inappropriate. The stabilisation of commodity markets, the co-ordination of production, procurement and allocation, during the shortage period, are functions far transcending in scope any conceivable interpretation of the term “relief”; and it is difficult to believe that an organisation designed originally to ensure certain supplies to liberated territories, would be in the least suitable to take over these more ambitious tasks. The thing is clearly a montrosity born of a conjunction of ambition and muddle-headed internationalism; and if it were not, from time to time, supported by powerful personalities, it would not be worth mention in this connection.’ It would be far more in the UK’s interest to utilize the existing Anglo-American Combined Boards for allocation of scarce foodstuffs and raw materials to the various claimants, including Britain, leaving UNRRA the more modest role of administering their distribution, at first under the Allied military authorities, in continental Europe. At the ministerial meeting (GEN6/3rd meeting, CAB123/225) Anderson, having squared Dalton, carried the day. Dalton reported that he had agreed with Eden that the primary responsibility for relief should be transferred to the Foreign Office and added that he and the Chancellor had agreed the Treasury should play the leading role in the forthcoming negotiations on commodity schemes (Pimlott ed 1986b, 613, 619). After the meeting Lionel copied his note to Frank Lee, who was the Treasury official concerned with commodity policy, and to Eady. Both agreed with Lionel’s arguments, although Bridges thought a postscript to Eady’s letter of 24 July ‘show[ed] a certain amount of tendency to backsliding into heresy and error’ and asked Robbins on 26 July to ‘continue to do what you can to keep Sir Wilfrid Eady straight on this subject’ (T230/139). On 25 August the practical arrangements for the UK delegation to the Washington talks were decided (Note of a meeting held in the Foreign Office

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in the Ambassador’s Waiting-Room on Wednesday, August 25th, T230/92). Although it was still uncertain whether Richard Law would be available because of the forthcoming conference to set up UNRRA, it had always been intended that he should lead the delegation. (In the event the UNRRA conference opened in Atlantic City on 9 November with the British team led by Jay Llewellin, Minister of State in Washington.) The others who would go on the ‘Law Mission’, as it came to be known, were Keynes, S.D. Waley and – as Robbins told Keynes on 27 August (T230/30), ‘greatly to my delight’ – Lee from the Treasury, Liesching, Shackle and Meade from the Board of Trade, Ronald from the Foreign Office, Clauson from the Colonial Office, P.W. Martin from the Ministry of Food, Robbins from the Economic Section and Baster from the Reconstruction Secretariat.2 They would be assisted by some already in Washington: Robertson, Opie, Magowan and Holmes. Phillips was not of this number: he had collapsed on returning to London in July, and he died on 14 August. The delegation would travel by sea on a ship due to sail about 5 September. The delegation’s instructions (WP(43)383) were not agreed by the War Cabinet until the day before the delegation left London. The ideas on commercial policy to be disclosed to the Americans were essentially the conclusions of the Overton Committee, which had been discussed with the representatives of the Dominions and India in June. On commodity policy the British would now present the plan hinted at at Hot Springs. Keynes and Robbins had agreed during the summer not to revise the existing commodity policy document (apart from making one change Robbins suggested at the time of the Hot Springs conference). Robbins hoped they would be able, as at Hot Springs, to open with general talk about principles; Keynes suspected this would not be practicable (LCR to Keynes, 27 August, Keynes to LCR, 31 August 1943, T230/30). On monetary policy the delegation would start from the minimum American requirements and accept the conception of a fund made up of contributions of currencies and gold, with voting powers tied to quotas, and with the American contribution limited to $2.3 billion, rather than an international clearing bank providing overdraft facilities. At the same time the delegation must insist on the British minimum requirements: the fund should not deal in members’ currencies but transfer balances denominated in a new international money of account, now given the name proposed in White’s plan, unitas; the initial subscriptions should include only a small proportion of 2

Martin, like Baster, had been an economist with the ILO before the war (Endres and Fleming 2002, 87n).

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gold; the fund should be larger than the Americans proposed; and countries had to have some freedom to alter their exchange rates, for instance by reference to an objective test such as the state of the balance of payments. Labour ministers had insisted on the need for exchange-rate flexibility. Bevin feared a drift back to the gold standard; Dalton, who thought the exchange-rate issue far more important than the amount of the gold subscription or the currencies in which the fund could deal, wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and raised the point in Cabinet (Pimlott ed 1986b, 629–31). Meade and Robbins agreed with him. Meade drafted Dalton’s letter to the Chancellor (Meade to Dalton, 1 September 1943, T230/125); Robbins briefed Anderson on the morning of 2 September (CAB123/96). The use of a universal currency unit was desirable, since it was ‘simpler to work and easier to understand than the US proposal for a “mixed bag” of currencies’, but if the Americans thought it was politically impracticable it was not important enough to be a breaking point in any negotiations. On exchange rates, however, Two considerations are fundamental . . . (a) We need flexibility. It is essential that we should not be placed in a position in which internal deflation is forced upon us by external disequilibrium. (b) But, at the same time, we need order. Complete freedom for each nation to do as it wishes with its exchanges would mean a return to international anarchy. We need a procedure which allows freedom for desirable changes, while denying it for changes which would be undesirable. Both these requirements would be met by the introduction of rules which related freedom of action in this field to an automatic test – the state of the balance of payments. . . . Is there not something to be said for instructing the Delegation to urge strongly the desirability of some such provision?

The delegation was so instructed. Lionel did not keep a diary on the Law Mission, but James Meade did. The whole party, which included Lady Keynes and Lucius ThompsonMcCausland of the Bank of England, took the overnight train from Euston to Glasgow on Friday 3 September, and breakfasted the next morning in the Central Hotel before being taken by launch to board the peacetime passenger liner and wartime troopship Queen Mary (WD, 92–4). Law recalled (information from Lord Coleraine) that ‘it was very extraordinary to feel the great ship surge forward at full speed the moment the anchor was weighed, instead of being nudged and cajoled by a litter of tugs . . . I never did discover

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what course we took, but it must have been very far to the north, and we zig-zagged the whole way across.’ Although the delegation travelled in ‘the greatest comfort’, most of the public rooms, and the swimming pool, were filled with bunks and the former First Class dining room converted into the main mess room for the troops (R.G. Robertson 1990). The crossing was rough: Lionel was one of the few of the party not to suffer from seasickness. But he did not enjoy the voyage, as he told Iris on 16 September: ‘Our quarters were excellent . . . [but] the congestion of the decks – soldiers sailors & airmen everywhere – the closed port holes at night, the heat & stuffiness, the universal odour of stale vomit, all made it oppressive and dull.’ The delegation also worked hard on board ship, holding meetings almost every morning and afternoon. The Americans had proposed that the monetary discussions continue in the US Treasury between representatives of the two Treasuries, who would also consider international investment, and the discussions on other topics in the State Department. But for the British it was important to stress the interconnections between the four aspects of postwar international economic policy they wished to discuss. On board ship Ronald, Robbins, Liesching and Meade persuaded Law that after his opening speech, in which he would stress the interconnections, Liesching should talk on commercial policy and Robbins on commodity policy before Keynes on monetary and investment policy (AD(43)1st and 2nd meetings, BT11/215, TNA). Meade ‘suspect[ed] that he [Law], Ronald, Robbins, Liesching and I are the people who really have “fires in our bellies” for getting a generous and imaginative solution of the whole gamut of economic problems’; Waley was ‘frankly cynical of the whole thing’ and Keynes ‘an unknown factor in certain ways’: he might antagonize the Americans and it was not clear just how far he believed in the commercial policy proposals (WD, 93–5). Writing home a few days later to Cameron Cobbold in the Bank of England, Thompson-McCausland commented on the delegation (18 September, ADM14/9, BOE): ‘Robbins is sane and a tactician, concerned first of all with how to get things done. He carries weight with Law and the Embassy [in Washington].’ Keynes outlined the state of play on his and White’s monetary plans. He pointed out, as Robbins had to Anderson before the delegation sailed, that the two major issues in the forthcoming talks were likely to be the criteria for exchange-rate adjustments and whether the fund should deal in a mixed bag of currencies and gold or passively transfer a new international money of account between central banks (the monetization of unitas issue). Keynes also took the lead in the discussion of White’s other plan for an international bank for reconstruction and development, which the British delegation had

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recently received unofficially via Redvers Opie. They agreed they should support the idea of an international investment bank, without admitting they had seen the document (AD(43)2nd and 3rd meetings; WD, 95–7). For the fourth full delegation meeting on the voyage Liesching was persuaded, by Robbins according to Meade, to expound the UK position on commercial policy. Meade was ‘not clear what Lionel had in mind – I think he wanted to put Liesching through a dress rehearsal for Washington and also to increase the team spirit of the delegation.’ In between there were three meetings on commodity policy, on which Lionel was to take the lead in Washington, and one on the subject of international cartels in case the Americans raised it (they did) (WD, 95–9). The party learned of the surrender of Italy on 8 September, and in the early morning of 10 September they disembarked in New York. They were met by an Embassy official who informed them that the US government did not want them to arrive in Washington as a party. Lionel promptly seized the opportunity to go to Caroline and Joe at Ithan. There, for three full days, ‘The weather was absolutely perfect – an early Indian summer with bright sunshine, keen dry air and a sense of exhilaration everywhere. C & J were hospitality itself, took me out to Valley Forge the historic site of George Washington’s resistance to the English – a lovely spot – showed me round old Philadelphia – Independence Hall where the Declaration of Independence was signed & the constitution of the U.S. devised – and took me round to see a succession of charming & agreable people.’ Arriving in Washington on Tuesday morning, Lionel was then, as he also told Iris on 16 September, immediately ‘plunged up to the neck in consultations & meetings’. US Treasury Secretary Morgenthau had invited Keynes to lunch and asked if he wished to bring someone with him: ‘Keynes did bring Mr. Robbins.’ The only others at lunch were Harry White and Adolf Berle; at Morgenthau’s instigation they discussed the timetable for the Anglo-American conversations on monetary policy (White, Lunch in the Secretary’s Office, September 14, 1943, Morgenthau Diaries 644; Berle, Memorandum by the Assistant Secretary of State, 14 September 1943, FRUS 1943 1, 1083–4). Lionel was not impressed with the Secretary, remarking to Eady a few months later (27 March 1944, T247/74): ‘I have no hope of Mr. Morgenthau. The moment I set eyes on him I came to the conclusion that he was fundamentally a weak man and, unfortunately, the form that his weakness takes is a state of chronic indecision, even when it results in his failing to take action on matters on which his better judgment must tell him that action is necessary.’

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The conversations were not due to begin formally until the following Monday (20 September) but the UK group on monetary policy, of which Robbins was a member, held a couple of supposedly informal meetings with their US counterparts on the Wednesday and Friday. At the delegation’s first meeting in Washington on the Tuesday afternoon (AD(43)8th meeting) they agreed to suggest more than one opening plenary session in order to be able to develop their own views and to resist American ideas of a multiplicity of committees on detailed topics. On the Thursday Lionel went with Law, Ronald and Liesching to the State Department to discuss procedure with Myron Taylor (leader of the US team for the conversations), Harry Hawkins, John H. Fuqua and Pasvolsky, reporting to the rest of the UK delegation the next day (AD(43)6th meeting, BT11/2215) that they had agreed there should be frequent plenary sessions and committees on the four main topics plus two more, to start somewhat later, on international employment policy and international cartels. Robbins liked Hawkins: when he first met him in June he had commented (WD, 78) that he was ‘a real charmer; looks as if he had spent most of his life astride a horse and has a direct and friendly simplicity of approach that is most attractive’. Unlike Lionel’s earlier visits to Washington, on this visit there was, as he told Iris on 20 September, ‘hardly any junketing or dining out; our presence in Washington is being kept as secret as possible . . . beyond dining with friends, I hardly went out at all for meals.’ However, the friends included Machlup, whom he saw several times (Machlup to Hayek, 21 October 1943, Machlup 43–15), and Aaron Director and his wife. Lionel hated the hotel in which most of the delegation were staying, the new Statler on 16th Street between K and L Streets. He told Iris: ‘It was erected in 1941, is the most up to date & expensive in Washington, & includes every conceivable modern gadget – bedside radio, total air conditioning – including bathroom – shower, “ice cold” water etc etc. It is thus very comfortable but at the same time utterly loathsome. I can’t exactly say why. But we all feel the same, from Dick Law downwards.’ The Washington Statler (now the Capital Hilton), the only major American urban hotel built between 1930 and 1945, was architecturally the first consistently Modern hotel. A ‘commercial’ rather than a ‘resort’ hotel, which provided from the outset easy access for the crippled President Roosevelt, it was also the favoured location for official dinners and cocktail parties (Brinkley 1989, 145, 253; Wharton 2001, 175– 80). Frank Lee included it among the several defects of the administrative arrangements for the Washington conversations – another being the provision of office accommodation at the Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, so that the delegation soon moved its meetings to the Willard Hotel (Note on

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Administrative Arrangements, 1 November 1943, T230/92). The Willard, whose ninth floor had been leased to the British Purchasing Commission since 1940, is at the corner of 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, two blocks from the White House (only one from the Treasury) (Wallace and Carr 1986, 80). All the same Lionel decided to spend the weekend in Washington (LCR to IER, 20 September). On the Saturday he visited Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington. It was ‘certainly one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited. The weather (which at the moment is unbelievably perfect) was exactly appropriate – clear skies & sparkling sunshine and the white Colonial Georgian mansion, shining against the sky with diaphanous light green willows in the foreground & the majestic sweep of the River behind & below made a scene of unforgettable loveliness.’ In the evening he and Frank Lee went to dine at James Meade’s sister’s house, where James was staying, and, according to Meade, entertained the others with ‘a very fine selection of stories about the Prime Minister’ (WD, 106); Lee later remarked to Lionel (16 December 1943, T230/5) that one of the best things about the Law Mission was that it had enabled him to get to know Meade. On Sunday Robbins and Ronald, who shared his love of painting, inspected the modern French collection at the new (1941) National Gallery of Art. It was for Lionel ‘the first good show I have seen for four years & I was relieved to find that I had not lost the capacity to feel delight. One of the Cezannes – a still life – whisked me off to Heaven in the thoroughly authentic manner. How explain the mysterious alchemy of the emotions – the power of a couple of bottles some apples & a table napkin to take you right out of time & space.’ The Washington conversations were ‘the most important Anglo-American exchanges on economic issues not only during the war but also for many years before and since . . . conducted at a high intellectual level [and] ranging frankly over virtually the whole field of economic policy’ (Pressnell 1986, 110).3 At the first plenary session on 20 September, Law, as the British team had planned on board ship, responded to Myron Taylor’s speech of welcome, making (WD, 109) ‘a most moving speech . . . completely without a note and entirely memorised, but delivered as if it were extemporised’. At the second plenary the next day Pasvolsky spoke for the Americans, and then Liesching, 3

The minutes of the conversations are to be found in BT11/2215 (which includes the UK delegation meetings), TNA, and in RG 59 (General Records of Department of State), Records of Office of Assistant Secretary and Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson 1941–48 1950, Box 6 File 2 Implementation of Art. VII: Informal Economic Discussions, Anglo-American, fall of 1943, National Archives College Park MD.

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Robbins and Keynes in that order for the British. As at Hot Springs, ‘Lionel with a carefully prepared and balanced speech about commodity policy gave the impression of a man who is talking quite unprepared and at great ease on a familiar problem.’ Law and Robbins were outclassed, however, by Keynes, whom Meade had never heard ‘more brilliant, more persuasive, more witty or more truly moving in his appeal’ (WD, 110). At the beginning of the second session the delegates stood in silence for the unexpected death of the Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Kingsley Wood. The conversations lasted four full weeks. The first was ‘extremely strenous but not very enjoyable. Our conversations are going quite as well as might be expected. But it is very hard work, both intellectually & morally. There are not only puzzles to solve but resistances to be broken down and although this is interesting it is also very exhausting’ – and made more so for Lionel by a ‘pestilential cold’ and then a prolonged migraine. By the end of the second week ‘the pace [was] too hot to last’ and it had been decided to extend the conversations for an extra, fourth week (LCR to IER, 25.9.43 and 2.10.43). Lionel participated in four series of meetings: the monetary discussions and those on commercial policy, commodity policy and employment policies. The meetings on monetary policy began on 15 September, those on commercial policy and commodity policy on 22 September and employment policies on 5 October; I shall discuss them in that order. On most working days the British delegation gathered at the end of the afternoon to report to each other on their progress, or lack of it, in the other meetings. From time to time they held meetings with representatives of the Dominions and India to keep them informed. The British members of the monetary policy group also held frequent informal meetings between their encounters with the Americans. At the first meeting on monetary policy (AD(M)(43)1st meeting), ‘Keynes opened cleverly,’ Berle thought (note by Berle, 16 September 1943, Berle 215), ‘by explaining that the British labor party was inalterably opposed to getting themselves into a position in which the social or budgetary policy of Britain could be limited or overthrown by rigid currency arrangements such as attachment to the gold standard. It is in a way the formal statement of the revolt of the socially conscious classes against the Central Bank oligarchy of the Twenties.’ At the end of the meeting, after discussion of a note on exchange-rate flexibility that Keynes handed to White, they agreed they would meet again in two days’ time to discuss another topic. At that meeting (AD(M)(43)2nd meeting) they discussed two other issues, the US requirement that it could not be forced to change the gold value of the dollar, and the size of the quotas and hence of the fund. On the

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former Robbins ‘emphasised the importance of having some provision in the scheme for reassuring countries which would not wish to be bound to change the gold value of their currency, even though in practice they might not make any use of it.’ However, in these and in the later more acrimonious meetings Keynes and White dominated the dialogue. One meeting was so difficult that, as Robbins reported to the delegation meeting later in the day, White asked that no official record be kept (AD(43)13th meeting, 29 September 1943). Robbins and Meade could intervene rarely and had to try to make their own views known in the meetings of the UK currency group. The ‘monetization of unitas’ was a particularly contentious issue. Keynes’s proposal did not fly with the Americans. Keynes was inclined to be intransigent but Robbins and others did not think it worth breaking off negotiations over. According to Meade (WD, 124) Lionel made ‘an admirable intervention’ in a meeting of the UK currency group on 2 October, when he suggested cabling London to warn that it might be necessary to give way on this point. ‘When told that we could do nothing on this without fresh instructions from London, he said that he realised that but thought that we could get new instructions: Anderson would not consider this a breaking-point, Cherwell was convinced from the start that it was not a point of importance, Attlee would listen to the advice of the technical experts, Dalton was interested primarily in the exchange-rate point, Bevin was the one minister who was firmly convinced of the necessity for firmness on this point.’ The idea of an objective test to permit exchange-rate changes without permission of the fund had not got far. Keynes had suggested to White that a country could change its exchange rate to a limited extent without waiting for fund approval, which could not be withheld if the reasons for the change satisfied one of several criteria (AD(M)(43)1st meeting; WD, 103). While this would give more flexibility than White and his colleagues wanted, there were some in London, in the Treasury and the Bank, who thought it did not give enough and communicated their doubts to the delegation by telegram. Dalton, who supported Keynes, fumed that ‘while the cats are away, the mice, led by the rump of the Treasury and the bloody Bank of England, . . . are trying to play’: he suspected them of trying to play the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Anderson, when the Treasury produced an unsupportive draft telegram on 2 October (Pimlott ed 1986b, 647–8; WP(43)428, Currency talks at Washington: exchange stability, Note by the Chancellor, 2 October 1943). Fortunately for the delegation, the telegram sent after the Cabinet met on 4 October was more helpful and, thought Keynes, allowed the possibility of compromise with the Americans (JMK

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25, 366–7). To Dalton the incident illustrated that the delegation was ‘too strong’. In Keynes, Waley, Liesching, Meade and Robbins it included ‘the most intelligent people who have, moreover, the most knowledge of the subject, since they have been shaping policy over here’. Those left behind were second-raters or worse (Pimlott ed 1986b, 650). The American and the British delegates found it easier to move towards compromise on the size of the fund (US$10 billion), the size of the quotas and the initial exchange rates. The monetary talks took a sudden turn for the better on 6 October when Keynes had overnight produced a directive for the proposed drafting committee in terms of an American-style stabilization fund which would deal in a mixed bag of currencies (AD(M)(43)6th meeting; WD, 129–30). When the monetary talks concluded on 8 October (AD(M)(43)8th meeting), the participants had managed to prepare an Anglo-American Draft Statement of Principles, which included both US and UK versions of clauses where they had agreed to differ, and a document describing details which had been agreed and those which had not (JMK 25, 371–93). Over the next six months the disagreements were gradually resolved, by and large in the Americans’ favour, and the Joint Statement was eventually published on 22 April 1944 (Pressnell 1986, 138–47). A final meeting of the monetary group, on 11 October (AD(B)(43)1st meeting), discussed White’s international bank plan. Here Lionel had the last word, saying ‘he would like to see an expert body appointed as part of the Bank organisation, to accept, scrutinise and press on schemes of redevelopment in various parts of the world. The U.S. group agreed that this suggestion should be considered.’ The commercial policy discussions, held in Hawkins’s room at the State Department, were conducted in a lower key, ‘in the spirit of a university seminar rather than of a formal international conference’ (Gardner 1956, 104). The two sides achieved broad agreement on an overall objective, the establishment of an international trade organization with a set of rules for trading behaviour, in spite of major differences on several issues. They took as their agenda the British document on commercial policy, whose illustrative outline of proposals incorporated Meade’s Commercial Union. Hence they commenced (Trade 1st meeting, 22 September 1943; WD, 111–12) with quantitative import restrictions. Liesching explained that there were divergent views in Britain on their use and that the outline proposed that they should be phased out in the first few years after the war and then forbidden except in certain circumstances. Meade made clear his preference for an objective test for the imposition of quantitative restrictions on balance-of-payments grounds. Lionel expressed his personal view: he

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believed that ‘balance of payments difficulties ought to be met in the first instance by mobilization of short-term credit. If the difficulties persisted, then exchange rates should be adjusted, and only as a last resort should recourse be had to the imposition of quotas upon imports. If this view was generally accepted a precise objective test would hardly be necessary, as quotas would only be used in situations which were obviously catastrophic.’ When Wheeler for the Americans asked whether quotas could be applied in a non-discriminatory manner, Robbins ‘canvassed the solution, which was theoretically satisfactory, of auctioning quotas within a fixed global limit. . . . He suggested that this procedure merited serious consideration,’ and Hawkins agreed. When he also proposed that it was better to use subsidies than quotas to assist domestic producers, for instance growers of hops, the Americans pointed out that Congress was not well disposed towards subsidies and favoured alternative methods of protection. The second meeting the next day, on state trading, was as ‘encouraging’ as the first (WD, 113), but when the group moved on to subsidies at its third meeting, the UK proposal to disallow measures which reduced export prices below domestic prices ran up against US agricultural policy which combined loans to keep up domestic prices with subsidies to exports. The Americans also pointed out it would conflict with Australian and New Zealand farm policies. Meade and Robbins admitted the proposals would not suit UK agricultural interests either, since they strongly disliked open subsidies and preferred import quotas. Wheeler pointed out, not for the first time, that in his view the proper way of maintaining farmers’ incomes was by commodity agreements (Trade 3rd meeting, 24 September 1943). The meetings on tariffs and preferences were noteworthy for their frankness (Trade 4th and 5th meetings, 27 and 28 September; WD, 117–18). Liesching immediately linked tariffs and preferences and emphasized the need to consider them together in a comprehensive approach to the whole postwar economic problem. Hawkins frankly responded that ‘in the United States view, preferences and the height of tariffs were different in kind, that the United States had always considered preferences as discriminatory’ and had, therefore, included their elimination in Article VII, but he also suggested the group ‘reopen the whole subject and explore it with complete objectivity on the basis of individual views’. In the ensuing discussion Liesching and Meade were the major protagonists on the British side but Lionel frequently made clear his own position. For instance, when the discussion turned briefly to some alternative proposals for multilateral tariff reduction that the US officials had been considering, including a uniform

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cut in all duties, Robbins ‘thought that against the admitted technical difficulties which would accompany any rough solution to the tariff problem, should be balanced the broad effects it would have in clearing the channels of trade’. On a suggestion that each country cancel its most recent tariff increases, he justly remarked that ‘no greater virtue attached to tariffs imposed 60 years ago than to those erected 12 years ago’. At the end of the first meeting on tariffs and preferences, Hickerson had restated the US case for the complete abolition of imperial preference. Liesching commented at the delegation meeting (AD(43)12th meeting) that ‘His case had lost nothing in the telling.’ When Liesching replied the next day (Trade 5th meeting), Lionel followed up by pointing to the uncertain economic effects of removing preferences. ‘Removal of tariffs led to immediate dislocations but, in economic theory, there was no long-run sacrifice or loss in so doing, except in certain special cases which were so hypothetical that they could be ignored. No such clear answer was, however, possible to the question what the economic effects would be of removing preferences; as in the case of tariffs there would be a period of immediate dislocation, but it could not be said that, in the long run, the country removing preferences would suffer no loss of real income. He had heard both views argued and thought it unsafe to assume that in all cases abolition of preferences would result in the enjoyment of higher real incomes.’ For Robbins the monetary and commodity policy talks took precedence over those on commercial policy. By the time he returned to the latter, on 11 October, the group had begun to reach agreement on an Anglo-American document on commercial policy, on the basis of drafts prepared by the Americans. But the 11 October meeting was, according to Meade (WD, 135), ‘a battle! It appeared that some of them . . . really did believe that we might have an international multilateral convention outlawing quantitative restrictions and certain other protective devices and yet leave tariffs to be dealt with subsequently by bilateral agreements. We – i.e. Liesching, Robbins and I – . . . did our utmost to make it clear that there was no possibility of agreement whatsoever on those lines.’ The atmosphere remained friendly nonetheless – perhaps because Hawkins suggested that they move on to the details of tariff reduction formulae in the paper (Trade 10th meeting). The next meeting two days later was also (WD, 136–7) ‘quite a tough meeting. But Lionel Robbins and I [Meade] managed to puncture some of their more extreme arguments to the effect that preferences more than tariffs diverted trade from its economic channels. We also re-emphasised the argument that the Americans had a Federal Union with 100 per cent preferences between the States, whereas we had a Commonwealth with less than 100 per cent

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preferences between the constituent members. Why is our arrangement sinful and theirs virtuous?’ Again Lionel pointed out there was no case in economic theory that preferences were more wicked than tariffs. He thought ‘The argument against preferences was . . . fundamentally political not economic. He did not agree that any logical distinction could be drawn between preferential arrangements and customs unions. The purpose of preferential or customs union arrangements had, in the case of the German Zollverein and in the United States, been to solidify a political system. This was, in fact, one of the reasons why the United Kingdom suggested that room should be left for preferences; it might well be politically desirable to strengthen certain regional organizations in Europe after the war. MR. MEADE agreed with Professor Robbins’ (Trade 11th meeting). The last meeting on commercial policy, the twelfth, on 15 October, was brief, for it was easy to agree on the objectives of an international commercial policy organization, which concluded the Anglo-American document. But while it had been ‘a major British achievement’ (Pressnell 1986, 118) to persuade the Americans that a multilateral rather than a bilateral approach to trade negotiations was desirable and possible, the document the delegation took home also emphasized the areas on which disagreements had not been resolved, notably subsidies and preferences (Commercial Policy Covering Report, 21 October 1943, and Annex A Agreed Anglo-American Document on Commercial Policy, 17 September 1943, T230/92). It was also an uphill task to produce an agreed joint statement on commodity policy, where there were, as at Hot Springs, major divisions between the Americans, who included Appleby, Clayton and Wheeler. After the first commodity policy meeting on 22 September Meade gathered from Lionel (WD, 112) that ‘the Americans are chaotically at sixes and sevens, Appleby advocating complete restriction, Clayton advocating complete laissez-faire and no one supporting our Buffer Stocks idea.’ Fortunately for the British, the views of State officials were in the middle and thus closer to the British. Lionel had outlined the British point of view at the plenary session the previous day. He tried to emphasize the relation of commodity policy to trade policy as well as to explain the commodity problem – the severe fluctuations of commodity prices and the vulnerability of primary producers to deflationary influences – and indicate that the British had a solution – ‘stabilisation pools’ for major primary products – which did not involve restrictive agreements. He had also mentioned, to good effect, the recent UK government decision not to renew the rubber regulation agreement (Notes for a statement on commodity policy at the first plenary session, T230/30; Plenary 2nd meeting). Magowan, chairing the commodity policy

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committee, therefore suggested the Americans indicate their general position. Appleby opened by admitting that he approached the commodity problem ‘with some agricultural bias’ and expressed his doubts about the adequacy of buffer stocks to solve the problem, at least not without production controls. Clayton was equally sceptical, but he argued, against Keynes who attended this meeting, that buffer stocks would not be an improvement over the free play of market forces. The British delegation still intended to withhold their plan for the time being, but when one of the American officials, Lynn Edminster of the US Tariff Commission, indicated they would produce their own document in two days’ time, Robbins and his colleagues swiftly concluded they had better produce the whole Commod document immediately. It was circulated that evening, after the UK delegation meeting (Commodities 1st meeting; AD(43)9th meeting; Commodities Paper No 1, 22 September 1943). Lionel explained the next day that the document ‘did not represent the definite policy of his government. In some respects, the balance of thought of the people concerned had changed . . . [but] its presentation at this time might serve to give a better general picture of the ideas which the British group had in mind.’ The committee also had an agenda prepared the night before by Magowan, Robert Carr of the State Department and Robbins. This led to general discussion, mostly on the objectives of international commodity arrangements, which lasted over four meetings. The minutes (Commodities 2nd-5th meetings, 23, 25, 28 and 29 September) show Lionel trying to steer discussion in his desired direction, especially in dealing wth Appleby. He also took time outside the meetings to try to bring Appleby round to his point of view. When they lunched together on 24 September, Appleby told him frankly that he thought the approach of the British economists was ‘too theoretical’ and ‘too . . . laissez faire’. ‘He (Mr. Appleby) felt that in our thinking on commodity arrangements too much emphasis had been placed upon buffer stocks because of our general bias against commodity regulation: buffer stocks were to some extent a red herring to divert attention from regulation.’ However, after Robbins ‘expounded something of our general approach to internal and external problems,’ Appleby said ‘that he would not press so hard for commodity agreements if the currency, investment, and other schemes now under discussion could be operated so as to guarantee a high level of economic activity’ and had gone on to praise the British document in spite of his objections and reservations. ‘Generally . . . it was clear,’ Robbins told his colleagues afterwards, ‘that he liked the U.K. document much better than might have appeared from his remarks at the outset’ of the committee meetings (AD(43)11th meeting).

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Lionel was ably backed by Lee, who had been in the Colonial Office before the war, as well as by Clauson who represented the Colonial Office – although when the two of them had spent the whole of the third meeting describing prewar commodity schemes, Edminster noted that the discussion had ‘departed somewhat from the consideration of buffer stocks’ (Commodities 3rd meeting, 25 September 1943). By the fourth meeting Martin and Carr were both noting points of agreement in the British and American views. The day before Robbins had commented (AD(43)12th meeting, 27 September) that he thought the US document, prepared by Edminster, Carr and Wheeler, ‘placed an appropriate emphasis on the dangers of restrictionism and it seemed quite possible that a synthesis could be made between this document and our own.’ At the fifth meeting it was agreed that Martin, Carr, Lee and the American secretary of the committee would get together to produce a statement of the ‘agreement and divergence which had developed in the discussions to date’ as background for future discussions. This was ready by 3 October (Commodities Paper No 5). In the meantime the group’s discussion of subsidies on 1 October revealed the same differences of opinion as had appeared in the commercial policy discussions: Lionel thought that at this meeting ‘the two groups had reached a better understanding of one another’s position than at any previous meeting’ (AD(43)14th meeting, 4 October 1943). On 30 September Hawkins could accurately report to the third plenary session that the commercial policy committee ‘had made remarkable progress’. He was optimistic that the differences, largely over methods rather than objectives, could be overcome. In a similar vein Magowan reported the commodity policy group had reached agreement on objectives, which he listed as: (1) The elimination, where possible, of wide short-term fluctuations in commodity prices. (2) The reduction of the swing of the trade cycle which had a particularly disastrous effect on commodity markets and the fortunes of primary producers. (3) The adjustment of prices and production plans in such a way as to reflect longterm changes in supply and demand conditions and to allow the most effective producers full scope. (4) To make the adjustments called for as quickly and easily as possible.

Liesching was more cautious than Hawkins in reporting the progress of the commercial policy talks to representatives of the Dominions and India (AD(BC)(43), 2nd meeting). Lionel on commodity policy was also cautious. ‘On the abstract question of the role of buffer stocks and quantitative

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regulation of production and exports, there had been less disagreement than might have been expected after discussions at the Food Conference. The differences of opinion that had come to light seemed to reflect not so much divergences of view as to the methods to be adopted for tackling the problem of excessive variations in the prices of primary products, but rather upon the general outlook of individual U.S. members of the Committee towards post-war economic prospects as a whole. The possibility of reaching agreement on commodity policy should not be over-estimated at this stage.’ At the end of the first full week of discussions Lionel was feeling exhausted and unwell, as he told Iris on 2 October: ‘by the time I had got up to Philadelphia . . . for the week end, I really felt very dickey indeed. I felt more than a little guilty for arriving in such a condition. But it was perhaps just as well. Caroline lit an enormous fire & I did nothing but eat & sleep in great comfort until it was time to leave early Monday morning.’ The following weekend he remained in Washington, spending Saturday afternoon sleeping and dining in the evening with Law at Sir Ronald Campbell’s. He intended to spend much of Sunday sleeping too, before dining at the Opies, but he paid another visit to the National Gallery. ‘I have now been several times to the Art Gallery,’ he told Iris on 3 October. ‘It is, of course, a slender collection judged by European standards consisting at present of the bequests of two or three private collectors and a loan exhibition of refugee French pictures. But it has several masterpieces which are well worth a visit in themselves; and the whole collection is so well hung that it is a pleasure to wander round. You cannot tell what a delight it is after four years almost complete starvation to be able once more to wander round a well filled gallery, sampling where one wills the subtle pleasures of the eye.’ Refreshed by the rest and recreation Lionel was fit to face another fortnight of Anglo-American discussions. But he was concerned about the possible consequences of Kingsley Wood’s death and the appointments of John Anderson as Chancellor of the Exchequer and of Attlee as Lord President of the Council announced on 24 September. Meade thought this would be good for postwar employment policy, but Lionel wondered (to Iris on 25 September): ‘Will Sir John want any of us at the Treasury? What use, if any, will Attlee try to make of the work of the Section? . . . if it were really my career, I should be on thorns.’ He was tempted by an offer from Richard Law, who had been promoted to Minister of State, to move to the Foreign Office, admitting to Iris on 2 October that he enjoyed the economic diplomacy in which he was now engaged. On hearing from Dennison that the Section would come under Attlee and being pressed again by Law, he told

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her on the 6th that it was ‘only a feeling of loyalty to Bridges & Brook which prevents me from saying Snap here & now’. When the commodity policy group reconvened on 5 and 7 October, they went through the statement of agreements and disagreements prepared by Lee and the other members of the small working group. At the beginning they agreed, at Robbins’s instigation, that their aim would be to produce another document, again to be drafted first by the small working party and then discussed in the committee, that could be shown to their governments after the conclusion of the talks (Commodities 7th and 8th meetings). The only difficulty Robbins foresaw was Appleby’s frequently expressed desire for ‘parity’ between primary and other producers. Although Appleby had on 5 October claimed that this was not his intention, Lionel thought it might crop up again. He and Keynes agreed that if it did, this was ‘the point at which we must dig in our toes’ (AD(43)15th meeting). The most difficult point, however, turned out to be subsidies. The major protagonists restated their positions and the two sides did not get any nearer agreement than they had before. Edminster, for instance, ‘thought that subsidies were an unmitigated evil. . . . He thought that the U.K. group had shown great ingenuity in laying down the conditions under which international commodity agreements might be considered proper, and wondered why the evil of subsidies could be not circumscribed in the same way.’ Clauson responded, seconded by Robbins, that ‘we could not expect to push things too far at once. The U.K. plan was to attack tariffs and quotas, and to proceed more slowly with the matter of subsidies, which was regarded as the least of the three evils.’ Lionel suggested the final report of the committee should state clearly the differing UK and US views (Commodities 9th meeting). When he next reported to the representatives of the Dominions and India on 13 October he said he thought that the chief difference of opinion was over whether buffer stocks could help in offsetting cyclical fluctuations (AD(BC)(43) 3rd meeting). The consideration of the last draft (Commodities Paper No 6, Draft of “end-product”, 8 October) took up three meetings. Keynes attended the last two on 14 and 16 October (Commodities 11th and 12th meetings). In his several comments on the draft, he asked if there really was such a difference of opinion between the two groups on the role of buffer stocks in combatting business cycles as the draft suggested, for ‘he too would be pessimistic about the effectiveness of buffer stocks in counteracting the cycle, if we had a recurrence of a slump of the proportions of the years following 1929’. He suggested a milder statement, which was eventually adopted, with Appleby’s support. Subject to this and other changes suggested by Keynes, the joint

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statement was agreed on the morning of Saturday 16 October, immediately before the final plenary session at noon. ‘In closing MR. ROBBINS and MR. APPLEBY expressed the pleasure of the group with the helpful and cooperative spirit which had prevailed during the meetings.’ The joint statement – ‘a notable achievement (although its subsequent history disappointed)’ (Pressnell 1986, 120) – incorporated agreement on general principles, on the desirability of an international commodity organization and on the feasibility of buffer stock arrangements, even though the Americans still considered it might be necessary ‘to have greater recourse to quantitative regulation schemes’ than the British envisaged. But, as Lionel emphasized in his covering report, while the British had argued that any subsidies should be modest and limited to produce consumed as well as produced at home, the Americans suggested subsidies should be accompanied by quantitative limits on the amount of subsidized production, which the British could not concede because it went against their instructions on commercial policy (Agreed Anglo-American Document on International Commodity Policy and International Commodity Policy Covering Report, T230/92). The employment policy committee included all the British economists in Washington: Keynes, who chaired the committee, Hall, Meade, Opie, Robbins and Robertson; the Americans included the economists Lauchlin Currie, Bernard Haley and Alvin Hansen. They had ‘quite an interesting discussion on the possible organisation of an international economic body which would co-ordinate the main international agencies which we are hoping to set up (Money, Investment, Commodity, and Commerce)’ (WD, 128). According to the minutes (Employment Policies 1st meeting, 5 October 1943), Hansen saw a need for ‘(1) the coordination of internal expansion policies; (2) the coordination of the activities of the contemplated international agencies’. Robbins suggested two other reasons: ‘first, there will probably be a supreme political body handling decisions, many of which will be tinged with an economic character; it would be desirable that such issues should be sifted through an economic body. Secondly, there will be need for some means to prevent the jurisdictions of the various international economic agencies from overlapping.’ Keynes suggested the preparation of a report on the nature and functions of an international coordinating agency, to be drafted by Haley, Hansen, Robbins and Robertson. Their brief report did not take long to prepare. Meade discussed the draft with Keynes a couple of days later (WD, 130). It was revised slightly by Keynes after the second meeting of the committee and agreed ‘without difficulty’ at the third on 14 October. It simply noted that since it was hoped

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that four international bodies would be established to add to the ILO and the proposed FAO, there would be a need for a coordinating body, and accordingly recommended an Advisory Economic Staff, whose functions and organization should be further studied before it was decided to whom it should report (Employment Policies 2nd and 3rd meetings; Employment Policies Paper No 3). That evening Keynes, Meade, Robbins, Robertson and Waley dined with Hansen and Luther Gulick, who ‘wanted rather more solid economic argumentation than they got. Keynes was amusing and entertaining, but everyone on our side [was] so tired that the party broke up early.’ Tired though they were, Meade, Robbins and Robertson then met Liesching at the Statler and discussed the preference issue (WD, 138). Lionel may have managed another visit to Ithan on the weekend of 9–10 October, for he was not at the Saturday afternoon meetings and Meade does not mention his presence at a dinner party at Hawkins’s home in the evening. It is also not known what he did the next weekend, when the conversations were over. Meade left Washington the following Tuesday with Liesching and Shackle for talks in Ottawa, where they, and ThompsonMcCausland, reported the results of the Washington conversations. He and Shackle embarked for home on a Liberator from Dorval on 28 October, only to be held up in Gander, where they found Liesching (and ThompsonMcCausland) similarly delayed and took the opportunity to finalize the report on commercial policy (WD, 142–9). Law had left Washington before the end of the talks, and Keynes went to New York for discussions with bankers and Federal Reserve officials before he and Lydia left America at the end of October (JMK 23, 295–9). As for Lionel, Sir Richard Hopkins in London reported on Wednesday 20 October that he (Robbins) was unlikely to be available before Monday 25 October. Lionel did not appear at the Steering Committee on Postwar Employment until the 27th, the first record of his whereabouts since the 16th (EC(43)2nd and 7th meetings, 20 and 27 October 1943, T230/71). He may have travelled home by flying boat, for he later referred, without explanation, to being ‘Once marooned at Botwood’, the harbour in Newfoundland used by flying boats (Reminiscences & Reflections of an Ex-Bureaucrat, Speeches & Articles on Public Affairs Postwar to ’55, RP). The Steering Committee appointed in July had been asked to assign work on the various aspects of the postwar employment problem to different departments and to produce ‘a single comprehensive report’ by 31 October. When it resumed its meetings on 20 October the chairman (Hopkins)

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thought it was necessary to start work immediately without Robbins.4 One reason for urgency was that Beveridge, having not been invited to produce a report on employment, had recruited a group of young economists outside government to help him produce an unofficial report: ministers and officials did not want another ‘Beveridge Report’ to appear before the government had decided on its own postwar plans (Addison 1975, 242–3). On 11 October Hopkins told Anderson he thought the report might be ready by the middle of November (PR(43)23rd meeting, CAB87/12). He had received memoranda from the Ministry of Labour, the Board of Trade, the Treasury and the Economic Section, with the last (and one from the Board of Trade) criticizing the Treasury’s first paper, a ‘prefatory note’ on the maintenance of employment. Eady claimed to Dennison on 6 October (T230/67) that since ‘there are admitted differences between the Treasury and the Economic Section, partly on theoretical grounds and partly on questions of practicability’, the Treasury’s paper was ‘not directed specially against the Economic Section . . . but sets out an opposing point of view’. In Robbins’s absence the Steering Committee discussed Ministry of Labour and Board of Trade papers on the mobility of labour, restrictive practices in industry and the general support of trade. The discussion continued for four meetings after he returned. Even before he appeared it was decided that Overton should consult him in order to try to produce agreed statements on the effects of restrictive practices on employment and the relation of the improvement of efficiency to the maintenance of employment (EC(43)6th meeting). A Section note on the Board of Trade paper had questioned whether measures to improve the efficiency of industry were strictly relevant to the problem at hand. Overton responded that his department ‘held the view strongly . . . that measures to maintain aggregate demand and control structural dislocation would not be fully successful in maintaining employment, unless industry was sufficiently efficient and well equipped to stand up against foreign competition in both home and foreign markets’. The Board of Trade advocated measures to assist industry by strengthening trade associations of small-scale producers, by encouraging amalgamations of small firms in some industries, by providing finance, especially for small businesses, and by encouraging research and development (EC(43)4, General support of trade, 15 October 1943). The Section note pointed to the obvious dangers of encouraging monopoly and restrictive practices (EC(43)15, General support of trade, 20 October 1943). At his first 4

The committee’s minutes and memoranda are in CAB87/63 and T230/71–3.

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meeting Lionel ‘pointed out that any action which tended to slow up industrial innovation and technical progress would be a matter of major concern for employment, for it meant a reduction in the incentive to invest, whereas we should probably need to stimulate private investment in the interest of maintaining employment’. The next day he pointed out that while he believed amalgamations should not be actively encouraged, he realized there might be a need for some emergency measures immediately after the war, but it was ‘essential that the emergency character of such measures should be emphasised’ and entrusted to an ad hoc body rather than the permanent Industrial Commission proposed by the Board of Trade. On the matter of financial assistance, at his third meeting he ‘said he considered the re-equipment of British industry in the immediate post-war period to be of major importance if we were to put our balance of payments into equilibrium as soon as possible. As regards the longer period, however, an important distinction must be drawn between encouraging firms to put profits to reserve and to expend profits on further development. If, as the Treasury had suggested in their Prefatory Note, we should have to find means of stimulating consumption it might, as a corollary, be necessary to discourage company saving through reserves. The stress should then be on money spent on actual development’ (EC(43)7th-9th meetings). Consideration of the Treasury’s views began on Monday 1 November (EC(43)11th meeting). Its ‘prefatory note’ had attacked the Section’s – indeed Robbins’s – characterization of the unemployment problem (EC(43)6, The Maintenance of Employment, 16 October 1943). This was ‘out of focus’: it ‘treat[ed] the problem as essentially one of “stabilising demand at a high level”’ – although it recognized the complication of ‘structural unemployment’, ‘the suggestion is conveyed that the apparent “structural” unemployment of the inter-war period was aggravated in fact by a deficiency in aggregate purchasing-power, and that if such deficiencies can be avoided in future, and suitable measures taken to increase the “mobility of labour”, the structural complications should not prove very serious’ – and when the Section advised that the way to maintain aggregate demand was mainly by stabilization of investment, ‘Here, too, the diagnosis appears to the Treasury to be open to the criticism of being over-abstract, and of magnifying unduly the financial aspects of the problem.’ This was mild criticism compared to what followed. The holding back of capital investment in the postwar transitional period would ‘entail an immediate and gratuitous aggravation of structural unemployment’; ‘it would be dangerous in the Treasury’s view to proclaim the stabilisation of investment as a chief objective or principle of policy. To do so would be to encourage an

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over-facile conception of the problem’; ‘it would be wrong and dangerous . . . to look to financial policy as the chief instrument for averting fluctuations in the aggregate national income’; and on the matter of countercyclical budgetary policy, ‘Here again it would seem essential to avoid an over-abstract approach and to bear in mind the actual conditions which are expected to prevail in the post-war period.’ On deficit financing Lionel was, in his own words (Note on Treasury prefatory statement, T230/67), ‘treated to such a terrific lecture here that I looked back to what actually said’. In his April memorandum he had argued that in order to counteract depression it was worthwhile to run a deficit and increase government debt. ‘It does not follow, however,’ he had continued, ‘that the rules of prudent finance are to be regarded as thereby suspended. Nothing that has been said here can be regarded as speaking against setting taxation at such a level as may be expected, over a period, to cover the ordinary recurrent expenses of government, the surpluses in the fat years covering the deficits in the lean. All that is suggested . . . [is that] there are grounds for regarding the appropriate period for budgetary balance as being longer than the traditional year. This principle is not revolutionary.’ As for increasing the national debt, while it was true that a heavy debt burden could have adverse effects on incentives by reason of high progressive income taxation, there were ways of reducing the burden by, for instance, introducing capital taxes: the version circulated in May had suggested various ways this could be done (EC(S)(43)5 (Third Revise), The maintenance of employment, T230/15; PR(43)26, The maintenance of employment, CAB87/13). But the Treasury note resorted to old arguments, claiming that The altered conditions of the modern world serve to increase rather than to diminish the importance of budgetary solvency. . . . This prospect [of slower population growth] greatly increases the disadvantages of a steady increase in the debt charge such as must ensue unless the budget is balanced. A prolonged failure to balance the budget in time of peace would give rise to distrust which must . . . exert serious repercussions on our economic stability, and react adversely on unemployment. . . . the time-honoured arguments for reducing debt in times of peace and tranquillity, so as to provide a margin of financial strength for future unforeseeable contingencies, have lost nothing of their force. . . . we should aim at raising sufficient revenue not merely to cover current expenditure, but also a Sinking Fund charge.

It ended with an attack on the idea of a capital budget, which Robbins had not advocated. As Lionel commented in the notes from which he spoke on 1 November, ‘If this weren’t important, [I] could pretend we agreed. But [it is] better

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to bring out differences sharply at this stage.’ (As the minutes record, he bluntly told the committee that the Treasury note ‘at once misrepresented the position of the Economic Section in certain respects and appeared to involve certain points of view that had implications for employment policy which he found unacceptable’.) First, it was just not true that the Section underestimated the importance of structural unemployment. There was nonetheless a disagreement: We say that monetary demand will not suffice unless steps taken to deal with structural obstacles. Treasury while paying lip service to demand often speak as if, if structural troubles eliminated, all troubles at an end. But this view . . . [is] not correct: if all structural maladjustments eliminated & S [savings] tend to be > I [investment] then unemployment. Make all industries “efficient” & if people try to save too much, equilibrium [occurs] at a level of low employment. This is why we give the aggregate demand function a certain expository & logical primacy.

Second, it was not the case that the Section aimed at stabilizing investment. Its memorandum had repeatedly stated that the objective was the stabilization of national income. Investment was only stressed because it tended to vary spontaneously more than consumption. But again there was disagreement, over both the transitional period and the longer term. He did not see why the Treasury should claim it would be undesirable to restrain investment immediately after the war, especially if it feared a shortage of investment opportunities later on. As for the Treasury statement that ‘the essential task in a depression, resulting from a decline of investment, is to turn over part of productive power from the output of capital goods to the output of consumer goods’, the minutes record that ‘Professor Robbins found this view quite unacceptable. Most depressions, he said, result from a decline of investment. But the essential task in a depression is to avoid deflation; not to attempt permanent shifts of resources. He saw no reason to transfer productive power from the capital to the consumer goods industries, unless there was reason to suppose a permanent rather than a cyclical shrinkage of investment outlets.’ Eady lamely tried to defend the Treasury position by pointing to ‘legal and administrative problems’ in implementing employment policy. Robbins then told the committee that on deficit financing he ‘did not feel that what was there said [in the Section paper], suggested any strong disposition

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to the forms of financial heterodoxy assailed in the Prefatory Note and he asked was it really contended that the question could be dismissed merely by indicating points of danger?’ Eady admitted the Section’s arguments were ‘more cautious than the views which the Treasury had been countering in their paper’, and referred to the Board of Trade’s commentary on the Treasury note, which had objected strongly to the Treasury arguments against budget deficits. He went on to argue, as the Treasury note had done, that it would be practically impossible to budget for a surplus in the immediate postwar years because of the political need to reduce high wartime tax rates. The committee agreed to return to the whole subject of financial policy later. When they did, two weeks later, Robbins was asked to produce a draft on budgetary implications for their report (EC(43)24th meeting, 17 November). At the next day’s meeting Lionel expanded on his views on the control of investment (EC(43)12th meeting). There were three main alternatives: (i) To stabilise the demand for a particular industry at one particular level (e.g. the building industry). (ii) To stabilise total public investment demand as a whole whilst allowing changes in particular items within that total. (iii) To use total public investment as far as possible as a compensatory factor to offset changes in total private investment, and possibly changes in the level of consumption.

‘Alternative (i) would mean too great a rigidity, . . . As regards (ii), whilst this would be an important step forward, . . . it would be unwise to make this the limited objective [for] it would be difficult to influence directly either private investment or consumption and therefore it would be necessary to secure as much help as possible from the control of public investment. He therefore preferred alternative (iii).’ In the discussion of public investment which followed the committee agreed that, assuming an average annual value of new public investment of £300m, a variation of £50m ought to be possible and noted that, allowing for a multiplier effect of the direct expenditure, this might vary employment by 250,000, ‘a considerable contribution’ to the maintenance of employment. When the committee turned to the control of private investment, Eady said that while the main stimulant when depression threatened would appear to be cheap money, that is low interest rates, there was a difficulty: since the monetary authorities had been running a cheap money policy during the war and hoped to continue it afterwards, it would be

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difficult to lower interest rates further. (The Bank of England discount rate (Bank Rate) had been 2 per cent since October 1939, and since the spring of 1940 the Treasury had managed to maintain Treasury bill rates at 1 per cent and interest rates on long-term government debt at around 3 per cent.) Lionel agreed that from the budgetary point of view cheap money would be desirable after the war, although it would put an enormous strain on the physical controls, and hence suggested it might be desirable to ration bank credit in some way (EC(43)13th meeting, 3 November). When the committee turned to the possibility of reducing long-term interest rates below the wartime 3 per cent (EC(43)14th meeting, 4 November), he said ‘there could be little doubt as to the advantage that would accrue from a reduction in the rate of interest in the long period especially if we were faced with a period of stagnation in investment demand. Such a reduction would probably be more practicable than a long run of budgetary deficits. There were, of course, import[ant] general factors which would influence the future rate of interest – the opening up of new opportunities for investment or a change in the disposition to save. But within the framework of these broad forces he suggested that monetary policy could do a [great] deal to secure a lower level of interest rates. Certainly we should not accept 3% as the irreducible minimum.’ Robbins was particularly persuasive on Meade’s proposal for countercyclical variations of social security contributions. He spoke at length on it on 5 November, not claiming too much for it but deftly disposing of Treasury objections, and at the end of the meeting the committee agreed to an examination of the figures in the proposed scheme. After Meade had appeared on 18 November to explain the arithmetic, which had been agreed with Gilbert of the Treasury, the committee agreed Hopkins would prepare a draft statement for the report (EC(43)15th, 25th and 26th meetings, 5, 18 and 19 November). But it also agreed at the 19 November meeting that the scheme could not be put into operation in the immediate postwar period, which would be ‘one of abnormal economic conditions in which there was likely to be a coincidence of abnormal structural unemployment and high money demand’. Lionel suggested a clause might be put in the Social Security bill to allow the scheme to come into operation at the right time, but Hopkins suggested that ‘a more appropriate way of dealing with the matter would be to incorporate the idea in any Government statement on employment policy’. When Keynes saw the draft statement, he wrote Robbins on 12 December (T247/80): ‘Great congratulations to James and you, if, as I infer . . . the proposals for variations in social insurance

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contributions are to be included in the Report of the Steering Committee. It is a great triumph, – the first step to a major measure in social reform and the cure of unemployment, which may be regarded hereafter as a landmark.’ Several meetings were devoted to ‘the location of industry’ (EC(43)17th23rd meetings). The Board of Trade – and its President, who represented a northern coal mining constituency – wanted postwar governments to be able to direct new industry into depressed areas, an attitude the Section economists did not share. Overton was ‘finding [the Steering Committee] a frightful drain on his time, since they are meeting practically every day . . . [and] he is frequently practically alone against a combination of three Treasury officials – Hopkins, Barlow and Eady, but why all three? – and Robbins.’ Dalton also heard that ‘Robbins is talking too much at the Steering Committee and put in a most preposterous paper . . . [the Section’s paper] on Location’ (Pimlott ed 1986b, 673–4). Lionel did not in fact say as much on the location issue as on other issues, although he did make clear his position on the contending views. While the Board of Trade was proposing a ban on further industrial development in areas such as greater London and greater Birmingham combined with inducements to firms to move to ‘Development Areas’, representatives of other departments preferred that industrial location should be dealt with as part of a more comprehensive town and country planning scheme. Lionel also drew attention to the difference between the short-term and the long-term problems (EC(43)17th meeting, 8 November). In the former ‘it would be necessary to do many things and to use the various means of control so as to avoid leaving serious structural unemployment’; but for the long period he preferred the more flexible approach of an interdepartmental committee, advising the Ministry of Town and Country Planning to ‘a Location Board with its inevitably narrow approach to the subject’. Hopkins, on this as on several other issues, tended to agree with him. It was not only Overton who was feeling the strain. Iris told her motherin-law on 22 November: ‘He [Lionel] says that he has never felt the pressure of work so great. If only the 10 am committees soon come to an end, I think he will be alright. . . . When he went to New College [Oxford] on Saturday [20 November] it gave him a nostalgia for the old life there & he spent yesterday with his migraine trying to think how he could get back.’ By the last week in November the committee was ready to discuss a draft report. Lionel was responsible for the first drafts of the introductory chapters on the general nature of the employment problem, the international background and the problems of the transition, the bulk of the chapters

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on the measures for controlling aggregate demand, chapters on wages and prices and on budgetary considerations, and, with Overton, the introduction to the chapter on industrial efficiency and employment. He enlisted the help of Marcus Fleming for several of his drafts.5 Over the next six weeks, while Hopkins was away ill, the other members of the committee met frequently to argue over their drafts. By mid-December most of the report was ready for the printer, although Lionel had yet to draft the chapter on budgetary implications (and get it past the Treasury representatives on the committee). Another section, on restrictive developments in industry in the chapter on industrial efficiency, was still contentious, and Lionel had decided he would have to submit a note of dissent. By Christmas Eve the committee had a complete draft (except for Lionel’s note of dissent), but it was not until the new year, on 10 January, that they finally agreed their report (Chester, Draft report by steering committee, Present position, Friday, 17th December, 1943, T161/1168/S52098; EC(O)(43)16, Committee on Postwar Employment, Draft Report, 24 December 1943, T230/73; EC(44)1st meeting). It has been described as ‘a masterpiece of compromise’ (Addison 1975, 243). In the Treasury Henderson was, predictably, critical of Robbins’s draft of the early sections on the international background for their claim that the UK’s postwar problems would be much alleviated by multilateral initiatives of the sort contemplated in the Washington conversations: he ‘enter[ed] a protest . . . against this attempt to prejudge the issue by blessing the policy as an incident of the Steering Committee’s Report’. He was also critical, with more effect, of another paragraph which seemed to him to imply that in times of depression all countries should agree to run budget deficits simultaneously; Robbins toned this down slightly, but only slightly (Henderson to Eady, 7 December 1943, T161/1168/S52098; EC(O)(43)16, chapter II; R(44)6, Report of Committee on Post-War Employment, 10 January 1944, CAB87/70, paras 25–36). Lionel had to take more account of the Treasury criticisms of the section on budgetary implications, where his cautious drafting had to be modified first for the Christmas Eve draft report and then more drastically altered for the final version. Nonetheless the core arguments of the section remained substantively his, straightforwardly asking at the outset whether the proposed employment policy involved a dangerous increase of public indebtedness, arguing that much of the public capital expenditure undertaken in the interests of employment was of a sort that 5

The drafts of the various parts of the report are in CAB87/70 and in T230/73; the drafts by LCR and Fleming are in T230/67.

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should take place anyway and that an increasing public debt was not an increased burden if the national income was increasing at the same or a faster rate, admitting that ‘the maintenance of budget equilibrium should still be regarded as an important objective of policy’ but pointing out that budgets did not have to be balanced every single year. But Eady managed to remove his comment that there were precedents in the interwar years for unbalanced budgets and cut down his suggestions as to what to do to reduce the debt burden if it proved necessary to run budget deficits over several years, while adding in a paragraph on the possible deleterious effects on ‘confidence’ of a growing national debt and several paragraphs on the uncertainties of the immediate postwar budgetary situation (EC(O)(43)12, Budgetary considerations, 18 December 1943, EC(O)(43)16, chapter VII; R(44)6, paras 123–39). The result was, as Eady commented to Hopkins on New Year’s Eve (T161/1168/S52098), more orthodox than many of Robbins’s colleagues would have liked. What Lionel particularly objected to in the chapter written by the Board of Trade on industrial efficiency was the proposal for the registration of restrictive agreements with the Board, because that placed the onus on the Board of deciding which agreements were anti-social and also implied that those the Board failed to register were unexceptionable even if they were in fact dubious. ‘These doubts are not merely speculative. The proposals which have been put forward by my colleagues [on the Steering Committee] bear a disturbing resemblance to the German Kartelverordnung (Cartel Decree) of 1923. I submit that it would be hard to contend that the effect of that Decree was either to check the growth of the cartel movement or to weaken its evil influence in German economic and political life.’ What he argued for, as the main report noted, was the opposite policy of prohibiting all restrictive agreements except for those specifically allowed by government licence. The report also pointed out that the government needed to make up its mind on its policy towards monopolies and cartels because of the line on international cartels the Americans had expressed in the Washington conversations (Restrictive developments in industry, Note of dissent by Professor Robbins, and R(44)6, paras 274–5). At the same time that the Steering Committee was meeting every day, the members of the Law Mission had to prepare a report for the Cabinet. When some of them met with Eady on 10 November Lionel suggested it should include the joint reports of the US/UK subcommittees, reports by the leaders of the UK groups and a covering note by Law gathering together the threads and posing policy questions for Cabinet discussion. He thought such a document could go straight to the War Cabinet without prior

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consideration by a Cabinet committee, but if it did go to such a committee Lord Cherwell ought to be included. It was decided that Law should draw attention to the facts that although the currency discussions were a whole stage ahead of the others, ‘both Currency and Commercial policy called for urgent decisions, and Commodity Policy only slightly less so’, the three subjects were interconnected and the Dominions had a right to know the outcome of the talks. Law should suggest that Dominion representatives be invited to London for another set of talks and in the meantime an interdepartmental committee set up to advise ministers on the interrelated issues (LCR to Bridges, nd but early November 1943, T230/172; Ronald to LCR, 11 November 1943, T230/92). A couple of days later, Liesching reported to Dalton that, as Dalton described it (Pimlott ed 1986b, 670), ‘the Treasury are at it again. Eady and Co are trying to hold up the report to ministers on the Washington talks, and Eady even suggested to Overton that there should first be a meeting of officials “to brief ministers”. . . . Liesching thinks that such a meeting was designed to give Hubert Henderson a chance to wave his arms about and reopen many old closed questions.’ Dalton was also disturbed that Keynes had not seen Anderson or Hopkins since his return from America. Liesching, Meade and Shackle had already submitted the commercial policy report, which they had finished while sitting around at Gander, to Dalton; Lee had prepared a report on cartels policy soon after his return (Liesching to LCR, 9 November 1943, T230/172). Lionel wrote up his report early in November, discussing it in detail with Lee, who thought it ‘excellent in form and substance’ (Report on the Washington Conversations on international commodity policy, and Lee to LCR, 11 and 18 November 1943, T230/30). Clauson objected that the draft had ‘one minor defect’ in that it was written from the point of view that the UK was interested in primary products only as a consumer; Lionel did not agree but he accepted Frank Lee’s suggestion of a judicious addition, that the UK was also concerned as a ‘trustee’ for colonial primary producers (Clauson to LCR, 23 November, Lee to LCR, 1 December, and LCR to Eady, 7 December 1943, T230/31). The package of reports, which included Keynes’s on monetary policy and the agreed Anglo-American document on employment policy, was circulated to the War Cabinet on 17 December. But the Cabinet on 21 December asked Law, in spite of his plea for urgency, which Lionel echoed in briefing Attlee, to produce a further report on the issues for ministerial decision (JMK 25, 374–92 and 395). Thus the consequences – like those of the report of the Steering Committee on Postwar Employment – belong to 1944.

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Just before Christmas 1943 Lionel learned that the Prime Minister was going to recommend him for a KCMG (Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George) in the forthcoming New Year’s Honours List. He declined it without hesitation, explaining to Bridges on 21 December (Honours KCMG (declined) & CB, RP) that his father had refused a knighthood. ‘My Father is a much better man than I am; and his services to the country have been at once more genuine & laborious than anything I am ever likely to do. It would run counter to all my sense of the fitness of things were I to accept a title which, for these wholly loyal & creditable reasons, he did not wish to hold. I should always feel that I had done something wrong.’

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To his too coy colleagues Had we but world enough, and time, This slowness, gentles, were no crime. We might consume each livelong day Discussing how can debtors pay. John Maynard should delight our wits Describing how each project fits. James Meade should still expound the laws of economics, clause by clause Stout Melville might his land defend Demanding what the world shall lend. Mackintosh’ speech would slowly burn Into our hearts his great concern For all that helps to foster trade. McCarthy’d call a spade a spade. From Clauson and Sir David Meek We’d cynically learn to speak In praise of regulation schemes, Which Dennis Robertson just deems The deuce. Such talks could last no doubt For two years more or thereabout. But at my back I always hear Joe Stalin’s cohorts thundering near. We can’t expect the war to last Till all our problems are o’er past. The other nations may complain That we had racked our brains in vain. We do not wish to leave to Joe Decisions on the way we go.1 1

‘Lines inspired by the Article VII discussions’, March 1944, Meade 19/4 and RBA C.3.9.1.82.

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By the end of 1943 the Allies had determined on an invasion of France (Operation Overlord) in the spring of 1944. Although its exact time and place could not be known, it could be roughly predicted given the need for suitable weather and tides. Assuming it was successful, the war in Europe could end in 1944. In January Allied efforts in Italy, which had been making slow progress since the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, intensified with the landing of British and American forces at Anzio. In Russia the siege of Leningrad was lifted on 25 January. But the Luftwaffe returned to bomb London nightly; and even before the ‘little Blitz’ there was the threat of new weapons that Hitler was planning to launch on London: Lionel discouraged his children from visiting London during the Christmas holidays without telling them the reason (Sansom 1947, 176–83; LCR to IER, 9 July 1944). Over Christmas Lionel had been reading the manuscript of Karl Popper’s ‘war effort’ (Popper 1945), his attack on the ‘false prophets’ Plato, Hegel and Marx, which had ‘exploded’ out of the work on historicism he had talked about in Hayek’s seminar in 1936 (Popper 1974, 90–1). Popper had been teaching at Canterbury College in New Zealand since 1937 and had sent the manuscript to his friend Ernst Gombrich in London for him to arrange its publication. When Hayek read it in the summer of 1943, he and Morris Ginsberg suggested to the director of LSE that the Chair of Logic and Scientific Method shared between LSE and UCL, from which Abraham Wolf had retired in 1941, be converted into a fulltime readership at the School, now that ‘a suitable candidate is available in the person of Dr. Karl Popper’. Carr-Saunders authorized him to enquire informally whether Popper would be interested in applying for such a post – which he was (Hayek to Carr-Saunders, 7 August, Hayek to Popper, 5 November 1943, Hayek to Carr-Saunders, 8 January 1944, Hayek 44–1). Hayek also asked Laski and Robbins to read the manuscript. When Hayek wrote to Popper on 27 December 1943 (Hayek 44–1) he admitted he had shown Popper’s manuscript to the director and Ginsberg: ‘It is now being read by another colleague, my closest friend whose opinion I value most highly (Lionel Robbins); and his first reaction, after reading half of it, is “Most excellent”!’ Lionel’s second reaction was not uncritical. Hayek had hoped to send the manuscript to Macmillan but ‘desisted after a discussion with my friend Robbins’. Lionel had ‘expressed very strongly’ that the chapters on Marx made the book unduly long and less readable than it would otherwise be. Thus ‘before he [Robbins] could with good conscience strongly recommend the book for present publication [when there was a shortage of paper], he would wish to see this part substantially curtailed.’ Hayek was inclined to

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agree. He advised Popper on 29 January (Hayek 44–1) that if Routledge, to whom he had now sent the manuscript, refused it, he thought Popper should follow Lionel’s advice. Fortunately for Popper, who found ‘Robbins’ refusal to support the book . . . bitter medicine’ but could not see how to shorten it, Routledge accepted the book as it was. But Popper ‘realize[d] how right Prof. Robbins was when he said that he didn’t like the Marx part’ and made many revisions, without shortening it (Popper to Hayek, 14 March and 1 June 1944, Popper 305–13). Hayek also published ‘The poverty of historicism’ in Economica (1944–5), because of its length in three parts. Although Lionel was not involved in the negotiations over Popper’s position he was drawn back into School business in 1944. The Professorial Council held two meetings in London in January 1944, the first on the 7th to discuss postwar problems, including the timing of the return to London. (Hoping LSE could return for the academic year 1944/5 the governors had asked the Ministry of Works, to whom the School buildings were leased, for the return of the East Block in Houghton Street but they were refused.) The second meeting, on 28 January, agreed that the professors in government service should rejoin the Appointments Committee and appointed a special committee of Laski, Parry, Plant, Robbins and Tawney to help prepare a statement for the University of LSE’s postwar needs for staff and finance. Lionel, Plant and Hayek had already drawn up a wish list for economics, including three new chairs, three new readerships and additional junior staff. At its next meeting in Cambridge on 8 March, when it was reported that the statement had been forwarded to the University, the Professorial Council agreed the School should also ask the University for a readership in logic and scientific method. It was also reported that Dennis Robertson had resigned the Cassel chair at LSE to take the Chair of Political Economy at Cambridge. In April the Appointments Committee recommended the School ask the University to fill vacant chairs in anthropology, economic history and statistics as well as the Cassel chair but wished to have ‘further time to review the situation’ before making any recommendation about the chair in international trade that Condliffe had resigned in 1939 (Agenda for Standing Committee 3 April 1944). The committee asked the governors to drop the reference to banking and currency in the Cassel chair, to which the governors did not agree (Standing Committee 13 May 1944). Lionel wanted the School to appoint James Meade. He told the director on 5 April that Plant agreed with him and that while Hayek had some doubts he (Robbins) was prepared to back his own judgment against Hayek’s, adding that he was sure Keynes would support him (Plant 252). He persuaded James to apply when the University Board of Advisers (including Keynes, Plant and

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Robbins) was established (Academic Registrar to Plant, 9 June, Meade to Academic Registrar, 28 July 1944, Plant 252). The Board could not meet for several months because of Keynes’s and Robbins’s absences in North America. Early in 1945, by which time Meade had decided to stay in the Economic Section after the war, the Board decided to leave the chair vacant for the time being (Standing Committee 26 February 1945). Lionel rarely attended wartime meetings of the Council of the Royal Economic Society, even though they were often held in Keynes’s room in the Treasury. He had, however, been present when the Council agreed on 28 April 1941 to finance an anthology of Bentham’s economic writings to be prepared by Werner Stark, who had fled Prague in August 1939.2 In May 1944 he was appointed to a small committee on the editorial arrangements for the Economic Journal when Keynes indicated his intention to resign as editor. The committee (Beveridge, Jewkes, Keynes and Robbins) recommended the appointment of Roy Harrod and Austin Robinson as joint editors (Minutebook 1938–1944, RES 2/1/3; Robinson 1990, 170). The preparations for Operation Overlord meant new problems of British wartime economic planning – of manpower, munitions supply and transport – which involved the Economic Section of the Cabinet Offices, especially Dennison and Tress (Hancock and Gowing 1949, 450–1, 489–90; Cairncross and Watts 1989, 66). Lionel was not much involved: his major preoccupation in the months leading up to D-Day was postwar planning, especially (but not only) for the international economy. With the prospect of Stage II (the period between the defeat of Germany and the defeat of Japan, at that time expected to last two years) beginning within twelve months, the problems of the transition to peace, in Stages II and III, could no longer be ignored or their consideration deferred pending agreement on long-term policies and objectives. When Anderson became Chancellor of the Exchequer in September 1943, he remained in the War Cabinet, as did Attlee as Lord President of the Council. Churchill brought Beaverbrook back into the government as Lord Privy Seal; his presence added greatly to the difficulties of achieving ministerial agreement on postwar policies. In November 1943 Lord Woolton was appointed Minister of Reconstruction and a member of the War Cabinet, agreeing to move from the Ministry of Food on condition he could choose his small staff. He chose Norman Brook as his Permanent Secretary and John Maud as his deputy, but it was some months before Maud could leave 2

R¨opke told Robbins of Stark’s plight on 12 May 1939 (COLL MISC 63/4); the Academic Freedom Committee could not help as he was not an academic but the SPSL (and Keynes) supported him in Cambridge 1940–4 (Schofield 2009).

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Food. He also enlisted John Jewkes from the Ministry of Aircraft Production and Alexander Johnston from the Home Office. According to Dalton, who thought Woolton’s Reconstruction Committee a great improvement on its predecessors, Brook was ‘determined to make this thing succeed if he can’ (Woolton 1959, 261–4; Redcliffe-Maud 1981, 44–6; Pimlott ed 1986b, 684). The Minister and his committee were charged with reviewing both the major domestic reconstruction schemes and preparations for the transitional period – except for international economic and financial issues. Brook continued to work closely with Lionel. He told him explicitly on 29 February (EC(S)(44)6, T230/17) that he wished ‘to preserve the position that you can send me any representations which you wish to put before the Minister of Reconstruction on any projects that are coming before the War Cabinet or the Reconstruction Committee. In that respect I should like to reproduce in respect of the Reconstruction Committee the kind of relationship which existed between Sir John Anderson and the Economic Section in respect of the Lord President’s Committee. All I ask is that any material should be sent to me so that I can see it on its way to Lord Woolton.’ This meant the Section could brief both Attlee and Woolton before meetings of the LPC, the Reconstruction Committee or the Cabinet. The report of the Steering Committee on Postwar Employment was circulated to Woolton’s committee on 11 January (R(44)6, CAB87/70). Revisions since 31 December had reorganized the early chapters and changed the order of the later ones on mobility of labour, location of industry and industrial efficiency, and added two appendices, but the first three chapters – an introductory chapter, a long chapter on the control of aggregate demand and one on wages and prices – still showed Robbins’s (and Fleming’s) hand, in the measures advocated to control aggregate demand countercyclically as well as in the description of the problems to be faced in the postwar world. Private and public investment would be influenced by monetary policy, although in the early postwar years cheap money would have to be maintained and thus physical controls on private and public investment would be necessary, and by the planning and timing of public investment projects. Private consumption expenditure would be influenced by the variation of social insurance contributions and the adjustment of hire-purchase regulations. Although Hopkins wrote the paragraphs on the proposal for variation of social insurance contributions and Eady altered those on budgetary considerations, which were now included in the chapter on the control of aggregate demand, Robbins (and Fleming) had written the most important – from the economist’s point of view – parts of the report, even if they had been watered

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down in places. When Keynes read the report, he was (JMK 27, 364–72) ‘in general sympathy with the line taken . . . and with its recommendations. It is, indeed, an outstanding State Paper which, if one casts one’s mind back ten years or so, represents a revolution in official opinion.’ Keynes noted the ‘confusion of thought’ in the section on budgetary considerations, which had ‘the air of having been written some years before the rest of the report’ and failed to mention either the effect of the employment multiplier or the possibility of a capital budget (one of Keynes’s favourite ideas). He particularly commended the second appendix on the statistics needed for employment policy. He praised Lionel’s note of dissent, with whose message and recommendation of a ban on restrictive practices he was ‘in strong agreement’: I am confident that he speaks here – and most effectively, if I may say so – for the great majority of responsible economists in the whole of the Anglo-Saxon world. For those who believe it will be the role of this country to develop a middle way of economic life which will preserve the liberty, the initiative and (what we are so rich in) the idiosyncracy of the individual in a framework serving the public good and seeking equality of contentment amongst all, Professor Robbins’ admonitions go to the heart of things. . . . The Report would be much enriched and its balanced effect on public opinion enhanced, if Ministers were to approve the substitution of his Note for the parched and dessicated passages of the Report which correspond to it.

Keynes was right that Lionel’s note would command support from fellow economists. In the Section it led to a fruitful debate initiated by Meade and Fleming on the criteria for the pricing of state products, picking up from Lionel’s point that where monopoly or oligopoly was inevitable on technical grounds public ownership of the industry might be appropriate but that a nationalized industry would be as restrictive as a private monopoly unless it followed different operating rules. When Keynes suggested the Meade-Fleming ‘symposium’ should be published in the EJ, Robbins persuaded Bridges to allow this (JEM 2, 16–31; Bridges to Meade, 16 June 1944, T230/114). In ministerial discussions of the Steering Committee report Dalton supported Robbins (as against the weaker proposals of his own department) as did Stafford Cripps (R(44)13th meeting, 4 February 1944, and R(44)27, Note by the Minister of Aircraft Production on Chapter VI(iv) of the Report of the Official Committee on Post-War Employment, CAB87/5).3 3

Mercer (1995, 58) traced the origins of the Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Act 1948 back to these discussions and noted (83) that in spite of conflicting pressures in

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At the first Reconstruction Committee meeting devoted to the Steering Committee report (R(44)8th meeting, 21 January 1944, CAB87/5) ministers discussed, in general terms, the first three chapters. They agreed a white paper on employment policy after the war should be issued as soon as possible and put Woolton and Anderson in charge of its preparation. The government had already issued a white paper on education (in July 1943), a white paper on a national health service was in draft, and that on the government’s long delayed response to the Beveridge Report on social insurance was in preparation. The task of organizing the preparation of the white paper fell to Brook: Woolton (1959, 282–4) ‘want[ed] to place on record’ his debt to Brook for his ‘special contribution’ and also recorded the assistance of Jewkes and Robbins. Brook commissioned Dennis Robertson to try his hand at a draft based on the first three chapters of the report; when ministers also wanted a draft statement of government policy on location of industry, Brook asked Jewkes to write it (Brook to Robertson, 21 January 1944, CAB124/214). Robertson tried to follow the arguments of the three chapters fairly closely. Fleming thought ‘the general lay-out [is] admirable’ but had many specific criticisms. Brook sent the draft to Jewkes and Robbins and suggested the three of them read it carefully and confer before discussing it with Robertson. Robertson made many changes to meet their and Hopkins’s criticisms. Nonetheless they decided the second draft should be drastically reorganized; Brook suggested consulting Woolton and Anderson before proceeding further. A couple of days later, when Jewkes was away ill, Brook and Robbins ‘decided to bring to an end our speculations about the ideal author for the White Paper’ and commissioned Fleming.4 By this time it was March 1944. I shall return to the fate of Fleming’s draft later. In the early weeks of 1944 the members of the Law Mission were meeting frequently to prepare Law’s second report on the Washington conversations that the War Cabinet had requested on 21 December 1943. The first report had been criticized by many ministers, most strongly by Hudson, who wanted protection for British agriculture, Amery (Secretary of State

4

the intervening years, ‘The post-war Labour Government consolidated a model of stateindustry relations which, though markedly more interventionist than previous peace-time governments, had more in common with Lionel Robbins’ strategy for state involvement in the economy than anything deriving from socialist thought.’ Robertson, Employment policy, 1st draft, Robertson to Brook, 2 March 1944, CAB124/211; Fleming, Comments on Professor Robertson’s Draft White Paper on Employment Policy, 21 February 1944, T230/68; Brook to LCR, 16 February and 7 March, Brook to Jewkes, 10 March 1944, CAB124/214.

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for India) who championed imperial preference, and Bevin who feared fixed exchange rates. The task of responding to the criticisms was made all the harder by the divisions in the Treasury as well as between the Treasury on the one hand and the Economic Section and the Board of Trade on the other. In the Treasury, according to Eady (JMK 25, 395–8), ‘Keynes [was] fully engaged in pressing acceptability of Currency Scheme. Dennis Robertson equally emphatic . . . Waley not enthusiastic for S.F. [but] Thinks we ought to agree upon international monetary institution and that choice is between S.F. or nothing at all. . . . Henderson critical . . . [and] Generally . . . in favour of bilateralism. Bank of England impressively critical of several technical issues.’ The Treasury was so divided that it put two sections on monetary policy into Law’s report, one by Keynes supporting the International Monetary Fund, the other outlining the ‘strong misgivings’ of other Treasury officials. Eady himself was strongly influenced by the opinions of the Bank men, especially Cameron Cobbold and George Bolton. The Bank had never been in favour of Keynes’s Clearing Union, in the first instance because, as Fforde (1992, 39) put it, ‘Central banks, particularly those presiding over large and sophisticated monetary systems, tend to dislike or even resent grand international and inter-governmental schemes dreamt up by economists who may seem, if only because of terminological differences, to be giving insufficient attention to the practicalities of the market-place.’ Now, to quote its official historian again (58–9), ‘with its anxieties, its suspicions, and its well-founded concern for the transitional period . . . in the winter of 1943–4 it relentlessly maintained its advocacy of an alternative approach.’ By February 1944 ‘it had been driven into a corner from which it could only oppose the plan by the force and bluster that the other side could easily expose for what it was.’ The Cabinet which discussed Law’s report on 11 February had to decide the instructions for UK officials at the forthcoming Article VII talks with representatives of the Dominions and India who were already on their way to London. As Dalton recorded (Pimlott ed 1986b, 703–5): ‘There have been great comings and goings by the officials trying to get all the ministers primed right. . . . Bevin has been warned that if he makes a row today he will be isolated along with Beaverbrook and the Bank of England.’ Beaverbrook had claimed the monetary policy proposals would restore the gold standard and the commercial policy plan would destroy imperial preference. Dalton thought his arguments were ‘ludicrous’. The meeting began well. It degenerated when Beaverbrook ‘wave[d] his arms and talk[ed] more arrant rubbish, thinking that Canada might easily be persuaded to enter into bilateral barter arrangements with us and join the sterling bloc’.

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Dalton and Law objected that the Canadians were strongly in support of the proposals, but then ‘Hudson adds his usual stuff, boring us all and making no converts. It is incredible how these rambling discussions succeed one another, every few months, with no new arguments and no one changing sides and never any really firm decisions.’ The outcome was a committee of Anderson, Lyttleton, Beaverbrook, Dalton, Law and Cherwell, in which the discussions became much more heated. They had to meet morning and afternoon over four days to reach agreement that the Washington proposals should be discussed with the Dominions and then only with a dissenting report from Beaverbrook (EEP(44)1st-6th meetings, CAB87/95). On the second day (15 February) Keynes was summoned to give evidence, at Law’s suggestion; he was followed by Catterns and Cobbold from the Bank, at Beaverbrook’s. On the third day the discussions on commercial policy (which Fleming observed as he was acting as secretary alongside Bridges) degenerated into a shouting match between Beaverbrook and Dalton. Afterwards Beaverbrook invited Dalton to lunch and complained about Law and Eden and that ‘it was shocking how the Government was being run by “the three Profs” – Cherwell, Keynes and Robbins’ (Pimlott ed 1986b, 706–7). When the committee resumed discussion of commercial policy at 6 p.m., somewhat more calmly, it also discussed commodity policy: ‘General agreement was expressed with the objects of the plan, but doubts were expressed as to the feasibility of the buffer stock technique.’ Lyttleton made the standard objection that it would not work without output restriction and associated himself with this point (but only this point) in Beaverbrook’s minority report (EEP(44)5th meeting, CAB87/95). After the Bank men had appeared before the committee, Law sought Lionel’s advice. He responded on 15 February (T230/41) that he suspected that ‘the general attitude of the Bank is that we could get a gentlemen’s agreement with the United States by offering to fix the dollar sterling rate and then proceed to consolidate the sterling area, while perhaps extending it to certain European countries’, in which case he had three counterarguments. First, the proposal would anger the Americans, the State Department as well as the Treasury: ‘The idea that we could go ahead to attempt to reconstruct the pre-war sterling arrangements enlarged to bring Europe within our economic orbit, without arousing intense suspicion and anger in the United States, would in any case seem to be over-simple. When it is combined with a deliberate attempt to jettison the present product of the Article VII conversations, it seems to approach sheer lunacy.’ Secondly, it probably could not succeed: ‘It seems optimistic indeed to suppose that either on

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financial or on commercial grounds the project would appear as attractive to the Dominions and the others concerned as it does to the Bank of England.’ Finally, it is a bit steep for an institution which has been party to a propaganda which represents our plan as a return to the Gold Standard to put forward a proposal that we agree to fix the dollar/sterling rate. What a miserable proposal this is. . . . We should be crucified to the dollar, while other countries would still be free. We should have antagonised our best friends in the U.S. Administration, cut ourselves off from the credits which are forthcoming under the present proposals, and all on the dubious hypothesis that the rest of the world will so admire our heroic behaviour that they will refrain from accepting the baits and inducements put forward by our wealthier Ally and content themselves to live in self-decreed poverty with us. . . . I hope very strongly that the Committee will think seriously before accepting so short-sighted a plan as this. If we wanted to produce another first-class crisis of sterling as soon as the war is over, I can scarcely think of a better way of doing it.

When the Bank summarized its position in writing, Lionel attacked it so strongly that Eady and Hopkins agreed his note should not be circulated outside the Treasury and the Section (Eady, ‘Robbins’ Note on the Bank of England Memorandum, T273/336); Eady thought (surely unjustifiably) that ‘both in substance and in temper this paper is unworthy of the Economic Section and of the seriousness of the subject’. The Bank did indeed propose indefinite maintenance of strict exchange controls around the sterling area after the war, fixing sterling against the US dollar at $4 to the pound and negotiating bilateral payments with countries outside the sterling area (EEP(44)3, CAB87/95; Fforde 1992, 59–60). In his note (The Bank of England’s alternative to the proposed international monetary fund (EEP(44)3), T273/336) Robbins’s analysis of the sterling area proposals was in fact quite temperate in tone, but he pointed out that they would be unworkable unless all members of the sterling area maintained strict exchange controls over capital movements and that they appeared to contemplate import controls as well and hence discrimination against Canada, the USA and other countries outside the sterling area. This was hardly a sound foundation for imperial unity, let alone Anglo-American cooperation. As for the fixed exchange rate, The Bank appears once more to be concerned that the pound should “look the dollar in the face”. Last time this led to the disaster of the return to the Gold Standard in 1925 at the old pre-1914 parity. This time . . . [i]n order to avoid any possibility of having to rely on a loan from the United States to help in the transitional period to overcome our difficulties in a way which would make possible co-operation with the United States on the multilateral basis of an International Monetary Fund, we

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are to organise a sterling area which will discriminate against the dollar; and we are then to fix the dollar-sterling exchange rate . . . without any of the safeguards of the International Monetary Fund . . . With the Bank’s proposals not even the other members of the Sterling Area would be under any obligation not to depreciate their currencies on sterling, an occurrence which has been not infrequent in the past history of the Area.

To carry the Bank’s attitude too far ‘would reveal a sense of inferiority which might well make it difficult to accept equal and independent membership in any international monetary organisation. Have we really sunk so low?’ Beaverbrook and the Bank lost this round. The general recommendation of the ministerial committee was that discussion with the Dominions representatives should proceed ‘on the basis that, while no commitment will be entered into, our expectation is that at the appropriate time we shall find it to our advantage to participate in these schemes [ie those discussed in Washington], with or without modification’. The UK representatives should explain these schemes fully and seek the views of the Dominions representatives (WP(44)121, Discussions under Article VII of the Mutual Aid Agreement, Report from the Committee on External Economic Policy, 18 February 1944, CAB87/95). But the Dominions talks, which were supposed to open on Monday 21 February, opened on the morning of 23 February before the War Cabinet had considered its committee’s report. The Cabinet that evening ‘develop[ed] into the worst pandemonium’ Dalton had ever seen (Pimlott ed 1986b, 710–11). Towards the end, four or five ministers are often shouting at once and the P.M., I think deliberately, allows the thing to get out of hand, explaining that he hasn’t had time to read the papers, and doesn’t pretend to understand it, but thinks it should be thoroughly discussed, and why anyhow should we be hustled, ‘just because a few officials from the Dominions are here: they can be entertained for a few days, and given drinks, and taken round to see the bomb craters’. . . . Then, at 9 o’clock, the P.M. said that it was clear we could reach no decision that night, but he saw no harm in this Cabinet paper being given to our officials on the clear understanding that the Cabinet had reached no decision upon it.

At the first of this third series of Dominions talks Hopkins again welcomed the participants from overseas. He reminded them to keep in mind Article VII of the Mutual Aid Agreement and the fourth and fifth paragraphs of the Atlantic Charter. They had been provided with the agreed statements resulting from the Law Mission to Washington, except that the monetary policy papers included the revised text of the scheme for an International Monetary Fund agreed between the UK and US Treasuries since the

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Washington talks. As in Washington, the discussions would proceed in committees on monetary, commercial and commodity policies and probably also on employment policy, cartels, and international investment. Mackintosh then reported briefly on the Canadians’ recent talks on commercial policy with the Americans. The remainder of the session was mostly taken up by a lengthy statement by Professor L.G. Melville of the Australian ‘full employment’ or ‘positive’ approach to Article VII, that countries should commit themselves to maintain full employment before agreeing to fix exchange rates or to reduce tariffs and other trade barriers (ASD(44)1st meeting).5 Melville, whom Lionel had met in London in 1933 (see Chapter 8), had been economic adviser to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia since 1931, after two years as the first professor of economics at the University of Adelaide. In the later 1930s he had tended to differ on monetary policy issues from most Australian economists, notably in a greater preference for exchange-rate stability (but only after the Australian devaluation of 1931 which he and other economists had urged), and acquired the reputation of the most orthodox of Australia’s leading economists (Cornish 1993 and 1999). But Roland Wilson (quoted by Millmow 2002, 175) thought that ‘it was Melville’s stubbornness and his “rigidity rather than the essential substance of his views which made us regard him at the time as a pain-in-theneck”’. At the Hot Springs conference Coombs had to tread carefully as the employment approach was still not yet official Australian policy (Coombs 1981, 38–45); since then it had been approved by the Cabinet (Turnell 2002, 114–17). H.V. Evatt, Minister for External Affairs, was notorious for keeping a tight rein on his officials (Hasluck 1980, 64–5, 88). When Melville, who was not as wholehearted an enthusiast for the positive approach as Coombs, was appointed to lead the Australian delegation to the Dominions talks Evatt told him firmly on 27 January that ‘it is most necessary that views you express are those which the Australian Government wishes to have put forward’ (RBA C.3.9.1.83). During the talks Melville was obliged to defend himself when Evatt charged him with ignoring his instructions in the commercial policy discussions (Telegram, Personal for Melville alone from Minister for External Affairs, 20 March, and Telegram, Personal for Dr Evatt from Melville, 22 March 1944, RBA C.3.9.1.84). A few months later Lionel confessed in his official journal (WD, 191) that he used to find Melville ‘so dull and pedantic that I used to wonder whether I ought not to pray at nights to be made to like him better. But, as time has gone 5

The minutes of the meetings are in CAB99/34; Melville’s almost daily cables to Canberra are in RBA C.3.9.1.84.

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on, his extreme discomfiture at being under dictation from Drs Evatt and Coombs has become so apparent that insensibly my prayer has been granted, although it was never uttered!’ Lionel conscientiously sat through most of these meetings over the next four weeks. For one young member of the British secretariat, the future economic historian John Habbakuk (1997, 5), it was fascinating to listen to Keynes, Robbins, Robertson, Meade, Henderson and Mackintosh. In the early meetings members of the Law Mission outlined the progress made in Washington on the main subjects, beginning with Keynes on monetary policy. From the outset the Australians emphasized ‘points of difficulty’ – for instance, they wanted greater freedom to change exchange rates unilaterally and larger quotas for small countries such as their own – but in general the Dominions representatives generally approved of the IMF proposals. The Australians challenged the whole concept of the fund in discussion of the transitional period on 15 March when Melville stated, at length as usual, that they feared it would undermine the strength of sterling as a world currency and they would prefer to keep the sterling area in existence (Cable from Melville to Treasurer [Ben Chifley] and Minister for External Affairs, 16 March 1944, RBA C.3.9.1.84; Telegram for Robertson from Canadian Delegation Economic Policy Talks, 16 March 1944, RG19/3591, LAC). At the single meeting on the American investment bank proposals Australian dissatisfaction was more widely shared (ASD(Bank)(44)1st meeting; Cable from Melville to Minister for External Affairs and Treasurer, 23 March 1944, RBA C.3.9.1.84). The UK delegates emphasized the importance of a transitional period before countries had to assume the full obligations of the postwar plans. In the two meetings on the subject, Eady, Keynes and Meade were the main speakers for the UK (ASD(44)2nd and 3rd meetings, 15 and 20 March). Robbins listened, but he did remark that he thought ‘it would be wise to put as many exceptions as possible on the permanent provisions of the schemes, so that a country which could plead balance of payments difficulties or the absence of liquid resources would be able to contract out of the general programme. This would greatly simplify matters and would rule out the possibility of delay in assuming obligations for which there was no substantial reason.’ When Liesching reported on the Anglo-American commercial policy discussions on 25 February, Overton, chairing the trade meetings, asked the Canadians to respond first (ASD(Trade)(44)1st meeting). Their optimism was more encouraging to Lionel and the other members of the Law Mission than what they then heard from the other Dominions. The New Zealand,

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South African and Indian representatives at least admitted to acceptance of the idea of a multilateral approach. The Australians on Evatt’s instructions rejected it. As Melville warned in his opening statement two days earlier, ‘unless there was assurance that the larger countries would maintain a high level of employment by domestic measures, it was unlikely that smaller countries such as Australia could significantly reduce barriers to international trade, many of which had been set up in desperate efforts to deal with the employment problem.’ On 2 March Melville objected to all the various formulae for tariff reduction under discussion. While Mackintosh responded that if Melville meant that the Australians were against the multilateral approach then he (Mackintosh) ‘thought he should say frankly that the Canadians were in favour of it’, R.M. Campbell (economic adviser at the New Zealand High Commission) cautiously supported the Australians. Although the South Africans were in favour of a multilateral approach (they had contributed one of the formulae under discussion), they too thought the Anglo-American formula too drastic. The next day Melville’s colleague Edwin McCarthy stated boldly, if unrealistically, that Australia wanted to see the US tariff cut drastically before agreeing to any substantial reduction of preferences (ASD(Trade)(44)3rd-5th meetings; Cable Melville to Evatt and Chifley, 8 March 1944, RBA C.3.9.1.84). In fact, ‘The southern dominions were all retreating from their commitment to contract preferential tariffs’, for their own specific reasons (McKenzie 2002, 118–20). Lionel tried to assist Meade, Shackle and Liesching in responding to Melville and his colleagues but he rarely received helpful replies to his pointed questions. Keynes admitted on 29 February (ASD(44)(Employment)1st meeting) that the Anglo-American document on employment policy was limited and unambitious, largely because of American antagonism to the creation of an international institution which would advise governments on domestic policy matters. This gave Melville the opportunity to announce that in spite of these political difficulties he was going to produce a document proposing governments commit themselves to maintaining full employment after the war. Lionel tried to pour oil on turbulent waters by claiming that ‘nothing which Mr. Melville had said was incompatible with the spirit of the United Kingdom-United States discussions in Washington’ and that he was glad Melville recognized the political difficulties. He pointed out that the monetary, commodity and investment plans would help to maintain full employment. Melville was sceptical. The next day the Australians produced their draft international employment agreement. The UK response from Eady and Keynes at the next meeting on 6 March was to point to the preparation of the white paper on employment policy now in progress. The

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Canadians agreed an international employment agreement was unnecessary, but the New Zealanders and South Africans supported the Australians. So the meeting went through the Australian draft and produced a watered down version which after further amendments was agreed another week later (ASD(44)(Employment)2nd and 3rd meetings). It was also agreed that the UK would include it in proposals they put to the USA. This was gratifying to the Australians, but they were as aware as the British that the USA was likely to give short shrift to the proposal (Melville, Report on London Discussion on Article VII: February-March, 1944, RBA C.3.9.1.83; Turnell 2002, 117). As Lionel had admitted in his contribution to Law’s report in December 1943 (Draft section on commodity policy for inclusion in Mr. Law’s report, T230/31), the British government was not bound by any commitments on commodity policy. It had nonetheless taken a small step forward by bringing together a group of representatives of the interested departments. The results were not fruitful, but they show what Lionel and his friends were up against. Dennis Robertson was put in charge, although Frank Lee ‘remain[ed] in effective control’ (Caine to Clauson, 24 December 1943, CO852/659B). By the time the Dominions talks began there had been several meetings of this group. At the outset Robertson and Robbins had argued that any action in the next few months on commodity problems should at the least be consistent with the principles of the Anglo-American statement (Commodity policy, Minutes of a meeting . . . Friday, 31st December, 1943, CO852/659B). The most urgent of these problems was sugar, since the 1937 International Sugar Agreement, renewed for two years in 1942, ended on 31 August 1944. In January 1944 Lee and Robbins argued that instead of renewing the agreement the UK should suggest, first informally to the Americans and possibly the Dutch, the creation of a purely consultative body, so that, as Lee put it, in due course ‘it would be easier to devise a satisfactory scheme for sugar in the light of any general principles which might be agreed at a later date’. But at the next meeting, which Lionel missed, Robertson reported that the Treasury was going to discuss the sugar agreement with Sir Hugh Elles, the senior British delegate to the International Sugar Council, who was in favour of renewal. He also reported that the Ministry of Agriculture was in favour of renewal, which Miss Shufeldt, representing MAF, enthusiastically confirmed (Commodity policy: International Sugar Agreement, Draft minutes of a meeting . . . 7th January, 1944, and Commodity policy, Draft minutes of a meeting . . . January 24th, 1944, MAF83/632). On reading the minutes, Keynes wrote to Robbins on 7 February (T230/31): ‘My dear Lionel, Has some high authority with which I am not in touch, decided

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that the Commodity conversations under Article VII are, like the Currency conversations and the Commercial Policy conversations, all my eye and must be abandoned?’ Lionel reassured him on 9 February (T230/31) that the situation was not as bad as he thought, since the group at its first meeting had generally accepted that future discussion of commodity policy should be fitted into the framework of the Article VII proposals. Oliver Franks of the Ministry of Supply had been ‘especially strong on this’ in connection with copper. ‘The sugar business appears to be more of a mess; but that is largely due to the pertinacity of Donald Fergusson who, under the influence of Miss Schufeldt who, as you know, is secretary of the existing sugar agreement, is trying to get the matter dealt with outside this framework of discussion. But I do not think that this view has been accepted by the Treasury although since our last meeting, there have been conversations between Eady and Sir Hugh Ellis, of whose exact purpose I am not fully informed.’ Keynes was right to be suspicious. Three weeks later John Maud learned that ‘the Colonial Office and the Treasury, not to mention the Board of Trade, have ratted on their previous willingness [not] to see the agreement renewed’. He wrote immediately to Lionel on 24 February. He was sure the government should not rush into any decision, certainly not before the end of the Dominions talks; but if by any chance Lionel thought there was no harm in renewing the Sugar Agreement he would not hold out. In the meantime he had advised John Wall to withhold Ministry of Food consent (Redcliffe-Maud 9). A couple of days earlier the commodity policy group had met to discuss the line to be taken with the Dominions representatives, quickly agreeing that the main object should be to report the results of the Washington conversations without discussing individual commodities. It also agreed Keynes should be asked to expound his views on the finance of buffer stocks. On the more immediate concerns Lee argued again that the Sugar Agreement should not be renewed (Commodity policy, Note of a meeting . . . February 21st 1944, CO852/659B). In April, when Eady reported the US Administration was ‘definitely in favour of continuing the Agreement’, the Colonial Office and Robbins took the side of the Ministry of Food, the Dominions Office supported the Ministry of Agriculture. By June it was clear the agreement would be renewed, as a result of pressure from the US Administration supported by the Ministry of Agriculture (Commodity policy, Draft minutes of meeting . . . April 13th, 1944, MAF83/632; Interdepartmental commodity policy group, Minutes of a meeting . . . 28th June, 1944, CO852/659B).

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At the Dominions meetings on commodity policy, which began on 1 March (ASD(Commodities)(44)1st-6th meetings), Robbins summarized the Anglo-American discussions and Mackintosh reported on the Canadian-American discussions, which had ‘been less satisfactory than those on commercial policy’ since the Americans were preoccupied with the immediate postwar transitional period and much less interested in the contribution commodity control could make to counteracting the business cycle. The Canadians themselves liked the buffer stock idea but were ‘impressed with some of the difficulties’ in operating it. The attitude of the other Dominions’ representatives was one of lukewarm sympathy at best. The second meeting went through the Anglo-American statement clause by clause. Lee, Robbins and Robertson, who was chairing the meetings, provided the clarifications the Canadians and others sought. The discussion soon got bogged down in the details of an international commodity organization. The third meeting went round the same ground again; the fourth turned to methods of international commodity policy. At both Lionel outlined his own views – on the importance of ensuring the representation of consumer as distinct from producer interests and on the superiority of the buffer stocks scheme over quantitative regulation schemes – but he admitted there were conflicting views within Whitehall. The fifth meeting was back to the international commodity organization; the sixth discussed a paper by Keynes on buffer stocks (JMK 27, 197–9), introduced by Robertson as Keynes was ill. Lionel repeatedly clashed with the Australians. Melville thought the commodity policy discussions ‘proceed[ed] satisfactorily from Australia’s point of view’: ‘We argued that in some cases buffer stocks would need to be supplemented by regulation schemes. This was not opposed, but there was no enthusiasm for regulation schemes amongst the United Kingdom delegation’ (Report on London Discussions on Article VII: February-March 1944, RBA C.3.9.1.83). The Article VII talks ended on 21 March. The UK government was now under pressure from the US Treasury to publish the Monetary Fund proposals. At a Cabinet meeting on 14 April Anderson proposed the monetary plan be published without waiting for commercial policy proposals. Beaverbrook’s attack on the plan made Anderson ‘thoroughly angry’ (Barnes and Nicholson eds 1988, 978) but, as Dalton recorded, ‘after long wrangle on usual lines’ the Cabinet agreed to publication ‘though making it plain that we are not committed to it and that we expect it to be discussed by the House of Commons and the public before we take our decision’ (Pimlott ed 1986b, 735). Robbins had briefed Attlee the day before to

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support Anderson (CAB123/96): ‘The Chancellor’s [proposal] is an important step forward. . . . all the dense fog of obfuscatory technicalities concerning the monetisation of Unitas, etc., etc., which has impeded progress for six months, is dissipated at one puff of common sense; and the judgment of the Washington delegation, which has been the subject of so much dispute, now receives official Treasury support.’ He supported the idea of going ahead with international monetary policy without waiting for the commercial policy plans to be settled, but, he warned Attlee, ‘we shall do well to indicate to the Americans that we regard these matters as so closely interrelated that ultimate agreement on any one must wait upon a satisfactory settlement of the others. The obligations of the Monetary Fund would be much more onerous if we could not expect an increase of our export opportunities.’ Initial press reception to the Joint Statement by Experts on the Establishment of an International Monetary Fund (Cmd 6519) was favourable (Van Dormael 1978, 137–8). But at the same time there had been a debate on Empire and Commonwealth Unity in the House of Commons on 20 and 21 April, when many MPs proclaimed their support for imperial preference. Keynes optimistically thought this might strengthen the UK government’s hand in dealing with the US Administration (JMK 25, 444–8). When he mentioned this to Robbins on 24 April, Lionel responded (25 April) that he agreed but hoped the debate would not lead to a Laodicean (lukewarm) attitude toward Anglo-American agreement on commercial policy. One reason was that he feared that if the UK did not come to any agreement with the USA, the independent members of the Commonwealth might well do so themselves. As the Dominions talks had revealed, ‘It is not only the Canadians who are vulnerable to offers from that side. The South Africans told us quite candidly that they were thinking of reconsidering their whole attitude to Imperial Preference; and, although the Australians, as usual, were very cagey, it was clear enough that it only needed a sufficiently attractive offer in respect of wool and one or two other commodities to bring them down on the American side. I am afraid that, if we are not very careful, we shall find that a modern Imperial system as regards commerce means, in fact, little more than bulk purchase agreements with New Zealand, and anti-Japanese quotas on cheap goods for the blacks.’ He was also less sanguine than Keynes about the American attitude: ‘I cannot think that any of the indications warrant the view that he [the Secretary of State] is prepared to go slow on this particular hobby-horse. Indeed, I am inclined to regard his strong support for Morgie [Morgenthau] as part of a bargain – “I’ll back your Fund if you’ll back my Commercial Policy”.’ Keynes responded

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on 26 April that there was ‘not a line’ of Lionel’s letter with which he did not agree. He did think, though, that the forthcoming Presidential election allowed a delay in trying to obtain Cabinet agreement on commercial policy, which would be ‘a perfectly hopeless exercise’ at present (T230/41). When the Commonwealth Prime Ministers met in London in May, they broadly supported the IMF proposals but revealed their widening split over commercial policy. Canada alone definitely supported multilateralism; the southern Dominions wanted to retain imperial preference. Churchill sat on the fence, in favour of free trade but sentimentally attached to imperial preference (McKenzie 2002, 122–6). In May Anderson accepted Morgenthau’s invitation to an international monetary conference. At the same time Parliamentary debate on the Joint Statement revealed much hostility to it and little understanding of it – especially among Conservatives, although the lack of understanding did not extend to Lionel’s friend Alec Spearman, MP for Scarborough and Whitby, who spoke in favour of the proposals (HCDebs, vol 399 cols 1935–2046). Between the Commons debate on 10 May and the Lords debate on 23 May (when Robbins went to hear Keynes speak), Dick Law asked Lionel for his assessment of the present state of the postwar international economic plans. Lionel responded with what Law on 19 May thought ‘an admirably lucid paper’ which concentrated on monetary and commercial policy (Plans for external economic reconstruction, 17 May 1944, T230/92). On monetary policy there had been much progress since the autumn, but on commercial policy matters had retrogressed. Until the last week or so there still had been some hope that the commercial policy plan would be published, but this had not even been mentioned in the Prime Ministers’ talks and now D-Day was imminent. He warned that delay and procrastination would be dangerous. The dangers began with the American hostility they would provoke, in the economic as well as the diplomatic field, but they were not confined to it. ‘Despite all that has been said in recent weeks concerning the unity of the Commonwealth, I submit that it is a pure illusion to suppose that we should discover any enthusiasm among the Dominions for a policy of “ganging up” against the Americans. Canada, certainly, would be out at once.’ The same was true of the European Allies. Lionel recalled the meeting chaired by Phillips in Washington a year earlier (see Chapter 13), when ‘One by one the representatives of the various European nations assured us that they thought our [monetary] plan was superior to the Americans’; one by one they added regretfully that if the Americans refused to compromise, they would be compelled to follow the American lead.’ Since the UK could not wait until after the war to reach agreement on commercial policy he

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concluded by addressing the two major obstacles – agriculture and imperial preference. The position with agriculture was simple. ‘It is clear that if, in every country, the supporters of industries liable to be affected by international competition, were to make the claims which are put forward by supporters of our own agrarian interest, there would never be any clearance of the channels of trade.’ At the same time, however, it ought to be possible to find some other way than protection to increase agricultural prosperity: ‘it should not be beyond the wit of those responsible for agricultural policy to find ways of adapting their requirements to the requirements of a sound international settlement – if they really wanted to do so.’ Imperial preference was a bigger obstacle, but here too ‘it would surely be unreasonable to say that there was no offer in the shape of modification of the general obstacles to trade which would induce us to make any modification to the preference system’. Later in the year Lionel was to devote his time and energy to trying to find such compromises. In March, April and May 1944 there was, in Fleming’s words (JMK 26, 291), a ‘spring fever now epidemic among economists and others known as “writing a White Paper on employment policy”.’ Almost every economist in Whitehall was involved one way or another. At the beginning of March Dalton obained agreement from ministerial colleagues that the Board of Trade’s plans for controlling industrial location should appear in the white paper. When he and a few other ministers first saw a draft of the rest of the white paper, which he thought was by Robertson (Pimlott ed 1986b, 717, 729), they ‘all, both drunk and sober, agree[d] that the draft . . . is completely lousy. It is . . . is a sort of extract from an economic text book, full of long words, long sentences and all quite abstract. Not a fact or a figure anywhere!’ He also thought the document should begin with the transition, ‘which will interest people most’. This draft was in fact one of Fleming’s two drafts, but while he had drastically changed the order of presentation he had incorporated many of Robertson’s paragraphs. Jewkes thought Fleming’s arrangement far superior to Robertson’s and used it when he wrote the next two versions (Jewkes to Cherwell, 22 March 1944, CAB124/214). Cherwell contributed his own effort before Jewkes started, but the last three versions (after Jewkes’s two) were written under Brook’s supervision by Jewkes and Sylvester Gates in the Office of the Minister of Reconstruction.6 6

Robertson’s and Fleming’s drafts are in CAB124/211, Cherwell’s and Jewkes’s drafts and the first ‘Office Draft’ in CAB124/212, Office Draft II and the final draft and proofs in

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In the Treasury Henderson and Eady, who had already attacked Keynes’s paper on the Steering Committee report, attacked Fleming’s draft (Henderson, The employment policy, 27 March, Eady, Draft White Paper on Employment Policy (Fleming), 25 March 1944, T161/1168/S52099). Keynes responded in its support (JMK 27, 372–4). He ‘share[d] his [Henderson’s] pessimistic view about our prospective external financial position’ but drew the opposite conclusion, that it was imperative to tackle domestic unemployment vigorously. He also thought the draft was ‘very good indeed and does not require any substantial amendment. I think it as invulnerable from either side as can reasonably be expected.’ Keynes was frequently away from the Treasury because of illness during March and April. Lionel wrote to him on 4 April (T247/80): ‘Everything goes wrong when you are away. After havering about for more than a week, and using an incredible amount of Fleming’s and my time, the Treasury decided to launch a full-scale attack on our version of the White Paper, on the ground, if you please, that it was preoccupied with the problems of the long period – “the Golden Age” as I gather it is fashionable for their Lordships to call it – to the exclusion of what the public really desires, namely, a meticulous exhibition of all the conceivable horrors and snags of the transitional period. Hubert [Henderson] appears to have delivered himself of a terrific denunciation of the plan for varying the social security contribution, which I have not yet been privileged to see; and we had a frightful meeting the other morning, at which the Bank of England explained how thoroughly unsound and unworkable was the whole scheme for commodity regulation.’ The later, post-Fleming drafts met with more approbation in the Treasury. Henderson told Eady on 20 April that the ‘style and mood of the new draft represents a great improvement’ – but he still believed its publication would be dangerous (T161/1168/S52099). In spite of the changes Meade told Lionel on 19 April that it was ‘very surprisingly good. There are, no doubt, certain ways in which we should like ideally to alter it, but if it is to be shorter, more popular and more in accordance with the prejudices of the Treasury than Fleming’s draft, I feel that it is a very satisfactory effort.’ He made a few minor constructive criticisms (T230/68). Eady made more ‘wrecking amendments’ (his own words to Brook on 26 April), because, after many years at the Ministry of Labour, ‘this is the subject on which I CAB124/213. Sylvester Gates was a barrister with a First in Greats from New College (1924), who had been controller of publicity at the Ministry of Information from 1941 until attached to the Office of the Minister of Reconstruction in 1944. The final version of the white paper was not written by Hopkins as Skidelsky (2000, 282) claims.

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feel most deeply and I don’t regard it as satisfactory that a State Paper of this importance should contain two major proposals, on the variation of public expenditure and on the variation of insurance contributions which all the officials concerned believe impracticable or at best far less effective for their designed purpose than is claimed from them.’ But what he suggested was to follow an earlier suggestion of Keynes to begin by referring to the technique of national income accounting, for the planning of the national income was the real new policy. Keynes was somewhat more critical to Hopkins on 20 April than he had been of Fleming’s drafts, because he thought the paper had moved further from the report of the Steering Committee, but ‘by and large, the paper does not seem to me unduly unsatisfactory. Not a very dignified style, but it is quite readable and most of the necessary material is there.’ He continued to contribute drafting improvements (in T161/1168/S52099) right up to the penultimate version – as did Lionel (LCR to Brook, 15 May 1944, T230/68). Apart from the prose style, the most obvious difference between the later and the earlier drafts lies in the order of the chapters, which reflects the priorities of Dalton and other ministers. Fleming, and Robertson before him, had followed the Steering Committee in putting the control of aggregate demand first; Jewkes introduced the order which prevailed, placing The Transition from War to Peace and The Balanced Distribution of Industry and Labour before The General Conditions of a High and Stable Level of Employment and Methods for the Maintenance of Total Expenditure. After the ministerial Reconstruction Committee in April had discussed what the white paper should say on the location of industry and restrictive practices in industry, it ‘had another go at the Draft White Paper on Full Employment’ on 8 May, having received an almost complete version a few days earlier (R(44)30th, 34th and 36th meetings, CAB87/5). Dalton noted that ‘The bit about stabilising purchasing power and not bothering too much about balancing the Budget has been toned down a good deal under the pressure of the Treasury. This passage “now reads like an antiphon by Keynes and Eady”, as Cherwell says.’ The committee had another go the next day and a week later. At the War Cabinet at noon on Friday 19 May it was ‘finally – repeat finally – approved’ (subject to the addition of one more sentence to be agreed between Woolton and Anderson) (Pimlott ed 1986b, 741–2). Employment Policy (Cmd 6527) was published on 26 May – the same day that US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr announced that the international monetary conference would take place at the Mount Washington Hotel, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, beginning on 1 July.

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Whitsunday fell on 28 May in 1944. Spending the long weekend at Tor Cottage, Lionel wrote to his son Richard on the Monday: ‘I am just winding up three marvellous days of idleness – Hot sun, clear skies, nothing to do except read & sleep’ and help Iris with the garden by shovelling manure on to the vegetable patch. He wondered what his son thought of the war: ‘I find the progress of the battle in Italy highly exciting. There seems more than a bare chance of a really spectacular victory.’ The Allied offensive in Italy had been launched on 11 May. On 21 May the Allies had taken Monte Cassino after a long struggle. Allied forces entered Rome on 4 June. Two days later American, British and Canadian forces began to land on the beaches of Normandy: Operation Overlord had begun. The UK delegation to the UN International Monetary and Financial Conference was announced on 8 June. Keynes would lead; the other members would be Eady, Ronald, Robbins, Robertson and Opie. Brand, the Treasury representative in Washington, was ‘to be associated with the delegation and attend its meetings as a member as may be convenient’ (The Times, 9 June). Hopkins had suggested Robertson to Anderson on 5 June (T231/365) in order to take some of the strain off Keynes. According to Lionel thirty years later, the inclusion of Eady was ‘my doing’ (Transcript of Economists’ Dinner, The Reform Club, London, March 5th 1973, RP). As he told the story, ‘there came out a paper which nominated . . . Nigel Ronald from the Foreign Office, Maynard Keynes, Dennis Robertson and myself; . . . I saw the red light at once and rushed along the corridor to Maynard, and said: “Maynard, you must have a Treasury man, otherwise everything we do will be subject to obstruction in telegrams.” And he said, “Yes, well, that’s very sensible Lionel, who do you recommend?” I said: “Well, I’m sorry, but you’ve got to take Eady.” I can hear his voice saying – “Lionel, I can scarcely bear it.”’ Robbins also appeared in the King’s Birthday Honours list on 8 June. He had been informed shortly before Whitsun that the Prime Minister was now proposing to recommend him a CB (Companion of the Order of the Bath) and he had accepted, commenting to himself (or perhaps to his father), ‘This is the one I always preferred’ (J.M. Martin to LCR, 23 May 1944, and note by LCR, Honours KCMG (declined) & CB, RP). It is an honour rarely awarded to a temporary civil servant – as many friends and colleagues who wrote to congratulate him commented. Brook (KCB) welcomed him to the Order, pointing out that he had received ‘the same recognition for your work in this war as was given to Keynes for his work in the last’. Dalton echoed Brook: ‘This is a very Select Honour, conferred only, at intervals of about once in each generation, upon economists of real distinction.’ Lionel

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was particularly pleased with Dalton’s congratulations, reminding him that it was he who had first encouraged Lionel to think he had some future as an economist.7 Anderson wrote warmly: ‘I am sure you realise how pleased I am that it has been found possible to recognise your outstanding services in a manner worthy of them & acceptable to you. I offer you my very cordial congratulations.’ Law hoped that the appearance of Robbins, Liesching [KCMG], Enfield [CB] and Opie [CMG] in the same Honours List might be a sign ‘that the forces of righteousness would triumph’ and not ‘a kind of compensation prize for their defeat!’ To John Maud too it seemed ‘particularly good news’: ‘I feel you’ve had a lousy deal lately – which I know you don’t really mind except in so far as the things you care for get a lousy deal. And now this, perhaps quite irrationally, makes me feel the tide has turned & that Art. VII, Hot Springs etc. as well as the Prof. Robbins himself, is in the ascendant again.’ A former colleague of Maud’s in the Ministry of Food thought that ‘Apart from your other good works, the Points Scheme alone (on which you were so right & we were so wrong) deserve[d] permanent recognition.’ Ruth Cohen, now at the Board of Trade, thought it appropriately timed just after the publication of the employment white paper, as did Dennis Proctor in the Treasury. Sir Thomas Phillips ‘hope[d it will] strengthen you to continue those arguments with Eady & others, to some of which I had the privilege of listening [in the Steering Committee], with profound admiration, if not always with comprehension. I hope you like the White Paper on Employment.’ When the LSE Students’ Union sent their congratulations they also sent their good wishes for the Bretton Woods conference. Cobbold of the Bank of England wrote rather ominously: ‘I hope it will fortify you for the next six weeks, after which I should think you will all need dukedoms at the least!’ Before leaving Lionel wrote to Nicky Kaldor on 8 June (Kaldor NK3/9/2/126–7). He had known for some time, but not initially from Hayek, that the longstanding tension between Hayek and Kaldor had developed into 7

Brook’s, Dalton’s and other letters of congratulation are in Honours KCMG (declined) & CB, RP, LCR’s reply to Dalton, 11 June 1944, in Dalton 8/3. Ten years later LCR was asked to join the highly confidential Maecenas Committee which decides on honours; he served for twenty-two years and was particularly concerned that academics, such as mathematicians, should be honoured; he recommended Isaiah Berlin replace him: LCR to Bridges, 4 October 1954, General Correspondence 1.8.54– 31.1.55, Brook to LCR, 24 October 1958, General Correspondence May-December 1958; Douglas Allen to LCR, 29 August 1975, 1975 Correspondence; LCR to Allen, nd and 9 September 1975, Day File Jan 1975–Dec 1976, RP.

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an open dispute a couple of years earlier over examining for the Finals of the BSc(Econ). Honor Croome, puzzled by some remarks in a letter to her from Clarisse Kaldor, had asked him if he knew what happened when she wrote from Ottawa on 28 June 1943 (Private Letters War Period, RP). But now he had been told by another economist colleague in government service that he (Robbins) ‘had been induced to adopt a changed attitude to you [Kaldor] by the influence of our colleague Hayek. This is not true.’ He admitted he had been ‘shocked and distressed’ that the quarrel had become public and wished that if mediation had been needed he or Robertson would have been asked. He also told Nicky that if he had asked his (Lionel’s) advice, ‘I should have revealed to you what I am sure Hayek was too loyal a colleague to reveal – namely, that the habit of not putting you down for undergraduate examining was due not to him but to me. It was I who was chiefly responsible for the examination list in the past; and it was I who often expressed the view that you were not likely to be so good examining second-rate plodders as you would be at most other academic pursuits.’ As he concluded, he wrote with ‘candour . . . but with no lack of goodwill’. Kaldor’s reply on 13 June was equally frank and friendly (NK3/9/2/128– 9). He admitted that in the immediate prewar years he felt frustrated at LSE: ‘Without the opportunity of sharing in the work of examining and general undergraduate lecturing, I did not feel that my work was very fruitful’ especially in years of ‘far-reaching change in the approach to economic problems’. But he had ‘never forgotten how much I owe to you for my start in life in this country’ and regretted that differences had come between them. Scribbling a note to thank Nicky for his reply, Lionel added (NK3/9/2/ 124–5): I am just off to the U.S. but I hope very much that when I return we may meet and resume our discussions. I was warned by the Lord in a a dream, some two or three months ago, that our relations were approaching a happy resumption: in that I sought you out and obtained a very satisfactory elucidation of a point of theory that had been bothering me. Unfortunately I did not pay sufficient attention &, in the words of the poet, when I woke up “Day brought back my night”.’

Nicky (nd, Private Letters War Period, RP) was ‘delighted with [Lionel’s] charming letter’. The Bretton Woods delegation left London on 16 June and sailed to New York on the Queen Mary. It was ‘a comfortable voyage’ but not as restful as Lionel would have liked. As he told Iris on 24 June, he and his colleagues spent every day working – in discussions amongst themselves and with

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delegates from the Dominions and India and European Allies who were travelling on the same ship – preparing for the conference and for the preparatory meetings with the Americans at Atlantic City, New Jersey, before it. Lionel had to share a cabin, which made it hard for him to work before breakfast and to go to bed early. The UK delegates were also seriously worried about the effects on their families at home of the flying bombs (V1s) which had begun to land on London three days before they sailed. Lionel began to keep a diary once they had reached Atlantic City (WD, 156). George Bolton of the Bank of England, who accompanied the delegation as a technical adviser, began one on board ship. As he wrote (The International Monetary Conference, July 1944, OV38/10, BOE), within twenty-four hours of leaving London he realized he was ‘in a minority of one and if I was to have any influence it could only be on the basis of full co-operation’. He therefore ‘plunged . . . wholeheartedly into the fray while making it clear that I retained a healthy scepticism regarding the quota and executive side of the [International Monetary] Fund proposals’. He thought this tactic had worked ‘as I was enabled to keep close to Eady without being regarded as an object of suspicion by the professors’.8 The UK team took a good deal of trouble to ascertain the views of the representatives of the European Allies on board (IMC(44)(GENERAL)lst-5th meetings), and also of the Indian government represented by Sir Jeremy Raisman. Raisman, who attended the UK delegation meetings, was ‘shocked and surprised’ to discover that the UK might block the immediate postwar use not only of India’s accumulated wartime sterling balances but also of subsequent accruals during the transitional period; furthermore, Bolton recorded (20 June), ‘The only hope that Eady was able to give him was the suggestion that the Indian delegation should come to London after . . . [the conference] to discuss the whole of India’s financial relations. If [A.D.] Shroff [a director of Tata Sons Ltd who was a nongovernment member of the Indian delegation] or any other member of the Delegation raises the subject at Bretton Woods, the U.K. Delegation will stonewall and refuse to discuss it.’ Raisman made it clear that India was also likely to object to the small size of its quota in the Fund compared to China’s (IMC(44)(DEL)1st meeting; WD, 157). In their shipboard meetings Keynes and his colleagues first drafted a new version of the exchange rate clause of the Joint Statement and agreed it with the Allied representatives. This had been agreed at a Treasury 8

Bolton’s On Board, Atlantic City and Bretton Woods diaries are in OV38/8 and 9, BOE. The minutes and papers of the UK delegation are in T231/350–79.

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meeting on 8 June to which Robbins had not been invited; he recorded that he would have advised against it (IMC(44)(DEL)1st meeting; IMC(44)(F)11, International Monetary Fund, Report by the United Kingdom Delegation on the preliminary conversations with other delegates and suggestions for the amendment of the agreed Statement of Principles, 21 June 1944; WD, 156–7). Then, even while they were ‘up to our ears in complicated discussions about Management and Quotas’ of the Fund, Keynes completely redrafted the Bank plan. Much of the wording of this ‘boat draft’ found its way into the Articles of Agreement agreed at Bretton Woods (Oliver 1975, 174–81). Bolton (21 June) noted Keynes’s new enthusiasm for the Bank. Lionel, who had long favoured it, commented (WD, 157): ‘I looked back at the Economic Section file on the Bank and thought of the months and months in which we were alone in saying all this and were regarded for our pains as either academic bores or impossible pro-Americans. These, however, are not thoughts which I thought it helpful to make to my colleagues.’ Arriving in New York early in the morning of Friday 23 June, the party was met by Brand and taken to Atlantic City by train (WD, 157). When Hasler had arrived at that seaside resort (not then a casino gambling resort) for the UNRRA conference in November 1943, what he ‘miss[ed] most is the chance of hearing the reflections of Lionel Robbins upon the beauties of Atlantic City including the attempts of a number of architects to combine in one hotel [the Marlborough-Blenheim] the decoration of the Alhambra and Milan Cathedral’ (Hasler to Law, Second Weekly Report, 14 November 1943, T230/140). Lionel, having told Iris on 30 June that the town was ‘a sort of super Blackpool’, referred her to his diary (which he was sending to her via Stanley Dennison) where he expatiated at some length on its extraordinary attractions (WD, 159–60). It would be ‘amusing if one had more leisure’ and he wished he had time to swim in the ocean, which was right outside the hotel, the Claridge, a brown brick skyscraper built in the 1920s (Talese 1996). For the UK delegation, ‘plunged immediately into complicated negotiations’, it was ‘an immensely strenuous week [with] committee meetings all day and often far into the night’ (LCR to IER, 24 and 30 June 1944). But on the Sunday Caroline and Joe came over from Bryn Mawr, and Lionel and Dennis Robertson enjoyed the afternoon with them strolling along the mile-long boardwalk (WD, 159–60). On the Saturday morning there had been a brief meeting of the conference, at which seventeen nations were represented (Horsefield 1969, 79–80); the UK delegation then met some of the Commonwealth representatives to inform them what had been agreed

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on board ship; in the afternoon Keynes expounded the British views on the Bank at a private session with the Americans. This was a particularly successful meeting (WD, 158): ‘Keynes was in his most lucid and persuasive mood; and the effect was irresistible.’ Robbins ruminated in his diary afterwards on what made Keynes such a remarkable man; as he later put it (1971a, 193), ‘What . . . made him stand out above all his generation were more general qualities of mind and character: the swiftness of his thought and perceptions; the cadences of his voice and his prose style; his idealism and moral fervour; above all, the life-enhancing quality of his presence – as someone, I think it was Sir Roy Harrod, once said, when he came into a room we all cheered up.’ The Americans said little, but in the evening Pasvolsky confirmed Lionel’s impression that as far as the Bank was concerned the British were ‘off with a flying start’ (WD, 159). At the first Commonwealth meeting Rasminsky warned that the proposed alterations to the exchange rate clause of the Fund proposals could cause trouble with the Americans. Robbins rather smugly noted (WD, 158): ‘This, of course, harmonises completely with what Dennis [Robertson] and I have said all along . . . ’ At the second, after tea on the Sunday afternoon, Melville – whom Lionel ‘with the best will in the world, [could not] help regarding as excruciating dingy-minded’ – disclosed that the Australians thought they, like the Indians, were being unfairly treated over the size of their quota (WD, 160; IMC(44)(CON)2nd meeting). As at the Dominions talks in London Melville had detailed instructions from his masters in Canberra (Chifley and Evatt, Summary of suggested instructions to the Australian representatives, 10 June 1944, RBA C.3.9.1.6). He told Bolton (25 June) that he was ‘violently opposed’ to the Fund and the Bank and ‘quite convinced that no Australian Government will be able to put the Fund over’. The Indians were now represented by Raisman, the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India Sir Chintaman Deshmukh and Theodore Gregory, who, according to Bolton (25 June), ‘having flown from India in a transport plane, spending three days lying on the floor next to a cargo of unexploded Japanese bombs . . . is therefore not in a fit frame of mind, particularly as the Indian Delegation, who are having a fight among themselves, have made a complete mess of their arrangements’. Lionel was pleased to see him as usual (LCR to IER, 24 June). At the end of the Atlantic City meetings there was still no improvement in the situation over the quotas with the Australians and Indians, as Keynes, Melville and Robbins all recorded (JMK 26, 66–71; Copy of cablegram from the Australian Delegation, Bretton Woods, 3 July 1944, RBA C.3.9.1.77; WD, 165–6).

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For four full days heated discussions in private US–UK meetings alternated with relatively peaceful meetings of the full preliminary conference. The latter, working through all the suggested amendments to the Joint Statement, were often ‘boring and tedious’ but were admirably chaired by an unexpectedly genial and patient Harry White. There were also two equally amicable meetings on the Bank (WD, 161–5; JMK 26, 66–7). White was ‘most forthright’ (Lionel’s phrase) and less patient (‘in a raging heat’ according to Bolton [26 June]) at the first of the private meetings, when he made it quite clear that the attempted British modification of the exchange rate clause was unacceptable. Lionel did not need convincing; ‘fortunately it was not necessary for me to open my mouth except to take up an academic side issue with Hansen. . . . Robertson was in the same position.’ (It was not a very academic side issue; acording to the official record, ‘MR. ALVIN HANSEN remarked that American critics said that the Fund did nothing to prevent domestic inflations and suggested that some provision should be inserted about the necessity for the maintenance of internal stability. PROFESSOR ROBBINS thought that this would be dangerous because it would tend to encourage the Fund to intervene in domestic political issues. Those who were anxious to prevent inflationary tendencies would, he thought, find their hands weakened rather than strengthened if it could be represented that anti-inflationary steps were being taken at the dictation of an outside body of international financiers.’) Keynes had to agree to redraft the exchange rate clause. On another proposed amendment, however, he made it clear that the delegation could not agree to a shortening of the transitional period before members had to assume the full obligations of IMF membership (WD, 161; IMC(44)(DEL) 9th meeting; Horsefield 1969, 82–5). The British delegation was also concerned about another American drafting suggestion that nothing in the proposed agreement must be held to prejudice existing or future agreements regarding discrimination in commercial policy. At a special meeting held to discuss this on the Monday evening it was Robbins’s turn to fight the Americans: he ‘took up the challenge with the utmost determination’, arguing over two hours that if there were to be a clause referring to existing trade agreements it had to require that they would be revised if they hindered the working of the Fund. The matter was resolved the next day, after discussions between Opie and Pasvolsky, when the US/UK group agreed a clause to the effect that when existing treaties stood in the way of the provisions of the Fund agreement, the governments concerned would have to consult in order to make the necessary

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adjustments. ‘Whether this [was] due to the plain speaking last night, or whether we over-estimated the extent to which the Americans really wished to shift their ground,’ Robbins did not know, but the outcome was ‘very satisfactory’ (WD, 162–3). On Friday 30 June the delegates to the preliminary conference were taken by overnight train to Bretton Woods. As the general information provided to the 730 participants explained (Proceedings II, 1129), ‘Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, consists solely of the Mount Washington Hotel and its appendages. The hotel community is surrounded by the scenic White Mountain National Forest, which covers nearly one million acres and is dominated by Mount Washington, highest peak of the Presidential Range.’ On that first day the hotel, which had been closed for two years and whose reopening renovations were not quite complete, ‘swarm[ed] with familiar faces; friends from Washington, acquaintances from Hot Springs. Everything [was] in a state of glorious confusion.’ Lionel also reported in his diary the story that the manager had given up in despair and locked himself in his room with a case of whiskey (WD, 166–7; Van Dormael 1978, 169). He told Iris on 9 July: ‘The setting of the conference is delightful. From the window of my room I can see the summit of Mt. Washington, across an upland basin of green meadows & dark woods intersected by a wide mountain stream, which winds noisily round the base of our hotel. After dinner we sometimes get time for short strolls; & one evening Opie took Maynard & Lydia & me for a short drive through the hills [on 6 July]. But for the rest, it is an inaccessible Paradise. Although there is a pool I have not yet had time for a swim.’ In his diary Robbins made ‘no attempt to put down day-by-day even the chief matters that [were] discussed’ (WD, 171), dwelling instead on incidents in which he participated. I shall follow suit. On 1 July he attended the first plenary session. ‘As usual on these occasions, nothing of any significance whatever occurred. . . . A long series of banal or inaudible speeches preceded the voting of Mr Morgenthau to the Chair. Mr Morgenthau then delivered the speech which has been reported in the Press and we rested from our labours.’ More interesting and entertaining was the small banquet that Keynes gave that night to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the concordat between King’s College Cambridge and New College Oxford. King’s, New College, Eton and Winchester were represented by Keynes, Robbins, Robertson and Ronald, and (since King’s had a more recent special relationship with Yale University) Yale by Dean Acheson, Oscar Cox and the leader of the Chinese delegation, Kung Hsiang-Hsi (Governor of the Central Bank of China and a recipient of an honorary degree from Yale). Robbins

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particularly enjoyed a duel between Acheson and Kung over Chinese foreign policy, which ‘broke off with honours even’ (WD, 167–8; Acheson 1970, 82–3). The second evening Morgenthau gave a cocktail party for the UK delegation. Besides the Morgenthaus the Americans present were the vice-chairman of the US delegation Fred M. Vinson, the Republican Senator for New Hampshire Charles W. Tobey and Harry White (note by Edward Miller Jr, July 3, 1944, Morgenthau Correspondence 293). Afterwards the UK delegation ‘circulated throughout the hotel exchanging views and reminiscences with various friends’. Robbins noted, for the benefit of Bridges and others in Whitehall to whom he was sending his diary in instalments, that ‘among our intimate friends on the State Department side, relations are as friendly as ever, but there is a penumbra of implicit interrogation regarding our attitude on Article VII.’ Stinebower and others had asked, ‘with the diffidence of friends who do not wish to cause embarrassment, what can possibly have gone wrong in London’. It was easy to reply ‘political complications’, but Lionel wished his government had been more open with the American Administration. ‘From what I have seen and heard already, I am quite convinced that we are playing with fire in this matter. We run a grave risk of arousing widespread suspicion of our good faith just at the moment when, for other reasons, we need that confidence in our good faith should be completely sustained’ (WD, 168–9). After a second plenary session the next morning, at which Tobey gave, in the words of the conference journal, an ‘inspired address’, the conference divided itself into three commissions: I on the Fund chaired by Harry White, II on the Bank for Reconstruction and Development chaired by Keynes, III on Other means of international financial cooperation chaired by Eduardo Suarez of the Mexican delegation. I and II each had four committees. Robbins was assigned to Committee 1 of Commission I on the Purposes, policies and quotas of the Fund and Committee 1 of Commission II on the Purposes, policies and capital of the Bank (Proceedings I, 94–5, 403–21).9 As at Hot Springs there was a ‘Commission IV’, held in the hotel nightclub and well attended by the younger delegates (Mikesell 1994, 42). Eady told Waley on 1 August that he and some other UK delegates frequented the ‘Sterling Area Club’, the local drug store which served drinkable tea, along with the Indians, Egyptians and Iraqis. 9

LCR reported Tobey’s speech as taking place at the first meeting of Commission I; he noted its pomposity but admitted that he and Keynes, with their nonconformist backgrounds, shared a feeling of ‘gratitude for the persistence of the traditions of New England puritanism’ (WD, 169).

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The Indians’ discontents surfaced immediately in Committee 1 of Commission I. Although at its first meeting, on the morning of 4 July, the committee agreed to postpone discussion of quotas and Robbins successfully moved the appointment of a drafting committee, to which an amendment tabled by the Indian delegation – that the purposes of the Fund include ‘to assist in the fuller utilisation of the resources of economically underdeveloped countries’ – could be referred, in the afternoon the committee had to tackle a second Indian resolution, that one of the purposes of the Fund be ‘to promote and facilitate settlement of abnormal indebtedness arising out of the war’ (Proceedings I, 117–18 and 122–4; Horsefield 1969, 93–4). According to Robbins (WD, 170–1), Raisman opened for the Indians with ‘a very friendly and moderate statement’ but was supported by Egypt ‘in tones which were not quite so moderate’ Emanuel Goldenweiser, economic adviser to the Federal Reserve Board, explained that the Americans did not want to use the Fund for this purpose; other delegates suggested the issue might be referred to Commission III; ‘So that when I spoke I had to be very uncompromising and declare explicitly that HMG did not regard these debts as appropriate for discussion by any part of the conference.’ Victor Urquidi, a member of the Mexican delegation, remembered that the delegate for Guatemala tried to intervene in support of the Indian proposal (letter to the author, 11 October 1991): ‘Professor Robbins immediately raised his hand and rose to speak. As I recall it, he peered over his spectacles – for the delegate from Guatemala was at the other end of a long conference room – and in a rather aloof and slightly condescending fashion, he said something like this: “May I remind the distinguished delegate from . . . er . . . er . . . Ecuador that the question of sterling balances is strictly a matter of concern only to His Majesty’s government and the governments of the countries directly involved”, and sat down. Poor Mr Noriega-Morales [who was a graduate student at Harvard], feeling literally squashed, never opened his mouth during the whole of the rest of the Bretton Woods conference!’ The official minutes conclude: ‘The view was also expressed that the matter should be dealt with by negotiations between debtor and creditors and not by this Conference.’ When the drafting committee, which Goldenweiser chaired, met the next day it discussed the Indians’ first resolution, arriving at a compromise which ‘the representatives of the Indian delegation who were present . . . regard[ed] as an improvement . . . but as not completely meeting their wishes’. Judging even from the official minutes, Melville as a member of the drafting committee was obstructive as usual (Proceedings I, 130–1). At lunch Robbins ‘judged it expedient . . . to take my seat with the Indians’. This

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diplomatic move proved unexpectedly successful. Robbins discovered that he and Shroff had been contemporaries at LSE: Ardeshir Darabshaw Shroff had obtained a BSc(Econ) degree, specializing in Banking and Currency, in 1924 and worked in a stockbroker’s firm until joining Tata just before the war (Professorial Council, 1 October 1924; Lala 2004, 108). They ‘converged as one old LSE man to another and settled many outstanding problems of the world before touching on outstanding Indian questions. When we did eventually reach this point, everything was very friendly.’ Lionel had, anyway, considerable sympathy with the Indian position, especially over quotas (WD, 172). This did not settle the sterling balance problem, which arose again the next day, at the fourth meeting of Committee 1 of Commission I, when the Egyptians put forward a resolution even stronger than the Indian one. ‘This was an irresistible bait to our Indian friends and in consequence another full-dress discussion took place. The speeches for the resolution were good, especially the speech by Shroff, who mustered his arguments with great moderation and force, and visibly impressed the committee. It was my dreary lot once more to have to stonewall.’ The matter was eventually referred to Commission I (Proceedings I, 216; WD, 173–4). At the Commission meeting on 10 July the British were supported by the American and French delegates and the resolution was allowed to lapse, to Lionel’s relief (Proceedings I, 433; WD, 179). At the same time, there had been, Bolton reported (14 July), ‘an unexpected happy result . . . Shroff made an excellent speech couched in the most cordial language and it was answered by Keynes in his most magnificent style in an equally cordial tone [JMK 26, 86–7]. . . . There has, in consequence, been a rapprochement between the Indian and British Delegations, who are now on the most friendly terms and the astonishment of the Americans has to be observed to be believed.’10 Bolton also reported (10 July) that the British were on very good terms with the Soviet delegation, after ‘a couple of cocktail parties, during which immense quantities of strong liquor were consumed’. At the second Lionel ‘succeeded so well in making myself agreeable to M. Stepanov, the leader of the Delegation, that as the party broke up he gripped me by the arm and whisked me off to a private dinner with himself and the Technical Adviser of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs [Professor Alexey Smirnov]’. (J.B. Brigden of the Australian delegation related [The Bretton Woods Conference Some impressions, not wholly without prejudice, RBA C.3.9.1.77] 10

In 1968 G. L. Mehta, who had known Shroff at LSE and in Bombay, suggested Lionel be invited to give the third annual Shroff Memorial Lecture in Bombay (G.L. Mehta to LCR, 18 June 1968, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 M–Z, RP).

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that ‘Smirnov . . . whose English improves [after attending both Hot Springs and the UNRRA conference] . . . is said to be the sole practising economist from the pre-Soviet regime, and has the qualities for survival. . . . He acted as chief spokesman, except when his leader preferred to speak and be translated.’) At the dinner table the three men ‘sat and exuded hatred for the common enemy, related atrocity stories, and congratulated each other on the feats of our respective armies’ (WD, 178). The Russians were as exercised over the quota issue as the Indians, causing ‘general consternation’ on 5 July when they told the Americans that they wanted a quota in the Fund equivalent to that of the UK. The problem was given to an ad hoc committee chaired by Vinson, which allowed Committee 1 of Commission I to sidestep the issue (WD, 172, 176; Horsefield 1969, 94– 5; Proceedings 1, 150–1). On the morning of 15 July the Quota Committee agreed a list of quotas settled in private negotiations with the Americans which in effect gave the Russians all they wanted. In the afternoon ‘the result of our labours was presented to the full conference [ie Commission I]. The result was as anticipated. Judge Vinson opened for the US with a great blast of eloquence designed to cast a halo of respectability over the horsedealing of the last fortnight.’ (Bolton [17 July] described it as ‘a colourful speech . . . on the best Congressional lines, full of biblical quotations and flowery vague sentiments’.) Several countries, including Australia, Egypt and India, entered reservations or requests for reconsideration. It fell to Robbins to wind up on behalf of the UK, ‘urging the delegates to accept the list as representing the best that was likely to be forthcoming. I must confess that I have never felt greater distaste for anything I have had to do in Government service.’ He did not resist the temptation to tease Smirnov on his diplomatic success when he met him at a Canadian cocktail party the next day (Proceedings I, 634–5 and 652–3; WD, 185–7). On the Sunday at the end of the first week (9 July), when there were fewer meetings, Lionel reported to Iris that ‘The pace of this conference is even hotter than Hot Springs and I scarcely notice the difference between day and night. It is not going too badly.’ He was in good health but homesick, especially because the Treasury was forwarding her letters by sea and he had received none. With the continuing V1 attacks on London he was grateful for messages from Dennison that she was out of range. According to Bolton three days earlier, ‘The most complete confusion now prevails. Four committees on the Fund are working daily under the chairmanship of Russians, Brazilians and other nationalities, none of whom has any command of the English language. All difficult questions, which means all the real questions, are referred to Sub-Committees.’ Robbins spent most of his time in these

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committees, but he did not have to work as hard as Robertson and Bernstein, who settled the most difficult technical issues, including the exchange rate clauses, between them. Lionel successfully defended the amended clauses against criticism from Rasminsky in Committee 2 of Commission I on the morning of Saturday 8 July, although privately he did not feel happy about it (Proceedings I, 288–9; WD, 175–6). Commission II on the Bank began its deliberations on Tuesday 11 July, after a Proposal for a Bank for Reconstruction and Development – a combination of the US draft of November 1943 and the UK ‘boat draft’ – had been ‘hatched out behind the scenes’ and circulated. The commission promptly dispatched most of its business to subcommittees (WD, 180; Proceedings I, 495–7). As Bolton described it on 14 July, Keynes as chairman ‘began a system of taking a meeting so quickly that no one could understand either what he was saying or to which clause he happened to be referring and by this means about half of the clauses were referred to a Drafting Commission [sic]. The fun began after this process had been completed.’ Acheson complained to Morgenthau but Keynes’s methods got the business done (Van Dormael 1978, 198–9; Skidelsky 2000, 353). On 12 July Commission I also set up a drafting committee and several ad hoc committees in an attempt to complete its work. To quote Bolton again, ‘The business of discussing the various clauses of the Fund has broken down completely and for the last three days [11–13 July] we have sat in practically continuous session either in Commission, Committee, Sub-Committee or Ad Hoc Committee from nine in the morning to three and four o’clock the following morning.’ Robbins served on both drafting committees, on that for the Bank at Keynes’s suggestion (Proceedings I, 437; IMC(44)(DEL)(B)7). The only relaxations available were breaks in drafting when he could go for a walk with Goldenweiser or a drink with Acheson (but even then he would be tackled about the nonresumption of the Article VII conversations) (WD, 180–1, 183–5). Robbins was, of course, involved in many of the private arguments with the Americans, for instance those over the location of the Fund and the Bank. One was reported to Morgenthau (Van Dormael 1978, 209): White said that Robbins had urged that the issue of location should be left to be settled later; ‘Vinson added that Robbins had said, “We know we will be beaten and we hope to avoid being humiliated.” “We can wait,” said White.’ The US Administration hoped to finish the conference before Roosevelt’s renomination as Democratic Presidential candidate on 20 July. By Sunday 16 July exhaustion was setting in and tempers were fraying; in the early hours

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of the next morning it was decided to extend the conference to the end of the week (Horsefield 1969, 89–90; Bolton, The international monetary conference, OV38/10; WD, 188). Lionel wrote to Iris: ‘Our conference is nearing its close. But it is not so near as we thought until yesterday, for it has been prolonged a few days in order that we may not break down utterly. I do not think that I should have cracked for although I have had much to do it has not been unsupportable. But Dennis Robertson, our lawyer & some of the American technicians were very near the edge. Save for half an hour’s drive with the Keynes on two evenings it has not been possible for me to leave the hotel grounds.’ (As he reported in his diary [WD, 190–1] Keynes’s deteriorating health was a serious worry.) That evening, however, Senator Tobey gave a party for the US and UK delegations at Mountain View, another resort hotel some twenty miles away from Bretton Woods: ‘Lovely country, charming hospitality.’ Lionel was not sure where he would be going after the conference. When Viner invited him to New Haven, he had replied (nd, Viner 22–14) that he might have to go directly to Canada from New Hampshire; he told Iris on 17 July that he now expected to go to Washington for a week or so and then to Ottawa. He had cabled Bridges that he and Robertson hoped to discuss commodities with the Supply Missions, but on the 17th Hopkins cabled Keynes that until ministers had discussed the question of resuming Article VII conversations Keynes and Eady were not to do so and that ‘Robbins has authority to go to Washington for talks on commodities. It will be for consideration whether . . . it would be wise that he should not proceed until he hears from us again’ (WD, 190; telegram no 70 CAMER, T231/367). Keynes and Eady were keen to resume official talks on commercial policy while they were in America; Lionel found himself ‘in the odd position of trying to exercise – and it is an uphill task – a moderating influence’ on Eady and Keynes. Not only did he not want to discuss commercial policy without Liesching or Meade, but a conversation with Pasvolsky had led him to believe a delay until the autumn might be useful on both sides of the Atlantic. He was relieved when word came on 20 July that ministers had decided that Richard Law, who was visiting Washington, could tell Cordell Hull that the UK government hoped to resume discussions in the autumn; the same day Law flew up to Maplewood, a resort near Bretton Woods, to report to the UK delegation on his conversation with Hull (WD, 186–7, 192). Lionel optimistically wrote Meade on 29 July (T230/43) that ‘he had some reason to suspect that when the conversations are resumed we shall not find our opposite numbers so obdurate on the preference question as might at one time have been feared.’

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After three more days of frantic drafting and innumerable meetings, Commission I approved the IMF Articles of Agreement shortly before 11 p.m. on 19 July; Rasminsky presented them to a plenary session the next day. Commission II on the Bank reached the same point on 21 July. At the Fund meeting ‘the unfortunate Professor Melville’, greatly embarrassed, announced that his government had instructed him not to sign the Final Act (Proceedings I, 913–15, 1045, 1092, 1105–6; WD, 191–2; Cornish 1993, 450). On the last day Robbins was a member of the Coordinating Committee which prepared a summary of the conference and approved the Final Act for its presentation to the closing plenary session at 9.45 p.m. after the farewell dinner (Proceedings I, 1079–81, 1106). The ‘final Plenary on everything’ was ‘truly dramatic’ (WD, 193). The outstanding issue of substance at the beginning of the week had been the size of subscriptions to the Bank, where the Russians refused to contribute more than $900m rather than an amount equal to the quota they had obtained in the Fund ($1200m). At the last moment the delegation received permission from Moscow to go up to $1200m. When Morgenthau announced this in his opening remarks, ‘the Conference jumped to its feet and cheered to the echo’. Keynes then moved the acceptance of the Final Act, seconded by Stepanov, Mackintosh and Pierre Mendes-France, and received a standing ovation before and after he spoke. As Lionel justly commented, ‘In a way, this is one of the greatest triumphs of his life.’ (Harrod (1951, 691) claimed the delegates also sang ‘For he’s a good fellow’, although Lionel told him he had no recollection of this and thought it improbable: 20 June 1949, Letters to and from Economists 1.11.49-August 1950, RP).11 The Australians were also in the limelight: the ‘wretched Melville’ finally received permission to sign the Final Act. Brigden and Robbins both reported home Robertson’s remark that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety-nine just persons (Luke 15:7) (Brigden, The Bretton Woods Conference, RBA C.3.9.1.77; WD, 193). At the banquet there was ‘a final touch of absurdity’ (Bolton, The international monetary conference, July 11

Paul Bareau, who was there, recalled in lectures given at LSE in 1951 that, when Keynes entered the room for the final meeting, the other delegates spontaneously rose to their feet in silence until he had taken his seat (Anglo-American Financial Relations during and since the war, 7.2.51); the verbatim minutes of the session (Proceedings I, 1107–26) record: ‘Lord Keynes, upon arising, was accorded an ovation, everyone present standing, after which he read his remarks.’ Skidelsky (2000, 356–6) repeats Bareau’s story (citing Eady in The Listener in 1951) but claims this occurred at the beginning of the banquet and then, confusing the banquet with the final meeting that followed it, claims Keynes gave his speech at the banquet, before repeating Harrod’s apochryphal story.

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1944, OV38/10): ‘After a reference by Morgenthau to the prowess of the Australians at El Alamein, Stepanov [!] took the bow for the cheers which followed and then the whole audience rose to their feet and stood to attention to the strains of the only Australian tune known to the band, viz., “Waltzing Matilda”.’ On Sunday 23 July most of the delegates departed by overnight train to New York. From there Lionel went to Ithan, taking Robertson with him. ‘We did absolutely nothing for three lovely days but eat & sleep’ before going together to Washington on 28 July, where the UK Treasury delegation had booked them ‘excellent accommodation’ (LCR to IER, 29 July 1944; WD, 194). In Washington they spent a good deal of time with Frank Lee, who had joined the Treasury delegation there in May. On their first hot and humid night in Washington the three of them ‘went and laid on the grass in Lafayette Square, talking till far into the night on all the usual shop topics: the intolerable complications of the post-armistice period; the longing of temporary civil servants to get back to their normal occupations; the position of the Treasury in the Whitehall hierarchy; the Congressional system; the vanity of human wishes; the relation between Ministers and their advisers’ (WD, 195). As Machlup reported to Hayek (2 and 24 August 1944, Machlup 43–15), he and Lionel enjoyed a couple of meals together and Lionel also lunched with Aaron Director (WD, 201, 211, 214). Lionel telephoned Mises in New York but he was on holiday at Lake Placid (Mises to Hayek, 12 September 1944, Hayek 38–24). On his first free day, Sunday 30 July, he took himself off to the National Gallery, but he was too tired to enjoy it fully. He spent the rest of the afternoon reading Basil Liddell Hart’s history of the First World War – ‘How well it brings back the atmosphere of frustration and the crass stupidity of military advisers’ – before dining with Gilbert Walker, his former student at New College, now Director of Statistics with the British Supply Mission (WD, 197). Lee had organized a Washington Commodity Group similar to the commodity policy group in London and written to Robertson at Bretton Woods on 6 July (MAF97/2508) asking him to attend the next meeting to explain what had been happening in London since Lee left. In London the group had been discussing the application of buffer stocks schemes to sugar and wheat as well as a draft protocol for the renewal of the International Sugar Agreement – which had given Lionel plenty of opportunity to state his well-known views on buffer stocks, agricultural protection etc (Interdepartmental Commodity Policy Group, Minutes of a meeting . . . May 30th, 1944, MAF83/655; Interdepartmental Commodity Policy Group, Minutes of a meeting . . . June 8th, 1944, Interdepartmental Commodity Policy Group,

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Minutes of a meeting . . . 28th June, 1944, CO852/659B). In Washington the recent concerns had been copper (where the British and American members of the Combined Raw Materials Board had been discussing a possible international ‘study group’) and rubber (where there were about to be discussions between the UK, US and Dutch governments about an international rubber committee) as well as sugar. When Robbins and Robertson attended the meeting on 31 July they had to admit there were unlikely to be any ministerial decisons on commodity policy before the autumn and to reiterate the need for caution in any discussions with the Americans (Lee to Robertson, 6 July 1944, and Proposals for an international rubber committee, MAF97/2508; Washington Commodity Group, Minutes of a meeting . . . July 31st, 1944, T230/31; WD, 197). Robbins and Robertson expected that negotiations for an AngloAmerican Oil Agreement, commenced early in 1944, would be over by July. Lionel had been involved in discussions of a draft in Whitehall in May and June. He had naturally urged that any agreement should be consistent with the proposed principles of international commodity policy and with Article VII and regretted that oil policy was not being discussed with other commodities in the interdepartmental commodity group (Minutes of an interdepartmental meeting . . . on the 18th May, 1944 to discuss the proposed memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and U.K. governments on oil policy, LCR to Laithwaite, 6 June 1944, T230/108). In July a delegation led by Beaverbrook and including Law and Ralph Assheton, Financial Secretary of the Treasury, had resumed discussions in Washington at the ministerial level. When Robbins and Robertson arrived in Washington, Brand and Lee alerted them to the possibility of a ‘first-class crisis’. Law then sent for Lionel and asked for his opinion (WD, 194–5). The American draft memorandum of understanding (29 April, T230/108) included an introductory article of general principles (such as that oil supplies should be available in accordance with the principles of the Atlantic Charter), an agreement to set up joint US/UK machinery for dealing with immediate problems and an intention to expand this into an International Petroleum Council in due course. The UK government had decided to ask that the availability of foreign exchange should be explicitly mentioned among the ‘relevant economic factors’ referred to as needing ‘due consideration’ in the introductory article; the US negotiators objected. Robbins told Law that he did not think the UK should give in, at least not initially, pointing out the potential dangerous precedent that ‘if we were compelled to remove every special agreement regarding commodities from the sphere of operation of the general let-out clauses regarding transitional

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monetary or commercial arrangements, we should have precious little room to manoeuvre.’ On 1 August, when Lionel was expecting the next day to accompany Opie to talk to New York bankers, Frank Lee said it might be a good idea to find out from Assheton how the oil talks were proceeding. Lionel recorded what happened next (WD, 201–9). At 5 p.m. they went to the Mayflower hotel to wait for the delegation. Time went on. No delegation. Eventually a lift door opened and out stepped Lord Beaverbrook followed by the Resident Minister [Ben Smith]. An interval. Then another lift disgorged the Secretary of the Petroleum Division [Geoffrey Lloyd]. Another interval. Then there appeared the Minister of State. Him we accosted. ‘Well we’re on the spot this time’, he said. ‘They have withdrawn even the insertion they suggested for the minutes, and [Edward] Stettinius [Assistant Secretary of State] says that if we don’t sign, it’s no use going forward with the other conversations. . . . ’ By this time Assheton had arrived; and it was agreed that we should wait for him in his room while the delegation conferred. Hours passed again. Eventually at about a quarter to eight Assheton appeared followed by Sir William Brown. ‘Mr. Lee and Professor Robbins are to join the delegation meeting. Lord Beaverbrook would be obliged if you would come immediately.’ We arose and followed them . . . We found the delegation in full session. Lord Beaverbrook motioned me to a chair at his side. ‘Sit right here, Professor’, he said, ‘We want your advice.’ He then read aloud a long draft telegram which resumed more or less the sequence of the negotiations and the nature of the deadlock which had emerged at the last Plenary Session. ‘What do you think of that?’ he said. ‘What course do you advise?’

After some ‘very rapid thinking’ Lionel replied at some length. He could not, he said, disingenuously, pronounce on the political consequences of breaking off negotiations but he supported the Treasury’s view that US recognition of British postwar difficulties was essential. He continued with his ‘main argument’: ‘I could not understand, I said, why the Americans were so difficult on this point. At Bretton Woods it had been agreed to insert the most ample provision for emergency action in the section dealing with the transition’ and this had also been agreed in the Washington talks on commercial policy. (When Beaverbrook interrupted with ‘Exactly what I tried to say myself this afternoon’, Robbins continued ‘without pausing to welcome this powerful accession to the ranks of the supporters of Article VII’.) He thought there must have been some misunderstanding: ‘I could not believe that people like my good friend Hawkins, a man whose integrity was simply not to be called in question, should be so cruelly inconsistent as to grant to us in general what he insisted on denying in each particular.’

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‘The heat was intolerable, and the argument flopped on wearily like a dying fish at the bottom of an empty tank. . . . Suddenly Lord Beaverbrook gathered up his papers. “Well then”, he said, “the telegram goes. Agreed?” The others signified assent. “And you Professor”, he said, . . . “I authorise you to get into touch with your friend. Tell him that, I, Lord Beaverbrook, have given you permission to see him. And then we shall see if there has been any misunderstanding.” Needless to say I did not waste any words in seeking more precise instructions.’ Lionel then dined with Assheton and Law, who was ‘plunged in gloom at the probable repercussions of today’s business on Anglo-American relations . . . : Dear Law, such is the fine quality of his moral sensibility, that he suffers more than all the rest of us put together. Perhaps that is why all the officials I have known who have had intimate dealings with him, put him into quite a class apart.’ The next morning Robbins and Lee went to see Hawkins. Lionel explained his personal view of the situation. When Hawkins, who admitted he was surprised by Beaverbrook’s reference to the commercial policy talks, argued the oil negotiations were different because they were bilateral, Lionel counterargued. He also used the dangerous precedent argument. When Hawkins admitted the validity of this argument and suggested a way of providing some flexibility (by a statement allowing possible suspension of the agreement), ‘Lee and I said that, of course, we had no authority to give any undertakings, but that we would at once report back to Lord Beaverbrook; and, if he thought it right, perhaps we could get together again in the afternoon and try to thrash out a draft.’ Beaverbrook agreed and Lee and Robbins rushed back to the State Department in torrential rain to see Hawkins and Hayden Raynor, secretary of the State Department Oil Committee. They eventually reached agreement on a suitable form of words after a ‘slow grinding struggle’. Robbins and Lee repaired to ‘another endless delegation meeting’: ‘Telephones ringing; secretaries bustling to and fro. Officials summoned to look at a sentence, then ordered back to their “cells”, as our leader calls their magnificent apartments! Ministers appearing and disappearing. And always in the background, fetching drinks, answering the phone, gliding in with mysterious little bits of paper which he would hold before his master’s nose until told to go away or take appropriate action, a slim figure almost exactly resembling a younger, if somewhat sinister, version of Sir Horace Wilson, bearing the name of “Knockles”. At any moment the course of deliberations might be interrupted by the appearance, as it were, from nowhere, of this individual, or by the leader breaking off his sentence to shout, “Knockles – Knockles, fetch me a whisky and soda”. “Knockles, what did Mr. Ickes say?” “Knockles tell me where I’m going next.” “Knockles, the members of the

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delegation have stolen all my cigarettes.” “Knockles, ask Sir William Brown to step this way.”’

(An American observer of ‘the omnipresent and amazing Nockles’ a few days earlier [Berle and Jacobs 1973, 492] thought he ‘belong[ed] in a P.G. Wodehouse novel except that he makes Jeeves look like a piker’.) The next day (3 August) Lee and Robbins went again to see Raynor, and then to Beaverbrook, who summoned the rest of the delegation and decided to ask the Americans for another meeting later that day. From noon to midnight they were involved in drafting telegrams to London. Around midnight Beaverbrook offered Lee a bottle of champagne. ‘Mr Lee indicated that champagne at midnight was not exactly his drink. “Have a bottle of whisky to take home then”, said Lord Beaverbrook. Mr Lee indicated less dissent.’ Knockles was summoned. ‘“What kind of whisky, M’Lud?” “Why the best whisky, Knockles, naturally, for Mr Lee.” “Yes, M’Lud.” A bottle of the best whisky was produced and handed over!’ Lionel sent his diary of his activities in Washington to Keynes, who was in Ottawa for talks with the Canadians on Mutual Aid, on 11 August. Keynes commented two days later (Keynes W/10): ‘Oil is obviously a scream. What it was all about I still have no idea whatever. The point at issue seems such a small and definite one that we were at a loss to know with what conversations on what subjects so many days could be occupied.’ He also could not see from the published version of the agreement where the matter had been resolved.12 When John Maud read Lionel’s diary a few months later (27 November 1944, Redcliffe-Maud 9) he thought the highlights were the passages on Keynes and the account of the oil episode. When Law read Lionel’s account many years later (Coleraine to LCR, Xmas Eve 1978, RP), he was greatly amused by the description of Knockles, of whom he ‘[didn’t] believe that I had ever set eyes on him before or afterwards’. He was not so keen on Lionel’s description of himself, which ‘reads like a character in Henry James the young consumptive . . . [Ralph Touchett] in Portrait of a Lady, for instance. I much prefer F.D.R.’s comment that I had an unexpected vein of ruthlessness in me. As Isaiah [Berlin] remarked, that was a genuine compliment . . . ’ He also thought Lionel was unfair to the Americans. Repeating what he had said in a note to the Foreign Secretary about the oil negotiations just before he went to Washington, he pointed 12

In fact it is in the wording of the minutes of the plenary session of the negotiations on 3 August: Agreement on Petroleum between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Washington, 8th August, 1944 (With Agreed Statement), Cmd 6555, 1944.

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out: ‘I may not understand the Americans, but I do understand the Lord Privy Seal [ie Beaverbrook]. I have known him for thirty-five years. . . . I think you did not appreciate the reality of my fears!’ Beaverbrook himself summoned Lionel on 8 August and handed him ‘a written testimonial’ (WD, 211), which read: Dear Robbins I come directly from signing the Oil Agreement to write you & Lee my grateful thanks for your help. If you claim credit for the Oil Agreement (in case you wish to do so) you will not exceed the bounds of truth. Yours sincerely Beaverbrook (Private Letters War Period, RP)

(Beaverbrook was right to be pleased, as the oil agreement was well received in Washington at the time of its signing [Nicholas ed 1981, 402]: ‘[Harold] Ickes [US Secretary of the Interior] is happy, the press is happy, the oil industry is said to be acquiescing silently’. The oil industry did not have to acquiesce for long: the agreement was rejected by the Senate in December.) While Robbins and his colleagues had been crossing the Atlantic the USSR had launched Operation Bagration, ‘which, in six weeks of relentless armoured attack, destroyed [the German] Army Group Centre and carried the Russian line 300 miles westward from White Russia to the banks of the Vistula outside Warsaw; thirty divisions, 350,000 German soldiers, were killed, wounded or captured in the catastrophe’ (Keegan 1997, 326). At the end of the Bretton Woods conference Stepanov had drawn delegates’ attention to the fact that the Red Army closely approached the prewar borders of Germany. The American, British and Canadian forces of Operation Overlord were at the same time making only slow progress in Normandy: a month behind schedule in taking Caen, they were faced with determined German resistance and, by 8 August when Lionel was writing to Iris, the counteroffensive which was to develop into the great tank battle at Falaise. Lionel was still optimistic, as he had been ten days earlier: although it was ‘tantalizing in the extreme to watch the pace of the Russian advance while we make such slow progress in Normandy’, he doubted whether progress was seriously behind schedule and thought the odds were on an ending before Christmas. Lionel also told Iris that ‘just as I was contemplating hopping on a clipper & coming home, the Treasury people here want me to stay on for some very hush hush conversations. . . . I fancy that I shall have to stay. . . . I am getting more & more homesick every day and, at the rate the German disasters are developing, I sometimes wonder if I shall be back for the armistice.’ He told Keynes on 11 August (Keynes W/10) that Brand particularly wanted him to stay; he abandoned his plan to go to Canada (LCR to Meade, 18

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August 1944, RP). The conversations related to preparations for Stage II which would commence as soon as the war in Europe ended. By 1944 the dimensions of the UK’s postwar external financial problem after the defeat of both Germany and Japan (Stage III) were clear. To put it bluntly, Britain would have a massive deficit in the current account of the balance of payments and massive external debts, mainly in the form of the sterling balances accumulated by India and other countries. Since 1940 exports had been drastically restricted both by the need to produce guns rather than butter and by conditions attached to lend-lease, to less than £300m by 1944, while imports, excluding munitions, were about £1500m, and including munitions more like £3000m, in 1944. During the war, after reserves had been run down and foreign investments sold off, the deficit was financed by US lend-lease and Canadian Mutual Aid and by the accumulation of sterling liabilities (Sayers 1956, 495–503; Howson 1993, 31–2). In 1944 the sterling balances were increasing rapidly towards £3000m. In Stage III, therefore, Britain would have to increase its exports (by at least 50 per cent over the prewar volume according to the estimates first made in 1941), find ways of paying for its imports in the meantime, and restrict severely the use of the sterling balances. Before that stage was reached, however, there was Stage II in which the US was likely to reduce lend-lease following the end of the European war, quite possibly restricting it to munitions, so that at the same time as the UK was contributing to the fight against Japan and to the military occupation of liberated and enemy countries it would need to begin to rebuild its export production. Adding in the need to prepare the domestic economy for peace (Hancock and Gowing 1949, 518–22), ‘The particularly urgent needs were three: first, some easement of civilian living standards; secondly, some rebuilding of capital equipment; thirdly, and most urgent of all, some expansion of exports.’ The last would require the withdrawal or at least revision of the Export White Paper of September 1941, under which the UK was committed not to use lend-lease supplies to produce exports which could compete with American exports. In the spring and summer of 1944 ‘the United Kingdom authorities were acutely aware of the need for high level discussions on what was to happen after the defeat of Germany’ (Sayers 1956, 465). In May Robbins had read and commented on Keynes’s major paper, ‘The problem of our external finance in the transition’, which Keynes wrote after discussions with Stettinius while he was visiting London in April 1944 (LCR to Keynes, 21 May 1944, Keynes W/1; Note of a meeting in the Treasury on 24th and 25th May 1944, T247/55). While Keynes and Robbins were at Bretton Woods the War Cabinet decided there should be early negotiations

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with the US Administration on Stage II which should take full account of the UK postwar position in discussions of the British contribution to the Pacific war and lend-lease before Japan was defeated. Keynes hoped Anderson would come to Washington to hold such a meeting (JMK 24, 33–65, 70–3). In the event Anderson talked to Morgenthau while he was on a European trip in the middle of August; Churchill and Cherwell raised the matter with Roosevelt and Morgenthau during their Octagon meeting at Quebec City 13–16 September; and a mission, led by Keynes, sailed to North America on 21 September. These turned out to be perhaps his most successful negotiations (Moggridge 1992, 775–81; Skidelsky 2000, 364–71). Robbins’s discussions of the Stage II problem in August extended over several days – with Sir Ronald Campbell of the FO (‘one of the coolest and most clear-headed men in this city’ in Lionel’s opinion), Brand and Law and several of the UK economists stationed in Washington – and he spent much time reading the files on Mutual Aid before putting his views on paper (WD, 196, 210–13). Since the subject of the sharing of the costs of military occupation of liberated and enemy countries in Europe between the US and the UK came up several times in his conversations, he also wrote a short note on that (Cost of supplies in the military period, 10 August 1944, RP), enquiring why the European Allies should not themselves make some contribution – for instance out of their gold reserves which had been kept safely in North America since 1940? He managed another weekend in Ithan with Caroline and Joe, when he found his sister gloomy and pessimistic about the US elections but he, as usual, was more optimistic. He wrote his Stage II memorandum before travelling in ‘appalling’ heat with Brand and Lee to New York for two days to talk with Keynes and Eady who were waiting for a flight to England; he finally met some bankers when he and Keynes lunched at the Federal Reserve on 17 August. In his conversations with Keynes they agreed that requests for assistance in Stages II and III should be kept separate and that what was really needed for Britain to cope successfully with the postwar transition was ‘some eventual grand international assize at which the burdens left by the war are to be reviewed and adjusted’ (LCR to Keynes, External financial settlement, 22 August 1944, T247/58). Lionel described his ‘Notes on Stage II’ as ‘rambling reflections, compiled in an effort to clear my own mind’, when he circulated them to his Economic Section colleagues on 30 August (EC(S)(44)13, T230/16). He sent them to Cherwell on 31 August (T230/141) before Cherwell went to Quebec. They were characteristic in that they tried to identify the factors to be taken into account in any decisions as to what to ask the Americans for and the

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tradeoffs involved. There was not a single Stage II problem – except in the sense ‘in which it is true that all economic problems are interconnected’ – but at least two of significance for external policy: rebuilding the export industries and avoiding further external borrowing. The first required a transfer of manpower and resources which could obviously not be taken from production for domestic consumption; the size of the transfer possible in Stage II would be greater the greater the contraction of the military effort and the greater the supplies that could be procured from elsewhere. It was therefore necessary both to consider the distribution of military effort in the Japanese war between the US and the UK and to consider how much the other Allies could contribute. The optimal solution of the second problem, the continuation of US lend-lease and relaxation of the Export White Paper limitations, was probably politically impossible. It was necessary to consider the alternatives. In my judgment, the first thing to do would be to enquire very seriously whether we could not do without some of the things which we were asking for. . . . I confess that after four years observation of the process of requisitioning and allocation, I entertain the belief that military demands are always squeezable and I should guess that by now our quarter-masters have all sorts of secret stores from which they could make do, in some part at any rate, for Stage II.

If this were not true, there were three alternatives. (a) To try to get them on Lend-Lease, accepting the White Paper limitations. (b) That we should make them ourselves. (c) That we should procure them from the United States on credit.

Alternative (b) was undesirable because it would hinder the expansion of the export industries. As between (a) and (c), if nothing else were involved, I confess I should be more in favour of course (c) than is usually allowed to be prudent. If nothing else were involved, then surely the decision would depend on the terms of borrowing and repayment as compared with the advantages of freedom [from White Paper limitations]. If, e.g., it were a question of either paying, say, 3/4 per cent. on £100 million, commencing repayment in easy stages in ten years time, and getting complete export freedom a year or so earlier, or going on as at present with all this exporting business subject to check and scrutiny, I am not prepared to argue that borrowing should be ruled out as inadvisable. But, of course, other and much bigger things may be involved. If we eventually contemplate some general survey of the total sacrifices of war with a view to pleading that a huge legacy of war debt for any one participant is undesirable, then it may well be that resort to solution (c) at this stage would be the least desirable alternative. I think this is a very strong argument; indeed, at the moment, I am

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inclined to regard it as decisive. But I would plead that if we reject solution (c), it must be on this sort of ground rather than on the ground that the burden of interest and repayment charges is necessarily such as by itself to outweigh the possible advantages of freedom from White Paper limitations. For that is not a judgment which can be made until the terms of possible bargains are known.13

On 21 August Brand decided there was no point in Robbins hanging around any longer. Lionel hoped to get a clipper flight at the weekend (26–27 August) but had difficulty getting a berth until a phone message on 23 August summoned him home immediately and he left without seeing Caroline and Joe again (WD, 214–15). Before his departure he had a last dinner with Pasvolsky and heard encouraging news of the conference which was taking place at Dumbarton Oaks to set up a permanent United Nations Organization. Pasvolsky ‘says this is his last conference save one. He is obviously determined to have a conference on commercial policy. We deserve all we get if we do not play ball.’ When Lionel first arrived back from America, ‘we were in the full flush of victory. Brussels & Antwerp fell within a few days of my arrival’, on 3 and 4 September (unfinished letter to ICR, 20 May 1945). The Allies had entered Paris on 25 August. Lionel and Iris began to think seriously of returning to London, although they did not think they could move soon if only because 10 Meadway Close was full of other people’s stored furniture (IER to Mrs Robbins, 13 September 1944). ‘Then came delays – a further breakaway – and then’, while he was on leave, ‘the almost unbearable anguish of the defeat at Arnhem’. Lionel was at Tor Cottage when operation Market Garden, in which American and British troops were parachuted into Holland in order to capture the bridges over the Meuse and the Rhine, began. ‘The vast dome of the sky throbbed as the airborne Armada passed over the Chilterns. For three or four days it seemed as though all was successful & the most imaginative strike in the history of modern warfare was to be crowned with complete victory. And then the weather worsened . . . ’ When the British 1st Airborne Division, which had taken one of the bridges at Arnhem, had to withdraw on 24 September its losses were so great that it ‘effectively ceased to exist’ (Keegan 1997, 362–4). With this sombre background Lionel returned to Whitehall at the end of September after two weeks’ leave to enter upon ‘the most trying period of 13

In the negotiations led by Keynes the USA agreed to provide under lend-lease most of the munitions and other supplies requested by the UK and promised some relaxation of the Export White Paper provisions after V-E Day (Moggridge 1992, 778–80).

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the war – at any rate for me’. He described it on 20 May 1945 (unfinished letter to ICR): I was fetched home to do a piece of work nearer to my heart than anything yet left to do but very exhausting and infinitely trying to my patience. All through the autumn & winter I have been sitting on committees with men ostensibly out to cooperate but inwardly reluctant to do so, although inexorable events were always pressing them in that direction; and I have had to restrain my zeal & my temper lest any sign of eagerness should be construed as imprudence & made the pretext for further delays. I have been winning all the time but oh so slowly and at what a cost in missed opportunities of decisive & fruitful action.

Working conditions in London were grim in the autumn and winter of 1944–5, in spite of the partial lifting of the blackout (Ziegler 2002, 295–305). London and southern England had endured flying-bombs (V1s) since 12 June. Now beginning on 8 September came the onslaught of the rockets (V2s) which continued until 29 March 1945. With this new ‘Blitz’ the underground complex under the Treasury had to be fully utilized again for daytime meetings and for sleeping. According to Colville (1985, 445) who slept there with the other private secretaries, ‘This was certainly safe, but it looked and smelt like a battleship and one emerged in the morning gasping for fresh air.’ Lionel, after several more months living in these conditions (1971a, 184–5), ‘looked around [his bedroom] and found myself saying, “Can it really be possible that I have spent five of the best years of my life in surroundings of such unbelievable squalor?”’ To add to the discomfort, the winter was the coldest for fifty years. Lionel had been recalled to prepare for the long awaited Article VII talks with the Americans on commercial policy. The Cabinet had decided in July that it should try to bury the bones of contention in Whitehall before resuming discussions and appointed a Cabinet committee to look specifically at the position of agriculture under the Anglo-American proposals. The committee, meeting on 16 August, promptly passed the task to a group of officials, asking them to report by 8 September (CCP(44)1st meeting, CAB87/97). The group, who represented the Treasury, Dominions Office, Board of Trade and Economic Section but not the Ministry of Agriculture, held its first meeting the day after Lionel returned to London (Eady to LCR, 28 August 1944, T230/127). By the end of the following week the group had a draft report which was cautiously optimistic that ways could be found to allow limited agricultural protection within the framework of the agreed Anglo-American statement. Since the spring the Section, largely on Lionel’s initiative (Broadley to French, 19 May 1944,

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MAF83/918), had been working on the possibilities of using nutritional considerations to resolve the conflict between agriculture and the commercial policy proposals (and to thwart the Ministry of Agriculture). Meade had prepared two papers, on ‘Agriculture and commercial policy’ and ‘Nutrition and agriculture’: the first, he told Keynes on 23 August (T247/2), was his ‘own personal responsibility and no one else is in any way committed to it’ but he was ‘pretty sure that Lionel would wholeheartedly support’ the second paper, which argued that by accepting the Hot Springs resolutions the government had implicitly committed itself to an agricultural policy involving increased domestic production of milk, meat, eggs and vegetables and increased importation of cereals. The group of officials drew heavily on Meade’s work, which included a proposal for a general levy-subsidy scheme, in compiling their report, which Eady sent to the Chancellor on Saturday 9 September (T236/172) and the Chancellor circulated a couple of days later. Lionel was then allowed his leave. Another episode that began while Lionel was in Washington was a prolonged dispute over the exact meaning of the convertibility obligations in the IMF Articles of Agreement. Lionel had not been involved in their detailed drafting at Bretton Woods and was not drawn into the increasingly personal dispute between Keynes and Robertson until the end of September. While Keynes was in Ottawa Robertson had sent him a note on the subject to which Keynes promptly responded (JMK 26, 113–22). When Brand returned from Ottawa to Washington he told Lionel that Keynes was ‘very upset about the final text of the clause in question’; Lionel later remembered telling Brand, ‘Well, as he authorised it, he has only himself to blame if he thinks it is bad now’ (LCR to Hicks, 28 September 1964, Economists Correspondence May 1964-, RP). A month later in London Keynes circulated a note outlining his differences with Robertson (JMK 26, 134–40). Lionel being on leave, Meade commented on it, only partly agreeing with Keynes’s interpretation (20 September, T230/41), and Lionel was still on leave when Keynes’s note was discussed with Anderson on 21 September. According to what Lionel heard afterwards and told Hicks in September 1964, ‘without any warning . . . Maynard turned to the Chancellor and said that he had been betrayed by his delegate on this particular clause and the matter must be taken up forthwith with the Americans.’ According to the official records Keynes was instructed to discuss the issue with White and Bernstein while he was in Washington for the Stage II negotiations. Robertson was mortified, to say the least.14 14

LCR’s letter to Hicks is quoted in part by Fletcher (2000, 154–5).

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Keynes did not return from Washington until December. As he told Hicks, early in the new year Lionel ‘pluck[ed] up [his] courage’ and wrote Keynes that Robertson ‘was completely innocent since he had been told that he, Maynard, had cleared this particular clause’. He told Keynes on 17 January (JMK 26, 171–2): ‘I recollect very distinctly that, some days before the end of the Conference, he [Robertson] informed me that you [Keynes] were very worried about the line the Canadians were taking on the question of convertibility, and had even suggested that this might be a breaking point. He said that negotiations were still proceeding and that, although he saw great difficulty, he did not think that we should yet abandon hope. Some days after I enquired again what was happening, and he said that he thought a suitable compromise had been reached, but that he had been unable to see you, and was, therefore, not in a position to close with the Drafting Committee. Later on, either on the afternoon of that day or next morning, we met and he said that, although he himself had not been able to see you, the point had been put to Eady and satisfactorily cleared.’ Lionel also told Hicks that he expected he would bring Keynes’s wrath down on his own head but Keynes replied that it must all have been a muddle: ‘I remember,’ Keynes wrote (JMK 26, 174), ‘Eady coming to see about some drafting point near the end, but no memory or consciousness that it was this one. If it was, we neither of us, I fancy, understood it.’ Keynes did not apologize to Robertson, however, and their friendship never recovered. It was ‘a very very miserable story’. The Cabinet Committee on Commercial Policy met to discuss the officials’ report (CCP(44)1, CAB87/97) while Lionel was on leave. The officials had been instructed to consider not major points of principle such as imperial preference – there ‘the issues were clear’ – but three ‘technical’ points in relation to the proposed multilateral commercial policy convention – levysubsidies, bulk purchase and programming (in other words, quantitative regulation) of imports – and to report ‘in the form of concise notes’. They began by pointing out the interconnections between the specific issues. The Anglo-American document had been criticized as ruling out special transitional measures in the immediate postwar period, as being more beneficial to countries with initially high tariffs than to low-tariff countries, as ambiguous about the extent of bulk purchase allowed to relatively free enterprise countries, and as precluding the use of quantitative restrictions except when balance-of-payments difficulties had already arisen. The first criticism was unjustified. As for the others, a multilateral convention did not need to rule out all protective devices but only to set limits and conditions on their use. For instance, a ‘completely logical convention’ might

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permit protective tariffs, levy-subsidies, bulk purchase and other forms of state trading and the quantitative regulation of imports only if they were non-discriminatory and did not increase prices to domestic consumers by more than say 25 per cent, and also allow this limit to be waived in case of balance-of-payments difficulties which satisfied an objective test. The officials put forward several suggestions, mainly contributed by Meade, for reconciling some agricultural protection with the provisions of the proposed multilateral convention.15 Of the three specific issues, levysubsidies, where the proceeds of an import duty or, as in the case of the Wheat Act of 1932, of a processing tax on all supplies, are used to subsidize domestic production, had not been mentioned in Washington, but the Washington proposals would limit the size of a levy and the amount of a subsidy. To assuage the fears of the Ministry of Agriculture, the officials suggested instead of the Wheat Act a general levy-subsidy scheme for British agriculture, where the proceeds of a levy on imports of all agricultural produce could be used to support the domestic production of different agricultural products (CCP(44)1, Annex “A”). On bulk purchases the officials reiterated the Washington argument that what was needed was not a definition of the circumstances in which countries could adopt bulk purchase or other state trading methods but a limitation on the discriminatory or protective effect of such methods. Similarly, on ‘programming of supplies’ the group noted that the Washington proposals allowed for quantitative import restrictions under certain circumstances but emphasized there was ‘no possibility’ of achieving a commercial policy agreement acceptable to the US and of benefit to the UK without a limitation on them (CCP(44)1, Annex “B” and Annex “C”). They concluded with a tantalizing ‘possible middle course’, namely to allow quantitative restrictions provided that they were both non-discriminatory and did not raise the price to domestic consumers by more than a clearly specified amount, but admitted how difficult such provisions would be to devise and to police. The ministers on the Cabinet Committee were impressed by the difficulties. At the Cabinet Committee meeting on 18 September (CCP(44)2nd meeting, CAB87/97) the Minister of Education, R.A. Butler, who was a Conservative MP for an agricultural constituency, raised the concerns of the uninvited Minister of Agriculture. Anderson had to agree he should be consulted, but he also obtained agreement to invite US officials to commercial policy 15

The Section proposals include: Meade, Note on the proposal for a general levy-subsidy scheme, 25 August 1944, T236/172; Meade, Commercial Policy, Programming of Imports, 24 August 1944, T230/9; Note by LCR and The Wheat Act and Commercial Policy Note by the Economic Section, 31 August 1944, T236/172.

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discussions in London in October. At the next meeting (CCP(44)3rd meeting, 27 September) Hudson admitted the officials’ report went some way to meet his objections. Nonetheless he and the Secretary of State for Scotland both stated that ‘in their view it was impossible to secure the necessary degree of stability without quantitative regulation of imports or some other scheme which was tantamount to this.’ After prolonged discussion the whole question of ‘the needs of agriculture’ in relation to the Anglo-American scheme for commercial policy was referred back to the group of officials, now including representatives of MAF, the Scottish Department of Agriculture and the Ministry of Food. The officials were also asked to consider whether a workable scheme of non-discriminatory quantitative regulation could be devised (Eady to LCR, 29 September 1944, T230/127). This time it took five weeks for the group to produce a first report on commercial policy and the needs of agriculture and another fortnight for a second report on non-discriminatory quantitative restrictions. After three weeks Eady told the Chancellor’s secretary on 20 October (T236/172): After a series of long, and on the whole harmonious discussions, I am sorry to have to report . . . that at present there are no signs of unity . . . Fergusson, who throughout was moderate and persuasive, was willing personally to take his stand on [the ‘completely logical convention’ of] paragraph 6(a) of C.C.P.(44)1 [the group’s first report] . . . though he made it plain that quantitative programming would play a large part . . . The Economic Section provided two suggestions for non-discrimination. One of them – the auctioning of [import] licences seems rather fanciful and impracticable – but the other, for automatic increase at a slow rate of import quotas in certain circumstances, would, I believe, be workable though of course it relies upon one of the mathematical niceties which are fashionable in current economics.

‘The Board of Trade would have none of this’, sharing the American objection to quotas as inimical to trade. The Section’s solution was a combination of state trading and levy-subsidies, but, according to Eady, ‘Both the Board of Trade and the Ministry of Agriculture attacked this solution’ and so did the Dominions Office. Eady himself found Fergusson’s case more convincing than the others’, but he ‘confess[ed] that if we take the record of the Washington proposals as the basis from which to start, I cannot at the moment see any simple way out of the conflict that these discussions reveal’. The Section proposed its scheme as ‘a reasonable and workable compromise’ between the desires of the agricultural departments and of the Board of Trade (undated paper with corrections by Fleming in T230/1). As Robbins told the members of the official committee on 14 October (Note: Possible

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Alternative Methods of Approach, T236/172), the proposed solution was a variation on Meade’s earlier proposal for a general levy-subsidy scheme, which had been criticized as not raising sufficient revenue for supporting agriculture and likely to be unacceptable to the Dominions. The new version met the difficulties by imposing a rather higher levy on imports and allowing for a preferential levy on Empire imports. The alternative ‘solution’ preferred by Fergusson, where all protective devices including quantitative restrictions would have to be allowed as long as they did not raise domestic prices by more than 25 per cent, would involve major modification of the Washington proposals. The Section proposal should provide enough support and stability of prices to British agriculture as to make import quotas unnecessary, since the single Agricultural Fund would mean that losses made on one commodity could be met from profits made on another. Nondiscriminatory quotas might, however, be arranged through, for instance, the auctioning of import licences. The group’s second report of 6 November (CCP(44)3, CAB87/97) described the objectives of the agricultural departments but rejected their preferred solution as requiring unacceptable modifications to the Washington proposals. It mentioned that the group had considered the Section’s proposals but had failed to agree on them. Instead it took up another proposal from Fergusson, that foodstuffs should be either excluded from the commercial policy convention or made the subject of special provisions (such as the 25 per cent limit on the price-raising effect of agricultural protection), and that this suggestion should be put to the Americans. Lionel explained to Attlee what had happened (Reports of the official committee on commercial policy – CCP(44) 3 and 4, 14 November 1944, CAB123/96): The fact that these [the Section’s proposals] are not further developed in the Reports or made the subject of minority reservations on our part [his and Meade’s] does not mean that we regard these schemes as in any way undermined by the discussion which took place at the Committee. Very much the contrary, indeed. I started with feelings of considerable reserve, but as the discussion proceeded, the weakness of the arguments which were deployed against us tended to harden my opinion that we had hit upon proposals which were really worth considering. In the event, however, we refrained from pressing them, since it was clear that we could not carry all our colleagues with us. And, in the interests of presenting something which could be unanimously agreed at the official level, we joined with our colleagues in recommending the proposals which you now have before you.

These proposals were, briefly, that agricultural protection be allowed up to a limit of 25 per cent for the price-raising effects of tariffs and other protective devices and that this protection must be gradually reduced when a country’s

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production of any tradable foodstuff exceeded by more than say 10 per cent its prewar production. Lionel was ‘very reluctant to have anything to do’ with Fergusson’s proposals, as he admitted to Attlee, but Meade had persuaded him they were worth putting to the Americans and the Dominions, because they were at the same time more lenient to British agriculture than the Washington proposals and more attractive to agricultural exporters. After all, he told Attlee, ‘the main thing is for us to agree on something which offers the possibility of a resumption of informal talks with the Americans’. For the group’s third report (CCP(44)4) Meade worked hard to persuade the committee to suggest the auctioning of import licences but found that ‘the only person in the official committee . . . who is willing to contemplate the auctioning of licences experimentally for some commodities is – mirabile dictu – Fergusson.’ He and Lionel also had to fight off a proposal from Henderson, who had replaced Keynes on the committee, that a nondiscriminatory allocation of import quotas could be based on past trade experience, since this would prevent a country shifting to cheaper sources of supply (COD, 3–4; LCR to Eady, 9 November 1944, T236/172). So the result was a very general paper which argued without elaboration that a set of rules for non-discrimination could be worked out. One idea mentioned was that a concept of ‘commercial considerations’ to be found in the AngloAmerican Trade Agreement might be utilized; this would warrant a country adhering to its normal sources of supply when the availability of apparently cheaper sources might make this appear discriminatory. The Cabinet Committee did agree to recommend to the Cabinet that Anglo-American talks should be resumed as the officials recommended (CCP(44)4th meeting, 15 November 1944, CAB87/97): Hudson grudgingly accepted the first of the two reports (‘if the matter was being discussed on the assumption that it was His Majesty’s Government’s policy to conclude a multilateral convention, then he thought that the paper before the Committee provided a workable modus vivendi’ but ‘he wished to make it clear that he personally was strongly opposed’); Dalton supported it; the Dominions Secretary said he was willing to put it to the Dominions; and Attlee, who would have preferred the Section’s proposals, argued that ‘the most important point was to break the deadlock and to resume the informal discussions with the State Department.’ The officials’ second report accordingly went as Anderson’s report to the Cabinet, with a draft telegram to inform the Dominion governments and the report on non-discrimination as annexes (CCP(44)7, CAB87/97). Before the Cabinet meeting Meade and Robbins briefed Law, Attlee and Woolton (COD, 8). The Cabinet agreed on 22 November to authorize officials to hold ‘exploratory and non-committal

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talks with Mr. Hawkins’ – who had already been posted to the US Embassy in London in readiness for the talks – but insisted that they could not disclose the percentages in the proposed special provisions for agriculture. Early in September, when the end of the European war seemed imminent, Robbins, Bridges, Brook and Jewkes met to discuss the administrative arrangements for implementing the white paper on Employment policy. There were to be many more meetings involving Bridges, the Economic Section and the Office of the Minister of Reconstruction on the same subject in the spring of 1945 (see Chapter 16). At this time, on 7 September 1944, they agreed there would have to be a new division in the Treasury to advise on the timing of public investment, as well as a group of economists specializing in employment policy, and discussed mainly whether the latter should be in the Treasury rather than in the Section. They decided it would be better to keep the economists together: ‘The ideal arrangement, if personalities permitted, would probably be that the director should cover the whole range of the section’s work, while the deputy-director specialised on the problems of employment policy and took direct charge of that group.’ They also thought the group should include an econometrician, whose work would have to be carefully coordinated with that of the statisticians in the CSO (Brook, Note for record, T230/69). For a few months the ‘ideal arrangement’ prevailed. At the beginning of November 1944 James Meade agreed to succeed Lionel Robbins as director of the Section at the end of the war. He saw the major tasks ahead as the implementation of Employment Policy on the one hand and the external financial and economic problems on the other. His first task, however, was to persuade others of his colleagues to stay on too; Lionel gave him ‘the very greatest help’ in the negotiations with the Treasury over their salaries (and sometimes also in the negotiations with the colleagues) (COD, 1–6, 11, 18–19). At the same time Lionel, determined to return to academic life, was actively involved with Carr-Saunders in trying to rebuild the academic staff of LSE. By the end of October 1944 the University had appointed R.W. Firth, T.S. Ashton and R.G.D. Allen to the vacant chairs of anthropology, economic history and statistics. Only Ashton from the University of Manchester was new to LSE. At the same time the Appointments Committee recommended that the School ask the University for leave to fill Condliffe’s chair and that Plant and Robbins, along with the director and Liesching (who was a governor of LSE), represent the School on the Board of Advisors (Standing Committee 18 September and 30 October 1944). A fortnight earlier Lionel had met Carr-Saunders at the Athenaeum to discuss the prospects of appointing Lionel’s old friend Frederic Benham, economic adviser in the West Indies

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since 1942 (LCR to Carr-Saunders, 11 October 1944, Carr-Saunders B/1/9). In the spring of 1945 Carr-Saunders expressed some doubts, when Lionel argued that, although Benham was not ‘unequivocally first-rate’, he was the only person available for this chair if Fleming, who was ‘pure alpha’, was to be offered the Cassel chair (LCR to Carr-Saunders, 2 May 1945, Plant 255). Benham was appointed. Lionel also managed to prevent the appointment of the Marxist Maurice Dobb to a readership in Russian and East European Studies jointly with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies.16 In December 1944, following discussions with the Rockefeller Foundation, Carr-Saunders invited Viner to come to LSE for the 1945/6 academic year. Viner was keen and suggested he could come from Christmas 1945 to September 1946. Lionel was delighted (Carr-Saunders to Willits, 6 December 1944, Rockefeller Foundation RG1.1/401/73/970; Standing Committee 26 February 1945; LCR to Viner, 17 May 1945, Viner 22–14). As for the Cassel chair, in June 1945 it was offered to Fleming, who decided to stay with Meade in the Economic Section (COD, 94, 108–9). Carr-Saunders then asked Lionel to approach Roy Harrod, who told Lionel on 22 August that he preferred to stay in Oxford (Correspondence, RP). In Whitehall there was also an issue of the Section’s peacetime relations with the Foreign Office. On 28 November Nigel Ronald told Lionel the FO was contemplating setting up its own Economic Intelligence Department after the war and asked him to come and give his advice at a ‘tea-party’ in the Minister of State’s room on 1 December. Lionel dined with Ronald the night before the tea party, when ‘Mr. Ronald began by saying that he hoped that nothing in his letter had caused anxiety in the Cabinet Office. This gave me exactly the opening I wanted . . . ’ Lionel explained that the Section was worried not so much about an economic intelligence department in the FO (or any other ministry) as that there might be a new organization for overseas economic intelligence set up in the Cabinet Offices. He explained what he envisaged, namely that the Section and the CSO should provide the information to the other departments (LCR to Bridges, Laithwaite and Meade, 1 December 1944, CAB21/2562). This was essentially agreed at the 16

Professorial Council 18 October 1944 and 21 January 1945. At the first of these meetings Carr-Saunders read a letter from LCR suggesting a joint readership was ‘unwise’ and the School should not consider this until it had filled the Condliffe chair; at the second the report of a committee on regional studies including LCR, appointed at the first meeting, was ‘unable to recommend that a joint Readership in Russian Economic & Social History should be instituted for Mr M.H. Dobb’ because ‘it was not altogether fortunate that the proposal was linked with the name of a particular person at the outset’ and they did not favour joint appointments with other colleges.

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next day’s meeting, Lionel having also agreed it with Campion of the CSO (Note of a meeting . . . December 1st, 1944, CAB21/2562; COD, 15–16). On 27 November Robbins circulated a critical note by Meade (EC(S)(44)17) on a paper by Coase in the CSO, commenting that it ‘contains what is probably the clearest account of our general approach to one of the most important problems of employment policy’ (T230/16). Meade criticized Coase’s suggestion of collecting statistics of national expenditure by product instead of by category of expenditure; Coase was not pleased that Lionel had circulated his paper but he suggested on 7 December that he and Meade meet to sort out their differences (T230/69). There was more tension that day when Meade wrote a note arguing for improved national income and expenditure estimates, hoping to further the creation of a special national income unit within the CSO under Richard Stone. His close friend and collaborator misinterpreted his intention, presumably taking offence at the claims that ‘the Economic Section will have the primary responsibility for forecasting, just as the Central Statistical Office has the primary responsibility for making statistical estimates of past events . . . [and] the Economic Section must have a primary interest and responsibility in the logical categories into which the items of national income and expenditure are divided, just as the Central Statistical Office must have the primary responsibility for collecting the statistical raw material and working it up into these logical categories’ (T230/69). Thereafter Meade had to take particular care to keep on good terms with all the members of the CSO working on statistics for the purposes of employment policy. When the Section began to draft its latest Economic Survey in October 1944, it devoted a large part of it to analysing the necessary transfer of labour and other resources in the first year of Stage II. Although it did not specifically assume Stage II would begin on 31 December 1944 many of the figures used implicitly did (EC(S)(44)15 and EC(S)(44)15 (Revise), T230/16). Since the draft survey was ‘more prospective and less retrospective’ than previous issues, Lionel told Bridges on 31 October that he thought he should show it to the Treasury. Bridges agreed and Lionel sent it to Hopkins on 3 November, diplomatically explaining: ‘It has not been [our] habit in the past to add to the burdens of our friends at the Treasury by asking them to look through these Surveys in proof. But as the focus of attention shifts from war mobilisation to reconstruction prospects, it is inevitable that financial matters should move nearer the centre of the stage; and where this sort of thing is concerned we tread naturally only with the greatest diffidence’ (T230/162). The Treasury took issue with the Section’s estimates of the extent of demobilization and the inflationary pressure to

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be expected in 1945 as compared with 1918–19. Eady and his colleagues were not convinced by the defence Dennison wrote for Robbins; Robbins was not convinced by Eady, but agreed something must have gone wrong with the drafting (Eady to LCR, 10 and 21 November, LCR to Eady, 16 and 24 November 1944, T230/162). Having arranged for the redrafting and written the conclusion himself, Robbins then had to inform the Section on 5 December that ‘a drastic last-minute revision of the Economic Survey is imperative’ (T230/162). The Allied offensive in France was making slow progress and the Manpower Committee had decided planning should work on the basis that the European war would end on 30 June 1945; the Survey had to be completely rewritten after the Cabinet accepted the committee’s decision on 13 December (COD, 20).

SIXTEEN

The Last Months of the War

The postwar commercial policy talks finally resumed on 7 December 1944. It was a small gathering: Liesching, Eady, Fergusson, Robbins and Shackle on the UK side; Hawkins, Penrose and Loyd Steere of the US Embassy on the American. Meade, sorry not to be present, heard it was an ‘almost dramatic’ occasion (COD, 14). Liesching opened by explaining the UK political difficulties, especially over agriculture, in accepting the results of the Washington conversations, but instead of responding with searching questions Hawkins told the group that senior officials in the US Administration had now prepared their own set of proposals for a multilateral convention based on the Washington proposals and offered to outline them (AS(US)(44)1st meeting).1 Meade and Robbins cannot have been completely surprised. A few days earlier Penrose had asked Meade if he and Hawkins could come round to see him. Meade told Robbins on 27 November (T230/173) that Hawkins had ‘made it clear that, as he put it, the Americans had been persuaded by us that the multilateral approach to the problem of tariff reductions was the right one. What is much more significant, he went on to make it quite apparent that the Americans intend to offer a treatment of tariffs on multilateral lines which would involve a really very extensive and substantial reduction of the American tariff’ and had asked if this would help the British. Meade had replied that ‘it would, of course, be a very material factor’. The proposals Hawkins outlined on 7 and 11 December included the reduction of tariffs by 50 per cent, subject to a floor of 10 per cent, the narrowing of preferential margins by applying the tariff cuts to the non-preferential rates and the prohibition of quantitative restrictions after the transitional period except in certain special cases. Exchange controls on current transactions were to go, after a 1

The minutes of the talks are in CAB123/96.

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transitional period during which there should be no discrimination except on grounds of serious balance-of-payments difficulties. Export subsidies were not permitted, domestic subsidies were not explicitly ruled out, but new or increased subsidies would have to be reported to the international trade organization with a justification (AS(US)(44)1st and 2nd meetings). Lionel told James Meade that the first meeting of UK officials to consider the US proposals was ‘terrible’: Liesching produced a ‘lamentable’ paper by Shackle ‘emphasising every difficulty and disadvantage in the American proposals and overlooking all the many advantages’. Meade began to fear that it was only the professional economists who really wanted an agreement, especially after the Board of Trade produced more negative papers at meetings which he attended after Christmas (COD, 18, 25–6; Shackle, Points for discussion on American draft convention, 14 December 1944, T230/31). In the meantime the UK officials broached their idea for special provisions for agriculture with Hawkins on 15 December (AS(US)(44)3rd meeting). Fergusson tried to explain the MAF position and outlined the proposal accepted by the Cabinet Committee on Commercial Policy in November but substituting X for the 25 per cent limit on the price effects of protection and Y for the 10 per cent output increase which would trigger a reduction of protection. Lionel argued that this proposal was both more lenient and more severe than the Washington proposals; it was also very doubtful whether the Washington proposals in relation to agriculture could ever have been accepted in Britain or continental Europe. After many detailed questions had been asked and some answered, Hawkins raised a shrewd general one. He asked ‘whether we were moving away from the idea of a single economic Magna Carta. Did we contemplate one multilateral formula to be put into effect immediately, or a series of bilateral negotiations?’ Liesching hedged and wanted to leave the issue for a later meeting, but ‘Professor Robbins explained that our present proposals in regard to agriculture had been drawn up definitely on the hypothesis of a multilateral convention.’ Afterwards Meade recorded (COD, 18) that ‘apparently after a sticky start it went down well.’ At a last meeting before Christmas (AS(US)(44)4th meeting) they tackled non-discrimination, Liesching explaining the UK view on the lines of the report by the group of officials on non-discriminatory quantitative restrictions (see Chapter 15). The night before the meeting Robbins, Meade and Fergusson dined with Hawkins. According to Meade (COD, 20), Fergusson, who was in his own way as charming as Hawkins, candidly explained how he had been a free trader until the economic disasters of the 1930s. Hawkins

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made ‘a very sad remark . . . He argued how if the USA and the UK really agreed together on the desirability of a liberal commercial policy, it would be irresistible throughout the world; and he said with a sigh that just as now the USA was turning rapidly towards the old English tradition of liberalising trade, just at that very moment the UK seemed to be moving as rapidly towards the evil old American tradition of high protectionism.’ The Robbinses spent Christmas at Tor Cottage. Richard came home from school with ‘such a pile of work to get through’ that the whole family became involved: ‘Lionel has spent a good deal of his holiday in tutorials on romantic poets from which we have all benefited. Anne has taken up Virgil again & I am reading Vanity Fair aloud & then Guy Mannering while Richard reads history & economics & writes essays for Lionel. What a holiday!’ They had nonetheless, Iris told her parents-in-laws on Boxing Day, ‘a very pleasant quiet Christmas with most seasonable weather & have walked a great deal – Lionel is in fine form again.’ On New Year’s Day Lionel attended a meeting in Eady’s room at the Treasury to discuss a Board of Trade paper on the subject of international cartels, which Shackle and others had been working on for weeks in case the Americans should raise it (Draft brief for possible discussion with American officials, BT64/317). Meade (COD, 25) thought it was ‘almost the most lamentable paper I have yet seen in Whitehall, being (in the words of Oliver Franks) a pure stonewalling effort compounded of negation and indecision’. Franks, Robbins, Jewkes and Meade attacked it with vigour. In the Washington conversations the Americans had suggested the registration of international agreements between private firms and the prohibition of objectionable cartel practices. Since then the British government had made only one vague public pronouncement on the subject of restrictive practices, tucked away in a paragraph (54) of the Employment Policy white paper: ‘The Government will . . . seek power to inform themselves of the extent and effect of restrictive agreements, and of the activities of combines; and to take appropriate action to check practices which may bring advantages to sectional producing interests but work to the detriment of the country as a whole.’ The Board of Trade paper first suggested the UK officials remain equally vague but went on to list a string of objections to each of the registration and prohibition proposals of the Americans, echoing the arguments used by the Board of Trade in the Steering Committee on Postwar Employment a year earlier (see Chapter 14). Given the stance Lionel had taken in the Steering Committee, his attack on the cartels paper was remarkably mild, at least according to the minutes (Cartels, Summary

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of meeting at the Treasury on 1st January, 1945, BT64/317). A note attached to the minutes provides an alternative summary of the discussion: Eady (1) Don’t let’s be apologetic or too much on the defensive, (2) we shall ‘get by’ with something a bit ‘woolly’. Franks Let’s appear more positive ... We share U.S. view that [cartels] want watching – in some senses won’t go so far and in other further. . . . Thus (a) won’t have Government manufactured goods agreements; (b) not prepared for registration and prohibition but (c) are prepared for enquiry. Robbins & Jewkes We must have something to offer U.S. in international sphere – international enquiry either (a) by British Committee or Government at request of Americans and/or others or (b) by an international body such, for example, X Trade Organisation. Meade Suggested that to avoid the necessity for British firms putting their costs etc. before an international secretariat, the international enquiry might take the form of internal Governmental consultation and enquiry by the Government of the country concerned through whatever agency thought best.

In the end Eady asked the Board of Trade to redraft its paper for further consideration before any discussion on the subject with Hawkins: ‘There was a risk that our intentions might be badly misrepresented.’ When the redraft produced two weeks later was worse – ‘a catalogue of musty and unimpressive arguments against doing anything, without any of the arguments on the other side’ (COD, 31) – Jewkes and Robbins took the matter in hand. Jewkes made sure the paper should not go to ministers before further official discussion and Lionel wrote a very critical memorandum to be discussed along with the Board of Trade paper at Eady’s next meeting (Jewkes to Brook, 18 January, LCR, International cartels Comment on the draft brief for possible discussion with American officials, 20 January, CAB124/496). Lionel was scathing in his comments: ‘it would almost appear from the [Board of Trade] paper that His Majesty’s Government have no interest in any policy other than one of pure stonewalling; as if the whole matter was just an academic debate forced into the arena of practical decisions by the doctrinaire pedantry of the Americans.’ It was certainly not an academic debate, given the need to consider what to do with German

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cartels after the war, the UK’s interest as a major importer in non-restrictive commodity arrangements and its need to expand its exports, and that on this issue the Dominions agreed with the Americans. ‘It would be tedious and unnecessary,’ he continued, ‘to discuss at length the logical status of the various arguments which it is suggested [by the Board of Trade] that our representatives should present . . . But it is necessary to say that . . . they will not appear in the least plausible or, indeed, interesting to Mr. Hawkins and his associates. . . . Mr. Hawkins, who as an ex-University teacher, must often have invented, for the examination of his students, propositions of the type retailed . . . with the request that they should “comment on their meaning and validity”, will be charitably perplexed as to why we interrupt important and practical conversations to remind him thus of his past.’ It would be far better to put forward some positive proposals and suggest that the proposed international trade organization should have power to investigate complaints from national governments about the practices of international cartels. At Eady’s next meeting the Board of Trade capitulated, ‘after some wrangling’, and Liesching asked Lionel to draft a paper for ministers (COD, 34; Note of meeting at Treasury on 23rd January, 1945, BT64/317; LCR to Jewkes, 24 January, and R(45)18, International Cartels, 25 January, CAB124/496). After further backstage work by the economists, especially to prevent Dalton from backing his permanent officials, on 29 January the Reconstruction Committee, led by the Chancellor of the Exchequer supported by the Minister of Production, agreed that the UK officials in the talks with Hawkins could ‘engage in an exchange of views’ on the lines of Robbins’s memorandum (R(45)6th meeting, CAB124/496). This exchange took place at the last meeting with Hawkins before he left London. Meade (COD, 39) thought it was ‘a feather in the Economic Section’s cap . . . without Lionel Robbins’ intervention we should have adopted a completely non-possumus attitude.’ The UK officials had begun to inform Hawkins and Penrose of their reactions to the US proposals on 3 January (AS(US)(44)5th meeting). They frankly stated a first general reaction: It appeared to us that the [American draft] Convention would, in effect, require us (and other countries, e.g. the Dominions and France) to take action in three main respects, viz. (i) reduce tariffs; (ii) reduce or even abolish preferences;

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(iii) abolish quantitative regulation save in exceptional cases. But from the United States it would call for practically only one step, i.e. the reduction of tariffs. Looked at from our point of view, this did not seem to produce the ‘mutually advantageous economic relations’ contemplated by Article VII.

To which the Americans responded that their country had already reduced its tariff considerably under the Trade Agreements Act and their new proposal would bring the US tariff below the 1913 rates and ‘result in reversion to a tariff almost as low as they had ever had’. Over five long meetings (AD(US)(44)5th-9th meetings, 3, 5, 8, 11, 16 January) the UK officials detailed this and their other concerns, such as the lack of provision for infant industry protection (which India, for instance, would want) and the specifics of the provisions for state trading. They also drew attention to the opportunity, which Hawkins claimed would not be taken, for the US to invoke the exceptional cases clauses to restrict its own imports in the early postwar years. The Americans also noted on 5 January that if the US did this the resulting shortage of dollars could bring the scarce currency clause of the IMF Articles of Agreement in operation. Robbins ‘observed that the scarce currency clause of the Bretton Woods Agreement was important in this connection. It had met with some criticism in the United States, and the rest of the world would watch anxiously its progress through Congress. If it were accepted Mr. Hawkins’ argument appeared a strong one, but not otherwise.’ On preferences the UK officials pointed out (5 January) the ‘lack of balance’ between tariffs and preferences: ‘To extinguish a number of preferences, while only halving tariffs, would consecrate the 50 per cent cut as all that is required in the way of modifying tariffs. This did not appear tolerable.’ The discussion developed into an interesting but fruitless exchange on the meanings of ‘preferences’ and ‘discrimination’ – with which I shall not burden the reader. The UK officials noted (11 January) that the exchange control clauses in the American draft convention were stricter than those in the Bretton Woods agreements. As they put it in summing up, ‘there were two major stumbling blocks for us . . . viz. (1) the total prohibition of discrimination during the transition, and (2) the prohibition of any further increase of blocked balances. . . . In the transition period it would be inevitable for us so to arrange our imports as to minimise our expenditure of hard currencies [ie dollars]. It would be no solution for us to aim at loans rather than an increase of blocked balances, since the effect would merely be to transfer a deficit on current account to capital account, thus increasing the burden to be carried in the future. Moreover we could only look for any

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loans to the United States and/or Canada – both of them countries to which we should have special difficulty in making repayment.’ Hawkins said he would report to Washington that the UK would not be able to go beyond the Bretton Woods agreements. When he asked whether the UK might be willing to discuss the problem of the sterling balances with the Americans separately from commercial policy, Eady replied that he would be prepared to advise the Chancellor to agree to this. At the next meeting (AS(US)(44)10th meeting) Herbert Broadley and John Wall of the Ministry of Food came to explain the UK’s use of bulk purchase contracts for foodstuffs. Hawkins then reported the reactions, which at this stage took the form only of queries, that he had received from the State Department on the British proposals for the special treatment of agriculture. The group agreed that before Hawkins returned to Washington at the end of the month they would have a general discussion on procedure and prospects for the draft convention and, at Hawkins’s request, a meeting on commodity policy and a final meeting on cartels. After the meeting on procedure (AS(US)(44)11th meeting) Lionel gave Bridges his optimistic assessment of the talks (26 January, T230/174). Although many features in the American plans would need to be the subject of ‘very hard bargaining’, he thought that ‘broadly speaking it can be said that the Americans are obviously trying very hard to meet our difficulties, and have put forward some proposals which will have to be taken very seriously’. Their tariff proposal really would bring the US tariff below the 1913 level; their demands on preferences were weaker than previously; and their reaction to the UK proposals with respect to agriculture had been ‘much more favourable than any of us had ventured to hope’. He attached ‘very considerable importance’ to the possibility raised by Hawkins of Anglo-American agreement on general principles before an international conference. The official reports on the talks (WP(45)96 and 97, CAB123/96) emphasized that Hawkins had repeatedly pointed out that ‘the climate of public opinion in the United States is at the present moment peculiarly favourable for making progress towards satifactory international economic arrangements, particularly in such matters as the reduction of the United States tariff’ and had urged action now so that ‘the tide might be taken at the flood’. Lionel was less sure of public opinion in Britain. In Washington Congress was expected shortly to discuss the Bretton Woods agreements, and in London, while Keynes and others in the Treasury were still arguing over the exact meaning of the convertibility obligations in the IMF Articles of Agreement, ministers were wondering whether the government should express its views on Bretton Woods in Parliament. Although Lionel usually

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tried to avoid giving advice on political matters, he minuted Attlee on this occasion (23 January, CAB123/96). Since in the Commons ‘the odds are on a hostile debate, with a vote for the Government only under pressure of the Whips’, if only because most of those who understood the technicalities were in government service, he wondered if it might be possible to arrange for ‘a purely academic debate’ in the Lords, where Keynes could explain the Bretton Woods proposals and reply to the public criticism. Attlee thought it was a ‘good idea’ but the Cabinet on 25 January backed away from any debate in either House (Pressnell 1986, 177). The penultimate meeting with Hawkins in January 1945 was devoted to commodity policy. Nothing positive had happened since Robertson and Robbins had been in Washington in August 1944. In September Robertson had wanted to get Keynes interested in the subject again (Broadley to Martin, 5 September 1944, MAF83/2735) and in October Robertson had left government service for Cambridge. The Ministry of Food had continued to prepare papers on the application of commodity policy to various foodstuffs but they received little discussion (Martin to Wall, 29 November 1944, MAF83/2735). Wall reported to Broadley, who was visiting Washington, on 18 December that ‘Robbins reported extreme reluctance of Treasury to take up position where Robertson left off’ (MAF93/918). When Lee heard this from Broadley, he wrote to Lionel on 23 December (T230/31). While he had become sceptical about the buffer stocks scheme he still thought there was an urgent need for a forum to discuss commodity problems ‘from a somewhat wider standpoint than professional zealots like Miss Shufeldt’, because international commodity schemes were going to be ‘thrust before us whether we like it or not’. The next likely was for cotton. With Lionel’s encouragement Broadley managed to create a new and smaller committee on commodity policy with a rotating chairmanship (Eady, Franks and Broadley) but not before the discussion with Hawkins (Broadley to Waley, 8 January, Eady to Broadley, 13 January, Broadley to LCR, 22 January 1945, MAF83/1641). Meanwhile Franks held a meeting to discuss the US State Department proposals for an international cotton conference. At that meeting, and in briefing Attlee afterwards, Lionel warned of the dangers to Britain if the prices of commodities such as wheat and cotton were held up by commodity agreements during a period of falling prices after the war. As he told Attlee, ‘An international conference at this stage is to be avoided at almost any cost. In present circumstances, it is more than likely that if it were held we should find ourselves called upon to accept – perhaps at the pistol point – a project on the lines of the Wheat Agreement. . . . Only if we were assured that a Cotton Agreement would be subject to the rules and safeguards laid

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down at Hot Springs and in the Washington conversations on Article VII could we safely proceed to a discussion of this particular commodity; and it is unfortunately the case that these safeguards at present do not exist.’ Lionel was for once in favour of stonewalling in Anglo-American discussions (Cotton, Proposed international conference, Notes of a meeting . . . 2nd January, 1945, and LCR to Lord President, 11 January 1945, T230/36). When commodities first came up in the meetings with Hawkins on 16 January (AS(US)(44)9th meeting) the UK officials readily admitted that given recent experience they felt ‘a deep-seated distrust’ of international commodity agreements. ‘We still had to see an actual commodity agreement which effectively provided the safeguards discussed under the heading of Commodity Policy at Washington in the autumn of 1943, viz: (1) equal representation for consuming and producing interests and (2) provision for switching away from high cost to low cost production. It seemed to us that the Wheat Agreement to some extent exemplified the objectionable features of such agreements, and we should not be willing to see them repeated, particularly e.g. in an agreement about cotton . . . ’ The meeting devoted to the subject on 25 January (AS(US)(44)12th meeting) concentrated mainly on questions of organization: should there be a separate international commodity organization, as envisaged at Hot Springs, or should the commodity organization be part of the international trade organization, on which opinions were divided, on both sides of the Atlantic, and what should be the relation of the individual commodity controls to the central organization. Buffer stocks received little attention. Lionel also argued that the immediate postwar period would not be a good time for experiments including buffer stocks, which would be ‘quickly discredited’ if the stocks were accumulated at high prices. Hawkins agreed with him. Hawkins’s final conclusion was that ‘he was disposed to agree with our point of view, namely that the guiding principles should be laid down and the International Organisation set up as soon as possible, but that caution and moderation should be used in applying the principles to the problems of particular commodities in the early post-war situation.’ Hawkins was less inclined to agree with the British over cartel policy at the final meeting on 30 January (AS(US)(44)13th meeting). He enquired why the UK could not go further than Robbins’s suggestion of a consultative body under the auspices of the international trade organization to investigate complaints about the practices of private firms and did not find the answers he was given – ‘that it was largely a question of the method for deciding which cases are virtuous and which are vicious’ and that it would be preferable to examine particular cases in the light of general principles – particularly convincing. He ‘still

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felt that it would be appropriate that an international convention on trade barriers should include an undertaking that Governments, when persuaded that private action is running counter to inter-governmental agreements, should prohibit such action’. After an inconclusive debate as to whether a suitable form of words could be devised the matter was left for later discussion. When Hawkins left London at the end of January he expected to return in March. When he did so he was summoned back to Washington for further consultations (Liesching, Note of a talk with Mr. Hawkins on Monday, 5th March, 1945, T230/174). The commercial policy talks did not recommence until late April. In the meantime the Canadian government decided to intervene. On the instigation of Graham Towers, Governor of the Bank of Canada, three ‘forthright telegrams’ arrived in London on 23 February, complaining about the lack of progress on commercial policy since the Law Mission and offering finance for Canadian exports to Britain and the sterling area in Stage II and after the war in exchange for an end to discrimination against exports from Canada (LePan 1979, 65; Pressnell 1986, 204; WP(45)142, Commercial policy: views of the Canadian Government, 7 March 1945, PREM4/18/4). The UK government did not know how to respond. When a meeting of ministers was called for 20 March Lionel briefed Attlee the day before (T230/174). He was anxious not to jeopardize the prospects of Anglo-American agreement on a multilateral solution. While the Canadian offer could not be ‘dismissed or ignored’ and there should be ‘friendly discussions’ with the Canadians, the government should hesitate before making special arrangements with them. The right way out of this fix . . . is the way indicated in the (hitherto) ill-fated project of commercial policy, namely, while pledging ourselves to a general code of international good behaviour . . . to insist upon a let-out as regards import restrictions for countries in severe balance of payments difficulties. In the recent conversations with Mr. Hawkins, we discovered that this idea had got home to the Americans, and I should have great hope of getting it inserted in any final international agreement. . . . I will not weary you here by repeating the arguments . . . for going forward with a policy conformable to the general principles of Article VII. I would only urge that the Canadian telegrams are some indication of the frightful pickle in which we shall find ourselves . . . if we turn aside from this policy, cause the Canadians to throw in their hands with the United States, and administer a deliberate snub to the rising volume of public opinion on the other side of the Atlantic which is calling for more rational trade policies.

When he and Meade discussed the brief with Attlee (COD, 57), Attlee, as usual, ‘says all the time “Yes, Yes” in a mechanical sort of way which leaves one quite in the dark as to whether one is making any impression or

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not’. But the next day Meade heard Attlee had taken ‘very much the right line’ at the small meeting with Anderson, Cherwell, Lord Catto (Governor of the Bank of England) and Keynes, which Churchill requested instead of the larger meeting. The War Cabinet the following day decided to respond cautiously and ambivalently to the Canadian offer, suggesting discussions in London. One Canadian diplomat reported that Churchill had been well briefed (LePan 1979, 69): ‘When the Cabinet came to consider the draft reply which had been prepared by the Treasury and the Dominions Office, the Prime Minister glared around the table, said in his grimmest voice, “I think this is the very least we can do to meet the Canadian Government’s wishes”, and went on with the next item of business.’ The discussions took place in Cambridge and London in May. It would be convenient but untrue to say that in the winter of 1945 Lionel was preoccupied with external economic policy, leaving Meade to deal with domestic policy. When Meade agreed to succeed Robbins after the war he sought assurance from Bridges that the Section would be fully involved in the making of peacetime financial policy. In December 1944 they were both invited by Hopkins to discuss the first paper circulated to the Treasury Budget Committee for the 1945 budget (B(45)1, 14 December 1944, T171/369). When they went to see Hopkins Meade was very pleased with the meeting, for he thought they had been able to get two points across: the importance of regular forecasts by the Treasury, CSO and Economic Section of national income and expenditure, and the need to begin to move from wartime physical controls to fiscal policies by, say, lowering the excess profits tax and increasing purchase tax on inessential consumer goods (COD, 17, 21). Hopkins’s note of the meeting is less enthusiastic (21 December 1944, T273/260): I was not very clear whether they were altogether satisfied at not being drawn into the [Budget] Committee at this stage, but at any rate they scrupulously refrained from making any comment. . . . Professor Robbins, who took practically the whole conversation to the exclusion of Mr. Meade, said that he was greatly impressed by two things. Firstly, the extreme importance and value of the national income method in approaching a Budget; and secondly, the immense variation in the Estimates which resulted from any important change in the assumption . . . [as to the date of the end of the war against Germany]. What he wanted to suggest was that there should be a much closer touch with the Economic Section in the course of the preparation of the national income figures than had recently been the case. I said that I would have a word with Lord Keynes and Sir Herbert Brittain on this subject which I thought could easily be arranged. ...

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There was then a discussion on the Excess Profits Tax . . . He [Robbins] added that he thought that there would be increasing difficulty in maintaining the controls, and that a fiscal device to maintain price policy was called for. He thought that the Purchase Tax ought to be seriously increased on articles which could be segregated as inessential to the maintenance of a sound price policy. Apparently he would let the range of this increased duty extend pretty widely with the object of diverting traders and consumers from inessentials to the making of articles in large and necessary demand.

When Customs and Excise prepared a draft report on the purchase tax in January 1945, Meade was asked to join in its discussion. He argued for an increase in purchase tax on inessential consumer goods and obtained some revision of the report (B(45)8, T171/369). When the report had gone to the Budget Committee Lionel wrote to Hopkins on 1 February to encourage the Treasury to take the Section’s suggestion seriously; as a result he and Meade attended the Budget Committee meeting on 5 February to argue – unsuccessfully because Keynes did not agree with them – their case (COD, 34, 36, 41, 42). Lionel wrote again to Hopkins on 8 February, and his two letters were included as annexes to the report that went to the Chancellor on 10 February (B(45)11 Revise, T171/369). He said he accepted for the time being Keynes’s argument that at present it was probably more important to maintain the current fiscal stance than to try to tighten it, but hinted he might return to the charge later, given the pressing need to increase production of exportable goods. In early 1945 the two economists had a major opportunity to explain and elaborate their general views on postwar financial policy. In the summer of 1944 Attlee had asked the Section for a note on a postwar capital levy to reduce the national debt – the idea popular in the Labour Party after the First World War, when Dalton was one of its chief advocates (see Chapter 4). Meade had responded by suggesting a wider-ranging study on the postwar debt burden, on which Bridges consulted Hopkins. Hopkins was sceptical at first, seeing ‘no obvious reason why we should attempt a very difficult study in the midst of all our present pre-occupations’, but persuaded by Henderson, he changed his mind and volunteered himself as chairman. The Chancellor having agreed, Meade was instructed to tell Robbins on his return from the USA (Hopkins to Chancellor, 18 July, Hopkins to Padmore, 21 July and 14 August 1944, T273/389). In the event the committee was not set up until 1945 because of Keynes’s return to North America for the Stage II negotiations. The participants in the National Debt Enquiry comprised Hopkins, who chaired the first meeting and then handed over to Bridges while

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remaining on the committee, Eady, Brittain and Keynes from the Treasury, Sir Cornelius Gregg and Paul Chambers from the Inland Revenue, and Robbins and Meade from the Section. When Hopkins wrote to the others on 17 January 1945 he explained the origin of the enquiry and added that ‘in the interim there has arisen the very general question what we mean by a cheap money policy and what are the measures that can be taken to sustain it’ (T273/389). The wartime cheap money policy involved a Bank Rate set at 2 per cent since 1939 and the continuous supply (‘on tap’) of government securities of different maturities priced to maintain their nominal yields at around 21/2 per cent for medium-term government bonds and 3 per cent for long-term. The Employment Policy white paper had stated that cheap money would be continued in the postwar transitional period to keep down the cost of capital expenditure, but was deliberately vague about subsequent monetary policy. With the European war nearing its end, the authorities had to consider not only the role of monetary policy in the longer term but also how cheap money could be sustained in the early postwar years, when savers might not be so willing to accept the government borrowing terms. At the Enquiry’s first meeting, on 19 February, Hopkins mentioned that Keynes had suggested ‘particular practical steps which . . . should be considered for early action’. The group agreed Meade would provide a memorandum on a capital levy and annual capital taxation, the Inland Revenue would provide statistical and historical notes on the same subject and Keynes would open a discussion on the theory and practice of cheap money at the next meeting.2 Keynes took three meetings, on 8, 22 and 27 March, to expound his theory of the determination of interest rates, on the lines of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, and the practical implications he drew from it. He argued that the old theory whereby the rate of interest was determined by the supply of savings and the demand for investment did not fit the facts, and that the monetary authorities could set short-term and long-term interest rates as long as they did not also try to fix the maturity composition of the national debt. He suggested the authorities should keep long-term interest rates at about 3 per cent for many years to come and also argued there was no need to raise interest rates in the transitional period because wartime controls on capital investment and bank lending could be continued to prevent inflation (JMK 27, 388–96). The other two economists were soon uncomfortable and embarrassed, for, as Meade described it after the second ‘lecture’ (COD, 55), Keynes 2

The NDE minutes and memoranda are in T233/158–9 and T230/94–5; the latter also contain ms notes by Meade and LCR.

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‘continues to put his [theoretical] ideas . . . in the most extreme form and to call on me and Lionel Robbins for support. He seems completely to have abandoned the idea of using the rate of interest to influence investment . . . and also leaves out all qualifications of the Liquidity Preference idea so as to assert unequivocally that neither thrift nor the productivity of capital have any influence over the rate of interest.’ For the fifth meeting, on 5 April, at which they were ‘billed to produce our “confession of faith” on the rate of interest’ (COD, 61) after Keynes had finished his exposition, they both prepared detailed notes. Lionel planned to leave the theoretical issues mainly to Meade and concentrate on the practical questions, but he wanted to make two ‘incidental remarks’ on the former. According to his notes (Financial Policy: Statement on Keynes’s exposition) these were: (a) On Determination rate much controversy exact way of putting things. Great Debt to K – roused us from dogmatic slumbers. Substantial agreement. Sometimes when says bluntly can fix rate where it likes I start. But I know that [there are] implicit qualifications which cover qualms. (b) On desirability of shifts less agreement – though not much probable gap. I agree that for financial reasons desirable not to put up & at moment desirable not to put down [rate of interest] – that’s practical & important agreement. But I confess I wish it could be moved more freely. Think it has some value – incentive to invest – if we get into secular stagnation we may have to come down. Can think of cases where some upward movement useful.

He was in ‘emphatic agreement’ with Keynes’s practical recommendations for managing the national debt, in particular not to try to fund the debt (that is, replace short-term government securities with longer-term securities) and to maintain low long-term interest rates for as long as possible. But he ‘want[ed] to air some uncertainties & doubts about future’: he thought it might be necessary to allow a rise in short-term interest rates in the transition period as well as to retain physical controls in order to prevent inflation, and that in the longer term higher rates might be necessary if there were a tendency to wage inflation at home or severe inflationary pressures overseas. The official record of the meeting is clearer on Robbins’s agreement with Keynes than on their theoretical differences. Prof. Robbins . . . commented on the views put forward by Lord Keynes at the previous meetings. He confirmed that the doctrinal analysis was one with which he (in common with most other professional economists at the present time) agreed. He agreed that an upward movement in interest rates should be avoided if it can

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possibly be helped, and certainly must be avoided, where it would lead to unemployment. But he felt that there should be a certain flexibility. During the transitional period, if the physical controls were to crumble, there might be a case for a slight upward movement of rates; again in the event of secular stagnation it might well be desirable to reduce interest rates, despite the reasons of a social character advanced by Lord Keynes for maintaining a remunerative level of long term rates. On funding policy, he was emphatically in agreement with Lord Keynes, but expressed some uncertainty about his proposals regarding short term rates. . . . [They might usefully be allowed to rise if they were domestic or foreign inflationary pressures.] Despite these uncertainties, he was clear that the financial arguments for maintaining cheap money were overwhelming and that we must retain it for as long as we possibly can.

At the sixth meeting, on 10 April, when the Treasury officials gave their views, the group agreed Keynes should prepare a summary of his proposals for the next meeting and Hopkins, Gregg, Robbins and Meade should get together to prepare, from Meade’s memorandum, a report on a capital levy. On 19 April, having discussed Keynes’s summary (JMK 27, 396–404), they agreed that Hopkins should try his hand at a report for the Chancellor on monetary policy based on Keynes’s proposals. A few days later Robbins and Meade went round to see him to try and ensure that his report included the need to allow for some interest-rate flexibility so as not to rely solely on the continuing of wartime controls to prevent postwar inflation, especially when taxes were reduced from their extraordinarily high wartime levels (COD, 70). Hopkins’s first draft of a report, for which he read Keynes’s General Theory (twice) and Robertson’s Essays in Monetary Theory (1940), claimed that there was ‘unanimity in the present Committee that on the whole and subject to [one] qualification . . . the desirable ideal for this country, as far ahead as can reasonably be envisaged, is not merely the maintenance but even the reduction of existing levels [of interest rates], both for long term and for short’. The qualification was that there was ‘less certainty and less unanimity’ about permitting interest-rate variations in the short run; but he went on to suggest that the members agreed that variations should be confined to short-term interest rates and regarded as secondary to restrictions on capital issues and bank lending (NDE Paper 9). At the eighth and tenth meetings on 1 and 14 May Robbins and Meade succeeded in altering these passages (COD, 73, 81) but not in preventing later drafts implying that controls were the best defence against inflation in the transitional period. For the continuation of cheap money Hopkins provided two arguments: the encouragement of investment in the longer term and the saving on interest payments in the budget. ‘On these grounds if they stood alone it might come to pass in the course of time that there was no limit, short

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of an almost nominal figure, to the desirable rate of interest at any rate on long term. The desirable low limit might then be governed rather by social and psychological considerations concerning the need to foster the habit of thrift’. Meade managed to achieve a few minor amendments here and elsewhere but the final report unambiguously reflected Keynes’s views and, with quotations from his General Theory, his theory of interest rates (National Debt Enquiry – First Report, The question of future gilt-edged interest rates (For the Chancellor’s eye only), 15 May 1945). On 3 May Robbins and Meade circulated under their joint names a memorandum by Meade, which emphasized that there were three ways of preventing postwar inflation: direct controls, high taxation and high interest rates. If the last was going to be forsworn on budgetary grounds and the first gradually relaxed, it would be essential to maintain the second (COD, 72; NDE Paper 10, The control of inflation: the three alternatives). But their memorandum was not discussed before the monetary policy report was sent to the Chancellor. Neither was the revised version of Meade’s memorandum on the capital levy, which he had been working on in the light of the comments of the subcommittee. Meade originally favoured a postwar capital levy as a ‘once-for-all surgical operation’ to allow the redemption of wartime government debt without a prolonged period of high taxation. But when he considered the probable yield of such a levy at a time of low interest rates and high income taxes, he was forced to the conclusion that in the circumstances of 1945 the yield would be too low to make it worthwhile (NDE Paper 5; JEM 2, 262–79). This echoed the arguments that Robbins had heard from Dalton twenty years earlier as well as the 1927 report of the Colwyn Committee on National Debt and Taxation, which also argued the yield of a feasible levy would not justify the disruption involved, even though the estimated yield was higher with 1920s tax and interest rates. Lionel sent ‘our first shot at a redraft’ after the subcommittee’s meetings to Hopkins on 23 May (T233/159) with the comment that the order had been changed because putting the main argument against a levy at the beginning ‘does not really seem the most forceful method of presentation. It is as though one’s tyre having burst one spent the rest of the time in a perfectly futile attempt to blow it up with a hand pump.’ But he left it to Hopkins to decide ‘the relative desirability of ending with a bang or with a whimper’. By this time the war in Europe was over. A German counteroffensive in the Ardennes in the second half of December 1944 had only temporarily slowed the Allied advance. By the beginning of March 1945 the Western Allies were at the Rhine; the Russians, having reached the Oder a month earlier, were

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preparing to advance on Berlin. In April the US Army reached the Elbe, the Red Army captured Vienna and, on 20 April, the bombardment of Berlin began. The siege ended on 2 May, Hitler having committed suicide in his bunker on 30 April. The formal surrender of German forces took place on 7 May. The end of the German war lent urgency to the planning of postwar employment policy. When Bridges succeeded Hopkins as Permanent Secretary of the Treasury in March 1945, he immediately took charge of making arrangements to implement the 1944 white paper policy. One evening when Lionel, Meade and Harry Campion were discussing the subject, a message came from Bridges that he also wanted to discuss the matter; they immediately went to see him. Bridges agreed with their suggestions and summoned a meeting on 15 March of a larger group, including Barlow, Eady and Proctor from the Treasury, which essentially confirmed the decisions made by Bridges, Brook, Jewkes and Robbins in September 1944 (COD, 49; Employment policy, Note for record, T273/319; see Chapter 15). The Section and the CSO should in collaboration with the Treasury jointly be responsible for forecasting national income and expenditure; they should immediately prepare a statement on the statistics required for such forecasting and how they would be used; and the Treasury would use this document to explain to senior officials of the relevant departments what data were needed from them. Proctor was to be in charge of a division in the Treasury on the planning and timing of public investment; Robbins and Meade took him to lunch the next day to explain the task before him (COD, 52–3). After preparing detailed comments on Stone’s draft of the annual national income white paper to be published with the budget in April 1945 (LCR to Campion, 13 March 1945, T230/70), the Section considered a CSO paper on statistics for employment policy (CS(S)(45)15(Revise), CAB139/124), while Meade began a memorandum on economic forecasting and employment policy, which provoked more of the critical reaction he had received from Coase in November (EC(S)(45), T230/70). This time Lionel was ‘most insistent that, as the method of dealing with this problem is a matter for the Economic Section and not for the CSO I [Meade] should not do more than write a letter to Coase stating my views as amended by the points which Coase has made’. Robbins, Meade and Fleming met more productively with Jack Stafford of the CSO who was also critical of Meade’s paper. Proctor held several meetings of the economists and statisticians on the two papers, with the result that he submitted agreed revised versions of both to Bridges (COD, 58–9, 60, 64–5, 69; Proctor to Bridges, Employment policy, 2 May

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1945, T230/70). Bridges used the CSO paper to inform departments of the statistics needed for employment policy on 11 May (T273/319) and circulated a further revised version of Meade’s paper after holding a major meeting of representatives of all the departments on 1 June and much conferring with Proctor, Robbins and Meade (Bridges to LCR, 11 June, Meade to LCR, 13 June, LCR to Bridges, 13 and 21 June 1945, T230/70; COD, 87–9, 95–6). This was effectively Lionel’s last involvement with the planning of postwar employment policy. Robbins and Meade were often visited by economists and officials from other countries seeking enlightenment and information on UK employment policy and the role of the Economic Section. One such visit was well recorded by the Canadian visitor, Douglas LePan. An instructor in English literature at Harvard when war broke out and later known as a fine poet, novelist and professor of English literature, LePan was in 1945, after service with the Canadian Army in Italy, a junior official in the Department of External Affairs on the staff of Canada House in London. He was ‘not at all prepared’ for a request for economic reporting from the High Commissioner, Vincent Massey, in April 1945, but he bravely set up a number of interviews with financial experts and ‘became familiar with the Great George Street entrance to the Treasury and the Cabinet Office’ (LePan 1979, 10, 53–4, 58–9). Most of those I interviewed were polite and friendly . . . The one exception was Lionel Robbins, . . . the most senior of all those I interviewed on my earliest rounds. For all his courtly manner, his reception was distinctly frosty. I was unnerved by the chill, so unnerved that I could hardly go on, until I realized that he simply couldn’t believe that the Canadian Government would send as one of its representatives into the fastnesses of Whitehall a neophyte with such innocent questions. . . . He thawed only gradually as he came to accept me at face value for the innocent I was, an innocent abroad in the highly subtle and cameralist world of international finance.

LePan managed to compile a substantial and informative memorandum on the UK financial position dispatched to Ottawa in May: ‘Not suprisingly in view of the tuition I had, I got right the importance of the weight of indebtedness to other countries in the sterling area that was overhanging Britain as a result of the War and even had reasonably accurate figures for the sterling balances’. He had plenty to say about the Economic Section, stressing ‘its informality, its advisory nature, its lack of executive responsibility, [and] its attention to problem-solving’. Hence, ‘the interview that had begun so frigidly had not turned out so badly after all!’3 3

LePan (1979, 59–62); Despatch No A 160, Vincent Massey to Secretary of State for External Affairs, 4 May 1945, RG19/4369/U-3–11, LAC. The interview had taken took place on 17 April at 5 p.m.: shorthand note on Frederic Hudd to LCR, 11 April 1945, T230/70.

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Robbins told LePan of his optimism that the Americans could be relied upon ultimately to follow policies commensurate with their new powerful position. ‘But,’ LePan reported to Ottawa, ‘he admits that his confidence is not widely shared in Whitehall.’ Robbins also told LePan that he had informed the government he wished to be released as soon as possible and that Meade would take over the Section and its responsibility for employment policy. ‘Should such a system, which relies on experts to interpret the national interest in matters which, for the most part, are unintelligible to the general public, break down, the alternative will be a situation in which decisions on economic matters are taken as the result of conflicting pressures by various interests in the community. Already, as the War in Europe draws to a close, there is evidence that this is taking place, and I [LePan] understand that this is one reason for Professor Robbins’ decision to return to academic life.’ The ending of war against Germany also lent urgency to the matter of reparations. In April and May 1945 Robbins and Keynes were members of a group of officials charged with preparing, for consideration by a ministerial committee, draft instructions for the British delegation at the forthcoming Moscow meeting of the Allied Reparations Commission (Committee on Reparation, T236/255 and 256). Their report, like that of the Malkin Committee (see Chapter 13) which had been discussed perfunctorily at one meeting of ministers in September 1943, received little ministerial consideration: ‘it is not too much to say that, from beginning to end, the members of the Coalition Government never met in Cabinet to agree on a reparations policy of any kind’ (Cairncross 1986, 32–3, 63, 73). The Malkin recommendations, with their emphasis on the UK need for disarmament and economic security rather than for reparations, had, however, reappeared in the next major official paper on the subject, prepared by the Economic and Industrial Planning Staff in August 1944; they appeared again in the 1945 report, which formed the basis of British policy at the Moscow conference in June and at the Potsdam conference in July (ibid., 50–5, 74–80; CP(45)16, Reparations, Memorandum by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, 5 June 1945, T236/257). As the officials put it (Reparations, T236/255), ‘Our Delegation’s argument should be that the first objective is the achievement of our programme of economic security. This will involve the reduction of Germany’s capacity to produce manufactured goods by once-for-all deliveries. . . . It should be a cardinal principle that we should not help Germany to reconstruct her industry in order to increase reparation deliveries and . . . our interest is that German industry should not be reconstructed beyond the minimum point required to enable her to pay for essential imports.’ But, if the instructions

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bore some resemblance to key parts of the Malkin Report, the outcome at Potsdam did not, starting as it did from the idea of allowing the Allies to take reparations from their own zones of occupation as the USSR was doing already. Even less did the reparations plan negotiated in Berlin in the winter of 1945–6: as Cairncross, who was there, commented (1986, 121): ‘the compromise[s] did not rest on any economic logic but lay a little above half-way between the Russian proposals and those of the three Western Allies’ and the ‘makeshift’ plan was soon abandoned. Victory over Germany was celebrated with public holidays on 8 and 9 May. At the centre of government it was not a time of great jubilation, with ‘the volume of work . . . if anything more pressing’ (Colville 1987, 246). For Robbins there was the uncertainty as to when he would be able to leave government service while the war in the Far East continued and the Article VII problems were still unsettled. Victory in Europe meant, however, that the Robbins family could move back to London. Although they did not finally give up Tor Cottage until the end of September, during the summer they began to spend time at 10 Meadway Close, especially in restoring the neglected garden (COD, 112; Anne Robbins to RRR, 27 September 1945). Victory in Europe also meant a return to party politics: on Whit Monday the Labour Party decided to withdraw from the coalition; two days later Churchill became head of a Conservative government pending a general election called for 5 July. In April Hawkins had returned from Washington. He told Liesching on his return that the State Department wanted an international trade conference as soon as possible, by which he meant the autumn (Note of a talk with Mr. Hawkins on Saturday, 7th April, 1945, T230/174). On 18 April the commercial policy talks resumed, at first without Hawkins: Liesching, Eady, Robbins and Shackle heard from Penrose some of the State Department’s responses to the detailed points on which the British officials had seen difficulties in the American draft convention (AS(US)(45)1st-3rd meetings). Lionel also had a couple of private talks with Penrose alone (ms notes in T230/174). When Hawkins joined them on 15 May, they discussed the possible programme, timing and procedure of an international conference. Hawkins reported that it had been put to Clayton, Assistant Secretary of State, that about 1 July the Executive Committee on Economic Foreign Policy should meet to consider the conference agenda for the conference, that that committee’s recommendations should go to the Secretary of State and the President for approval and then be communicated to the UK government; the proposals would next be sent to other governments, who would be asked

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for their comments by 1 October. The US would then seek definite agreement by the UK and the Dominions, the USSR and France, so that the conference could be held early in 1946. The timetable seemed far too short to the UK representatives, especially with a general election coming up in July or October. (This remained a concern at the next meeting on 30 May, after the election had been called, because the results would not be available until 27 July.) They also wondered what the conference would be asked to approve, a broad statement of principles or a cut-and-dried detailed scheme (AS(US)(45)4th and 5th meetings). After these discussions, the UK officials wanted to get permission from the Chancellor of the Exchequer (still Sir John Anderson) and the President of the Board of Trade (now Oliver Lyttleton) to present a brief draft statement of principles to Hawkins (Commercial policy: Article VII, Informal talks between a group of U.K. officials and Mr. Hawkins, T230/174). Before they could do so, on 7 June Hawkins produced his own draft statement (AS(US)(45)6th meeting). It was not reassuring: ‘As a general description of its contents, it may be said that, as regards commercial policy, it summarises the American draft Convention . . . [described by Hawkins in December 1944]; while as regards commodity and cartel policy, there appears to be substantial identity with the American views put forward at the Washington conversations in September, 1943.’ As they frankly told him four days later (AS(US)(45)7th meeting) it was ‘rather disturbing’ to find almost no reflection in the document of the comments they had made in December and January. There was also no indication of the American reaction to the British proposals on agriculture. By way of indicating something more appropriate they showed him a much briefer draft of their own, but without ministerial permission, they did not hand it over. They warned Hawkins that on the basis of his document it might be impossible to get AngloAmerican agreement before an international conference. ‘MR. HAWKINS said that this was a situation which, of course, he would be very anxious to avoid.’4 When the delegation of Canadian officials arrived in London in May for talks with their UK counterparts, Keynes organized a weekend meeting at King’s College Cambridge when he acquainted them with his thinking on postwar external finance (LePan 1979, 72–86). In the Board of Trade the following week Liesching and his colleagues briefed them fully on the talks with 4

Hawkins’s thirty-two-page document, Proposal to establish an international trade organization, June 2, 1945, which was not appended to the notes of the meetings because of its confidentiality, can be found in FO371/45680. The British two-page alternative, Commercial policy, Draft of a possible statement of principles, is in T230/174.

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Hawkins. Lionel was present only at the last of the London meetings (Article VII: Commercial Policy, Summary of Discussions at 3rd meeting with Canadian Officials on 31st May 1945, T230/174). The Canadians included W.A. Mackintosh, the author of the Canadian White Paper on Employment and Income, who spent a morning with Robbins, Meade and Tress and Stafford of the CSO to exchange views about postwar employment policy. Lionel also enjoyed the company of Frank Lee who was home on a visit from Washington (COD, 89–91). In the first week in June Norman Brook sent for Meade. He told him that ‘the Chancellor of the Exchequer had expressed the desire that Lionel Robbins should stay on in the Cabinet Offices for some months yet to be available to advise on Article VII and other matters of Anglo-American economic and financial relations. He had already talked with Lionel and they were suggesting that I might take over the Economic Section very soon and that Lionel should stay on in the office in an independent position for the other purpose.’ Meade objected strongly (COD, 93): ‘it would imply that Robbins had been dealing with Article VII etc. qua Lionel Robbins and not qua Director of the Economic Section, and . . . would therefore be very undesirable from the point of view of the future of the Section.’ He insisted, he later told Cairncross (11 July 1986), that ‘the change should not formally take place until Lionel in fact retired . . . and that Lionel retain the title of Director of the Economic Section in order to establish the principle that international financial arrangements were a proper field for the activity of the Section.’ Lionel remained director but with Meade increasingly assuming that role (COD, 110): ‘That is to say, I spend less time writing and thinking myself and more time directing the thoughts and writings of the other members of the Section.’ On 25 June Eady, Liesching and Robbins met Anderson and Lyttleton. They explained that they had learned from Hawkins that the US Administration was contemplating summoning an international trade conference at the beginning of 1946 whose agenda was to be settled in advance with the UK and a few other countries. They had argued at their last two meetings with Hawkins that it would be better to hold a preparatory conference early in 1946 to discuss a US statement of principles, which would have been cleared with the UK, which would in turn consult the Dominions, beforehand. At the preparatory conference a committee would be formed to prepare a more formal document for the full international conference a few months later. They had found Hawkins’s own draft statement of principles ‘thoroughly unsatisfactory . . . wordy and vague’ and far too long and sought the ministers’ permission to give Hawkins their own short statement

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(Note of meeting in Chancellor of Exchequer’s room on 25 June, T230/174). Receiving this permission they handed it over to Hawkins a couple of days later. It was somewhat longer than their earlier draft and included sections on commodity policy and on cartels, the latter reflecting the position taken in the January meeting with Hawkins (AS(US)(45)8th meeting, and Article VII Specimen draft of a possible statement of principles, FO371/ 45680). In the discussion of the UK statement on 27 June Hawkins warned that the US would probably not accept genuine multilateral negotiations and would insist on their preferred alternative ‘“multilateral-bilateral” method’, which involved each member country undertaking to negotiate with other members bilateral agreements whose results would then be generalized under the most-favoured-nation clause. The UK representatives reiterated their longstanding objections: it was really only an expression of intention, it would take too long to complete, the results were uncertain, and it would not have anything like the same psychological effect as a genuine multilateral attempt to reduce tariffs all round. ‘The last mentioned consideration might, indeed, endanger the whole project’, given the trend of public opinion against free trade in Britain and elsewhere. Hawkins also warned he did not think the US Administration would accept the UK proposals on agricultural protection and the UK wording on preferences would ‘raise strenous objection’ in his country. There matters rested for a few weeks. The National Debt Enquiry turned to some issues of fiscal policy after it had agreed its first report on monetary policy. On 18 May it discussed two papers by Meade, on the fiscal problem set by the debt and on debt repayment and employment policy (NDE Papers 4 and 6; JEM 2, 251– 62 and 279–84), on 24 May Meade’s and Robbins’s paper on the control of inflation. Lionel opened the discussion: ‘Professor Robbins said that in the immediate future there was a double danger of either inflation or unemployment and stagnation. If the process of reconversion of industry is mismanaged and stagnation results, the necessary measures to correct the position would be welcome to the public. If on the other hand the situation becomes increasingly inflationary, every corrective step will be unpopular.’ The purpose of his and Meade’s paper had been ‘to urge that we should not unless forced abandon any anti-inflationary weapon until it is clearer which way the position is going to develop. . . . They were principally concerned to see that reductions in income tax which would have an immediate effect on consumers’ purchasing power were not prematurely embarked upon, and that reductions in purchase tax and other indirect taxes were not considered while inflation was a clear danger.’ Keynes, however, opposed them

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‘vigorously’ according to Meade, arguing for a considerable reduction in taxation in an autumn budget (COD, 83–4). It was agreed to consider these questions further at a later meeting, but the committee’s deliberations petered out at the end of June. When the National Debt Enquiry was set up Robbins had volunteered to take over the rewriting of the Economic Survey necessitated by the state of the war in Europe to enable Meade to concentrate on preparing his capital levy paper. As events had unfolded the draft survey had been put aside. After V-E Day they tried again; as Meade commented, ‘This time we cannot make such an error about the ending of the German War!’ Tress was to be the editor. Robbins presided over the extensive discussions of its contents before Tress started drafting (COD, 33, 74–5, 77–8, 82). The record of the four Section meetings is interesting both for the way Robbins led the discussions and the questions he asked. He first asked his colleagues to describe the situation in their specialist areas. Dennison gloomily predicted that in the next two months the manpower situation would be more difficult than at any time since the outbreak of war, because there would be little demobilization before September and in the meantime married women would be leaving wartime employment. He dismissed the possibilities of alleviating the shortage raised by his more optimistic colleagues, such as that of Robbins and Chester that German prisoners of war might work in the coal mines. Chantler reported the (varied) situation in raw materials other than coal and the next day the less varied situations of food shortage, especially in Europe. Robbins asked ‘which was the more important factor, the decrease in supplies or increased requirements [of food]. Ministers would like to know which countries were getting supplies, especially how much food was going into Germany and Italy. Should not Germany feed the army of occupation?’ (Chantler thought the answer was increased demand.) Coal was a more serious worry: Chester warned that the UK coal shortage would be worse in 1945 than in the preceding war years, with hardly any coal available for production of exports. When Dennison suggested the Survey ‘sound a note of pessimism’ on productivity, Lionel asked again whether it was really impossible to use German prisoners of war in the mines: ‘100,000 prisoners added to the labour force would solve the problem’ (EC(S)(45)17, The Economic Survey, Minutes of staff meetings held on 15th and 16th May to discuss the next Survey, T230/162). Moving from supply to demand, Lionel suggested the balance of payments must be considered first and the Survey ‘must stress the darkness of our external position’. He pointed out that ‘the total of our overseas

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indebtedness was about equal to the amount that the Russians and the Americans considered a reasonable figure for German reparations in kind . . . [$20 billion]. The parallel should be drawn between our external position and that of Germany and the question of reparations linked with that of our external debt.’ He asked whether it was possible to say anything about the labour position with regard to exports. Dennison thought there would be little increase in the labour producing exports in the next six months. Hence when it came to considering the draft plan of the Survey, Robbins thought it necessary to make two main points: (i) the danger of inflation (ii) the danger of general stagnation resulting from the existence of obstacles to rapid reconversion and a weight of unnecessary regulations. It was important to impress the Treasury with the first point and the Board of Trade and Ministry of Labour with the second (EC(S)(45)19, Economic Survey, Minutes of a staff meeting held on 17th May to continue the discussion of the next Survey, T230/162).

The final meeting concentrated on the problem of inflation. Robbins thought they should consider what was likely to happen to the cost of living, wages and price controls at home and to international prices. He told his colleagues that Keynes had said ‘we should be lucky if the Cost of Living index were no more than 50 per cent above 1939 when subsidies were finally discontinued and thought that an increase of 100 per cent was probable’. On wages and price controls his colleagues were pessimistic (Dennison) and optimistic (Meade). Robbins himself ‘thought that a lot might be done to persuade people not to spend their savings at once and to continue to save out of current income by an announcement that purchase tax would go up in the immediate future, but would soon be removed and prices reduced when more supplies were available. He did not believe, however, that this was practical politics.’ On international prices there was little to be said except that they depended on economic conditions in the USA. He pointed out that the UK could not change its exchange rate: ‘Any change would be considered a breach of faith with the countries holding large balances in sterling. Much as we might be attracted by the general arguments in favour of flexible rates, it must be recognised that our own hands were tied in a quite peculiar manner’ (EC(S)(45)20, The Economic Survey, Minutes of a staff meeting held on 22nd May to continue the discussion on the next Survey, T230/162).

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When the Survey was ready in July (EC(S)(45)23(Final revise), T230/18) its most dramatic conclusions were about the danger of a coal shortage and a balance-of-payments crisis. ‘“It is no exaggeration, but a sober statement of fact”, ran the penultimate paragraph, “to assert that our external problem after this war will be at least as considerable as that of Germany after the last war.” As for coal, it was arguable that “next to the consolidation of peace itself, an improvement in the coal position comes highest in the scale of immediate necessities”. Exports and coal supplies were singled out as the key objectives on which the government should concentrate.’ As Cairncross and Watts (1989, 164–5) note, ‘this was one case where forecasting was relatively easy while action proved extremely difficult: the crisis foreseen in 1945 duly arrived in 1947 and the coal shortage lasted well into the fifties.’ As well as sending a draft of the Survey to Eady officially, Lionel sent a copy to Proctor personally. As well as complimenting the Section for the Survey, especially for its lucidity, and raising a few small points, Proctor had a final question for Lionel on 16 July (T230/162). ‘Two years ago we used to say that, if we had a two-stage ending to the war, it would greatly simplify our transitional problems. Reading your Survey I cannot recognise any fulfilment of this forecast. The continuance of the Japanese war will have practically no effect in slowing down the recrudescence of post-war demand, but it does have a very big effect in retarding the growth of the civilian national product. It seems to me, therefore, that it aggravates, not mitigates the main problem.’ Lionel replied on 20 July (T230/162) that he had thought Stage II would allow the government to retain physical controls longer than would otherwise be politically possible. ‘I still think that this is true, and when it is coupled with the fact that we should be very unlikely to get Lend-Lease if the Japanese war were not still on, this attitude is somewhat strengthened.’ However, ‘An abrupt ending of the Japanese war here and now would mean that the period of extreme physical shortage would be curtailed. But who is to say whether this would or would not be offset by more intense short-period unemployment and a greater tendency to rebel against every kind of administrative restraint.’ Robbins gave his own view on British postwar economic problems at a weekend conference at Jesus College Oxford, organized by the Foreign Office as a ‘refresher course’ on economic matters for members of the Foreign Service on 13–15 July (ms notes, Introductory Remarks, RP; COD 109). He drew attention to four aspects of the short-run reconstruction problem: inflation, the danger of unemployment, the conflict of objectives and exports. With inflation, where the wartime controls were likely to crumble and wages might rise, ‘Question is how long can we hold on.

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Can we do it until supply has more or less caught up [with demand].’ Unemployment had happened after the last war, ‘But we are going to try to stop this. . . . Probability a bit of inflation & some unemployment. Not a serious problem if we are careful.’ The conflict of objectives was more serious, especially when it came to the problem of increasing exports, which were desperately needed both to satisfy the holders of the sterling balances accumulated in wartime and to pay for current imports. ‘L[end-] L[ease] will not go on for ever. We cannot go on indefinitely running into debt.’ But because the production of goods for export needed labour and materials, which would have to be diverted from producing consumer goods, there was ‘A real conflict. We shan’t get all we need. Hope is that enough people will go on squealing. For exports not popular with people.’ At this conference he left longer-run domestic economic issues to Maud and Meade, who were to speak the next day, but he wanted to talk about ‘long period international economic reconstruction and its relation to our special problems’ before Eady and James Helmore talked in more detail of the external financial position and the export drive. His ‘Keynote [was] expansionism’ and the ‘main implications both positive & negative’ related both to money and to trade. On the former there should not be a gold standard or fixed exchange rates with their deflationary pressures on debtors but instead ‘Consultation & orderly adjustment [of] exchanges (No 1933) (1931 with safeguards)’, the avoidance of exchange controls except in special circumstances, convertibility and pressure on creditor countries to play a role in preventing deflation. Similarly with respect to trade, there would not be free trade nor blanket prohibition of state trading, but a reduction of tariffs, rules for state trading so as to restrict its protective effect, multilateralism (although he admitted ‘Status Preference a matter for discussion’) and provisions for countries with balance-of-payments difficulties. He emphasized how much these would help to solve Britain’s problems: ‘What do we want to help solve our problem[?] Reduction obstacles elsewhere of widespread character combined with retention [of] right ourselves to take special precautions. Won’t get reduction save as part of agreement. Won’t avoid retaliation for special measures save if permitted by general agreement.’ According to his notes, he ‘conclud[ed] with this. Won’t get this kind of solution save in expansionist atmosphere. Difficulties of reducing obstacles to trade in time of depression. To do this some things already provided. Fund. Bank. But on top of this domestic measures for maintaining employment’, on which he left his audience to listen to Meade. At a second similar conference, on 13 September, when he spoke more briefly on domestic economic problems alone, leaving Fleming to discuss

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external problems, he again emphasized the conflict between domestic consumption and exports (ms notes, Domestic prospects & problems, RP; COD, 131). Robertson also focussed on the export drive in his address to the annual meeting of the Royal Economic Society on 21 June. Lionel went to hear Robertson and to attend the dinner afterwards in honour of Keynes (RES Minutebook, RES2/1/3; COD, 98–100). In the spring of 1945 Keynes had begun to prepare his major paper on Britain’s immediate postwar international economic problem, ‘Overseas financial policy in Stage III’, which was to form the basis of official and ministerial discussions on the subject in the summer. After discussion in the Treasury it was circulated to the War Cabinet a week before the end of the coalition government (JMK 24, 256–95). The Economic Section had its first chance to contribute at the end of June, when Robbins and Meade were asked to discuss it with Overton, Liesching and Helmore at the Board of Trade; Lionel subsequently went to a run of meetings in the Treasury in July. Keynes’s paper opened with a blunt statement. ‘It has been a prime object of policy on the part of the Treasury and the Bank of England, for at least the last two or three years, so to conduct their technical tasks that we should end the war in a financial position which did not leave us hopelessly at the mercy of the United States.’ The success of this policy was that the UK owed very little debt in dollars but its liabilities in sterling – the accumulated wartime sterling balances – amounted to some £3000m. When the war finally ended the UK would also be facing a current account balance-of-payments deficit of about £1400m a year, and it would take three to five years at least to increase exports sufficiently to eliminate the deficit. Keynes argued that there were three alternative ways of facing up to the financial problem. There was Starvation Corner, which meant trying to do without US aid and living with the undesirable consequences (increased austerity at home, economic isolationism and bilateralism internationally). This was hardly imaginable: it would not be accepted at home and it would be opposed by the US and by Commonwealth countries, because it would not permit a multilateral international system and sterling would remain inconvertible. There was Temptation, the acceptance of a large American loan on superficially generous terms (low interest rate, long repayment period, etc), to entice the UK into accepting multilateralism on American lines and making sterling freely convertible (at least for current transactions) soon after the war. This would land the UK with a huge debt burden in dollars instead of sterling. There was also Justice, a sharing of burdens between the US and Canada, which would provide aid in the form of grants as well as credit, in an amount large enough to write off lend-lease and

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mutual aid liabilities and to permit early sterling convertibility for current transactions; the countries in the sterling area, which would allow most of their accumulated wartime balances to be cancelled or funded into longterm debts; and the UK, which would make the current earnings of the sterling area and a portion of the sterling balances freely convertible (for current transactions) and pay off its remaining debts only once its balance of payments had recovered. The advantage to the US, who would have to provide most of the money, was that without such assistance the UK would not be able to participate fully in ‘the free international economy upon which the Americans have set their hearts and which we also, no less than they, vastly prefer if it is made practicable for us’. Keynes’s idea of ‘Justice’ fitted with Robbins’s view that there should be a ‘grand international assize to reorganize the burdens left by the war’ (see Chapter 15). He and Meade and Overton were, Overton told Keynes on 9 July (T247/49), ‘in full agreement’ with the general approach. But Meade and Robbins shared a concern Overton had expressed to Keynes on 26 May (T236/436): that the amount of the sterling balances Keynes suggested should be released immediately was too large, larger than the amount of exports the UK could immediately supply, so that the balances would likely be spent on American goods; it would be better for Britain’s export trade that these balances were released more gradually. They were also concerned that the funded portion of the sterling balances which Keynes suggested should be released over a number of years for purchases of British goods would not be spent only on British goods without discriminatory measures incompatible either with the Bretton Woods agreements or with the commercial policy rules currently under discussion with Hawkins (COD, 103–4). In a note drafted by Meade they argued that ‘it would, in brief, be desirable if (i) as small a part as possible of the sterling balances were freed immediately at the end of the Japanese war, and (ii) thereafter, as the remainder of the uncancelled sterling balances were gradually freed, they were freed for all purchases and were not confined to “special purchases” from the United Kingdom’. Instead of Keynes’s proposal, which would give the holders of the balances £750m down plus £15m a year available for all purchases starting immediately and £30m a year for special purchases in the UK after five years, they proposed £250m down plus £50m a year starting at once and available for all purchases (Overseas financial policy in Stage III, Joint memorandum by the Board of Trade and the Economic Section of the Cabinet Secretariat, 9 July 1945, T236/437). Keynes (JMK 24, 367–9) agreed £750m was probably too large, but there was the question of what the UK could get away with in negotiations with the USA and the sterling area creditors.

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However, ‘whereas the first part of your proposal may not be as acceptable to the Americans as my version, your second feature they would undoubtedly prefer.’ In the subsequent discussions in the Treasury Lionel continued to be particularly worried about the problem of the sterling balances, enquiring, for instance, as to when the UK government would put the proposals to the holders and pointing to the ‘certain[ty] that India and probably the others would invoke American assistance at every stage’ and to ‘the great danger that the Americans might suggest taking over part of the debts owed to the sterling creditors’, which it would be difficult to argue against and would simply replace sterling debt with dollar debt (notes of meetings on 20, 23 and 25 July in T236/450). At the end of the month, when a visit from Clayton was imminent, Keynes redrafted his memorandum in the light of these discussions (JMK 24, 377–411). There was a small flurry of activity on the commodity policy front in Whitehall in the spring and summer of 1945. When Franks held a second meeting on the US proposal for an international cotton conference (Note of a meeting . . . May 7th 1945, MAF97/2508), Robbins ‘considered that the time had come to make cotton the occasion for an advance on a wider front. . . . Over the whole field of commodities, our interests would be best served if we could get general agreement on the principles to be applied. The danger to be avoided was being driven into specific agreements none of which were in accordance with our long-period objectives.’ Franks subsequently held a meeting of the revived Commodity Policy Committee on tin, Eady chaired two on techniques of commodity policy, which Lionel attended, and Broadley two on wheat and sugar.5 At the two meetings he attended, on 20 June and 18 July, Lionel, backed by Robert Hall, was strongly critical of the Ministry of Food’s suggestions, which led to the setting up of a working party, including Fleming from the Section and Wall from the Ministry of Food, to review the whole question of buffer stocks. Its deliberations in the next few weeks were ‘long and confused’, largely owing to disagreement as to whether and to what extent buffer stocks could be used to counteract the trade cycle, and they resumed in 1946. This was one of the activities continued by Fleming and Meade long after Robbins left 5

Given the rotating chairmanship, the records of these meetings are scattered: Commodity policy committee, Tin, Note of a meeting . . . June 13th, 1945, T236/1822; Commodity policy committee, Minutes of a meeting.. 20th June [1945], MAF83/688; Interdepartmental Commodity Policy Committee, Record of a meeting . . . June 25th, MAF83/655; Commodity Policy Group, Minutes of meeting . . . 18th July, MAF83/2735; Note of a meeting of the inter-departmental commodity policy group . . . 25th July, 1945, MAF83/632.

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the Cabinet Offices.6 Lionel did, however, take part in discussions in the Ministry of Supply over the proposed international cotton conference in the summer. In July he and Hall drafted a stiff telegram to the British Raw Material Mission in Washington: 1. We have examined draft Agreement. . . . this embodies most objectionable features of Wheat Agreement. It is thus entirely unacceptable. 2. . . . We think it is better that you should not repeat not attempt to secure agreement . . . but rather content yourselves with having placed on record your conviction that the draft is unacceptable. (TAMAR 3971 to BRMM Washington from M of Supply, 16 July 1945, T230/36)

It was hoped that if the UK stalled long enough the pressure for a cotton agreement would disappear after the war, as in fact it did. Keynes had guessed that the earliest practicable date for opening negotiations with the US Administration for postwar financial assistance would be September 1945, following not just the end of the European war but also the San Francisco Conference to establish the United Nations Organization and Congressional consideration of both the latest lend-lease appropriation and the Bretton Woods Bill (JMK 24, 294). The advent of a new President, Harry Truman, after the death of Roosevelt in April, added to the uncertainty of American reaction to any British proposals. In Britain there was also the uncertainty of the general election. The election results announced on 26 July, the day after the new Economic Survey was circulated to ministers in the ‘caretaker’ Conservative government, gave the Labour Party a huge unexpected majority. Attlee became Prime Minister and he and Bevin, who was now Foreign Secretary, took Churchill’s and Eden’s place at the Potsdam meeting with Stalin and Truman, which had been adjourned for the election results. Attlee also appointed Dalton Chancellor of the Exchequer, Cripps President of the Board of Trade and Herbert Morrison Lord President of the Council. Anticipating a Conservative postwar government under Churchill, Lionel had been trying to persuade his friends in the Conservative Party to fight the good fight for multilateral international arrangements, enlisting the help of James Meade by taking him to dine with his friends Alec Spearman and Peter Thorneycroft, who chaired the Tory Reform Committee, in May 6

Broadley to Franks, 19 July, Franks to Broadley, 31 July 1945, MAF83/688; Wall to Martin, 17 August, Broadley to Eady, 28 August 1945, MAF83/688; EC(S)(46)3(Revise), A buffer-stock-cum-quota commodity regulation scheme, 26 January, and Fleming to Kahn, 6 February 1946, T236/55.

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(COD, 33, 78–9). Like most other Conservatives Richard Law lost his seat (SW Hull), which he had held since October 1931. While Lionel was on holiday in August, Law tried unsuccessfully to contact him to ask his advice on standing next for South Kensington, ‘a constituency of rather definite Conservative views’, where it was rumoured in the local Conservative Association that Law was ‘not sound on Preference’. Law told Lionel on 22 August (Correspondence, RP) that ‘my first reaction was that I cd not possibly sit for a constituency like South Kensington’, his second that ‘it would be a very good thing if a place like S. Kensington did select a chap like me.’ (He was selected and returned to the House of Commons in November 1945.) Liesching, Eady, Robbins and Shackle met Hawkins and Penrose again, after a six-week break, on 4 August (AS(US)(45)9th meeting, FO371/45680). This time Clayton was present along with Leroy Stinebower and Henry Fowler. So were Keynes, Brand, Edmund Hall-Patch and Helmore. Before the meeting Hall-Patch warned his Foreign Office colleagues that Clayton had come over to talk about both postwar commercial policy in light of the informal talks with Hawkins and ‘the terms, duration and size of any financial aid required by the United Kingdom after the end of Lease-Lend (Stage III)’ and that the UK could not continue to stall, as it had been doing for so long, now that it had a new government with a large majority. As he concluded (Docs, 5), ‘We shall be playing for large stakes and these initial discussions may set the tone for the all important discussions on Stage III which are at present arranged to take place in Washington in the Autumn.’ The conversation was even more discouraging than the last of the previous talks with Hawkins and Penrose. Clayton bluntly stated what Hawkins hinted in June: Both the undertakings given to Congress in connection with the renewal and extension of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act [in June 1945] and the wording of the Act itself would prevent the United States from discussing any ‘horizontal’ all-round cut of tariffs; any such reductions must be selective, and must be preceded by the usual hearings of interested parties. Personally, he thought a horizontal cut, even by as little as 20% would, in any case, be impossible . . . He was convinced that, as regards tariffs the method of grouped or interlinked bilateral negotiations was the right one; the time required by it was a difficulty, but by suitable means this could be minimised. Some 10 or 12 bilateral tariff agreements could be concluded in a short period between the main countries, while an International Trade Conference was being arranged to deal with other aspects (quotas, exchange controls, discrimination, Cartels etc.).

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Hawkins produced a revised paper on the American proposals, which was ‘much the same as the paper he had handed us before’, and confirmed that the Americans would not accept the British agricultural proposals. In further discussion of the US document by the more usual group of participants on 9 August, the British representatives, noting that, while tariffs would be tackled in bilateral negotiations, tariff preferences would be dealt with multilaterally along with the non-tariff subjects, pointed out yet again that ‘we had always stressed that tariffs and preferences should be dealt with side by side: any attempt to separate preferences for treatment as a matter of doctrine would raise grave difficulties’. They pointed out other defects in the proposals before discussion reverted to the proposed American procedure. In conclusion, ‘We indicated that it would be necessary for our new Government to give consideration to the main questions involved, such as Preference and the treatment of agriculture. We asked the Americans what was the earliest date they had in mind for the preliminary Conference. They said they had been thinking of a meeting at Washington early in September: in that case they would be able to make public announcement of the contemplated negotiations in the U.S. in October and get the public hearings over so as to be ready to start negotiations just after the New Year. This might, however, prove to be an over-optimistic time-table.’ They agreed to meet again with Clayton present (AS(US)(45)10th meeting, FO371/45680). At that meeting on 14 August the UK representatives focussed attention on the proposed procedure (AS(US)(45)11th meeting, FO371/45680). (There was also a financial meeting involving Clayton and Keynes, which Robbins did not attend.) Clayton admitted the ‘only reason’ for linking finance and commercial policy was the expectation that ‘They would be acting in the capacity of bankers and as such would wish to see conditions realised which would make repayment possible.’ He conceded ‘the Americans did not contemplate that detailed agreements on commercial policy, etc. must be concluded before a scheme of financial assistance could be worked out’, but in the next breath he warned that ‘it would be necessary to have a fairly clear understanding as to the objectives in the field of commercial policy and as to the procedure for reaching them. If such an understanding could be reached, action in the financial field should be possible within a short time.’ When discussion turned to details of the long American document, Clayton’s response to British criticisms of its sections on, for instance, export subsidies and restrictive practices, was no more reassuring. On their document as a whole, the Americans told the British that ‘[having] now been approved by all authorities in the U.S. except the President, [it] could

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be taken as adequately representing their views. We were now at a stage beyond the informal discussions held in the past few months. They would now wish to learn in a general way our attitude in regard to their position as reflected in the document; this would form the basis for the next meeting, which they were thinking of holding early in September. . . . All outstanding points of difference could be discussed, but they hoped that conclusions would shortly be reached.’ Clayton had hoped this stage would have been reached during his visit. As Cripps gloomily pointed out to the Cabinet a couple of days later (CP(45)116, CAB129/1), ‘If the Americans continue to take the line that fulfilment of Article VII depends on our accepting this set of proposals as they stand, the difficulties in reaching agreement with them may well prove insuperable.’ On 6 August a USAF B-29 aircraft had dropped the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, on the 9th another B-29 the second on Nagasaki, killing over 100,000 people between them. Attlee announced the news of the Japanese surrender at midnight on 14 August. On 20 August the British government learned that President Truman was ending lend-lease immediately. Stage III of the transformation of the war economy into a peace economy had arrived. This time the Section did not rewrite its Economic Survey but recirculated it that day to the new government with a supplementary note (EC(S)(45)26, T230/18). Lionel then took some leave. Before he left Mary Soutar (now Mrs Muray), his personal assistant since 1941, left the Section for a lectureship in social administration at Manchester University. Writing on 29 August to thank him for his farewell gift (Correspondence, RP), she wished him luck when he went to Washington and hoped he would soon be able to return to academic life. He assured Per Jacobsson over lunch at the Reform that he was soon going back to LSE ‘and to freedom of speech’ (Jacobsson Diary, 17 August 1945). On 31 August he sent a postcard to his father from Seaford in Sussex: ‘We are nearing the end of the best holiday I have had since 1938. . . . I feel entirely different – almost a normal human being.’

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One morning after the election of the Labour government Lionel Robbins addressed the following minute to James Meade (nd, Correspondence, RP): Dear James I am sorry to have to report that my dream life with the senior civil servants has become active again. Lest there should be in it anything of relevance to the routine business of the Section, I hasten to put the salient features on record:An important meeting at Downing Street. The old Prime Minister is taking his farewells. Sir Edward Bridges, Sir Norman (then Mr) Brook, Sir Arthur Street, Mr James Meade, Mrs Churchill in attendance. The occasion of the meeting is to consider a draft paper entitled Why say Phut to the British Empire? which the old man has drawn up as his last will & testament. We open the paper eagerly. It is newly printed on sumptuous green in foreign office type. We are disappointed with the contents. One of the main features is a scheme for exhibiting on an enormous green blackboard the estimates of pessimistic statisticians who have been wrong in the past. You remonstrate with the great man who allows himself to be convinced. He is in immense good humour. He struts about, joking with Clemmie & releasing great puffs of smoke all over the room. ‘You don’t seem to like my paper, Mr. Brook’ he questions impishly looking at Norman who has collapsed into the most terrible gloom at the prospect of the release of so damaging a document. ‘Well, Prime Minister,’ replies that faithful secretary, ‘I did wonder whether it was altogether fortunate that your last specimen of official prose should end with such a dying fall.’ The literary allusion pleases the ex-Prime Minister. He roars with laughter and makes jokes at his own expense with everybody. The scene changes. Sir Edward, Sir Arthur & Sir Norman withdraw. The Economic Section reinforced with Mr. Frank Lee & Mr. Kenneth Goschen [Treasury], with the bland smile of Mr. Robert Brand in the background, are engaged upon a dark & dreadful enterprise entitled Operation White Knight. The object is to lure Sir W. Eady into a dark room and there spiflicate him, pouring flour over his head & clanking chains on the floor to increase the terror of the atmosphere. The operation is completely successful. Everyone (except Sir W.E.) is very pleased. 587

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But now a most sinister motive intrudes itself. Filled with malignant hatred Sir W.E. realizes that this is the opportunity of a lifetime to wreck the careers of his tormentors. He therefore gives it out that he has been seriously injured. He swathes himself in white bandages from head to toe, like an Egyptian mummy, leaving only a slit for his eyes and tiny openings for hands and feet. In this mournful guise he approaches Sir Edward Bridges who, unaware of the innocent and essentially good humoured nature of the prank, or of the identity of its perpetrators, sets all the forces of the secret service in motion. Terror & consternation reign among the Section, with the exception of Miss Mary Soutar, who has taken the precaution to provide herself with an alibi by lying to the hotel chamber maid about her intentions for an afternoon nap. The figure of Sir W.E., in his perverse winding sheet, becomes ubiquitous, filling the horizon of sleep like an infinite succession of winter squanderbugs. What does this all signify?

Lionel Robbins may have been hankering to return to academic life but he did not wish to leave government service while the ‘consideration’ for lend-lease under Article VII of the Mutual Aid Agreement was still unsettled. After the renewed commercial policy talks with Hawkins in August he was expecting to go to Washington for the final round quite soon and then to quit Whitehall for LSE. He was not unduly surprised by the abrupt termination of lend-lease, announced while he was on leave, but he was very surprised to learn that the new government had decided to send Keynes immediately to Washington to seek financial assistance from the US Administration, leaving commercial policy discussions for a later mission (Robbins 1971a, 204). On taking office as Chancellor of the Exchequer Dalton had asked Keynes to stay on in the Treasury as his adviser. He had circulated Keynes’s memorandum on the overseas financial problem and its proposed solution to his Cabinet colleagues on 14 August (Dalton 1962, 69–70; JMK 24, 377–411; Docs, 27–37). On 23 August Keynes set out his proposed strategy for Stage III talks with the Americans, of seeking ‘Justice’ as he had called it in May, to a meeting of the ‘big five’ ministers (Attlee, Bevin, Cripps, Dalton and Morrison). The day before, Lord Halifax, HM Ambassador to the US, at home on leave, had recorded in his diary (Birkenhead 1965, 553) a phone call from the Foreign Office ‘to say that Bevin and other Ministers were in a flap about the Americans having cut off Lend-Lease, which looked like precipitating immediate conversations about Stage III. . . . Keynes and Co. would have to go to Washington almost at once, and Bevin wanted me to what he called “lead the delegation”, and accordingly get there as soon as possible.’ Keynes suggested the opening gambit should be to ask for an outright grant of US$4 to $5 billion. In return the UK could offer to settle

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its indebtedness to sterling area countries, partly by cancellation and partly by release in instalments. On commercial policy he claimed that ‘there was no question of our being asked to agree to a detailed commercial treaty at this stage. What we should be asked to do would be to sign a joint invitation with the United States to 15 other countries to attend an international conference next year, on the understanding that the terms of the invitation represented the policy of our two countries.’ He also claimed the remaining points of difficulty in the American document on commercial policy could easily be settled in Britain’s favour. Brand, who was also present and who was ‘perhaps . . . rather less hopeful’ than Keynes, argued that the mission should not ask directly for a grant but ‘should let it appear from the strength of our case, as we developed it, that this was the one really satisfactory way of dealing with the situation’. Brand’s suggestion having ‘met with general approval’ and support from Halifax, ministers agreed ‘the matter should be handled by Keynes and his colleagues on the basis that he had outlined that evening’ (Record of a meeting of ministers . . . 23rd August 1945, Docs, 72–7 and JMK 24, 420–5). Keynes, Lady Keynes, Frederic Harmer of the Treasury and Edmund Hall-Patch of the FO sailed from Southampton for Quebec City on 27 August (Moggridge 1992, 798). Three days later, while Lionel (and Percivale Liesching) was still on leave, Hawkins called at the Board of Trade and then on Nigel Ronald at the Foreign Office (Ronald to Eady and Woods, 30 August 1945, FO371/45698): ‘Hawkins came round to see me [Ronald] this morning in considerable distress and told me that both Mr. Clayton, now in Paris, and the State Department felt that it was most desirable that Keynes’ team should include from the outset persons fully qualified to discuss Commercial Policy.’ Hawkins had learned at the Board of Trade that Helmore was probably going to join the Keynes mission in Washington, but he thought ‘someone who had taken a more prominent part’ in the previous talks would be required. Ronald immediately passed this on to the Treasury and the Board of Trade, commenting that he thought they would be ‘well advised’ to meet the Americans over this. But the next day ministers decided merely that the Foreign Office should inform Hawkins that they were preparing to send a commercial policy mission once they had had ‘an opportunity to form considered views on the complex issues involved’. In the meantime Helmore would go to Washington as an observer (Record of a meeting of ministers . . . 31st August, 1945, T236/437). A week later, by which time Keynes was in Washington, Hawkins called at the Board of Trade again. As the mission in Washington was informed, this time he read Liesching and Magowan a cable from Clayton to the effect that

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it was ‘imperative’ that commercial policy talks proceed simultaneously with the financial discussions and that without ‘a United Kingdom team of equal standing to that engaged on financial policy’ the financial discussions might be delayed (BABOON 21, 9 September 1945, Docs, 120–1).1 When Keynes, with Halifax’s support, proposed to London that he should conduct the commercial policy negotiations himself with the assistance of Magowan, Hall-Patch and Helmore, Liesching and Robbins revolted. It was ‘a most resounding counter-attack’ (COD, 132). They persuaded Bridges to call a meeting of senior officials and Cripps to speak at a subsequent ministerial meeting. At Bridges’ meeting Liesching argued for the sending of a full delegation including himself, Robbins and Shackle plus a representative of the Ministry of Agriculture and one from the cartels side of the Board of Trade. He received ‘general support for the view that a First XI must be sent out’ and Bridges raised the question of procedure, in particular the need for a ministerial decision on the delegation’s instructions. Lionel suggested a short paper, to ‘indicate the present position in Washington, . . . survey the conditions which the Americans would want us to accept . . . [and] list the points on which our representatives might have to resist strongly’, and drafted it before the ministerial meeting (Nevile Butler, Washington talks, 12 September 1945, FO371/45698; LCR, Commercial policy and the lend lease negotiations at Washington, T230/175). At the ministerial meeting on Friday, 14 September, which Liesching and Robbins attended, ministers had before them two more telegrams from Keynes and Halifax arguing against detailed commercial policy negotiations at this stage. Cripps, who was ‘magnificent’ according to Meade (COD, 132), opened by admitting he had initially agreed to the Board of Trade being represented only by an observer while the Keynes mission tried to make some progress in the financial negotiations. But now that the Americans were pressing to bring in commercial policy from the outset ‘he could not accept responsibility for the commercial negotiations if they were started before a suitable team had been sent out from London’. Having obtained his colleagues’ agreement to send the commercial policy team, he got their agreement to his (that is, Robbins’s) memorandum of instructions (GEN89/1st meeting and GEN89/2, Memorandum by the President of the Board of Trade, 13 September 1945, F0371/45699). Keynes and Halifax were instructed to wait for the commercial policy delegation and to ask for a postponement of the first meeting of the Commercial Policy Committee scheduled for the following Monday (BABOON 33, 14 September 1945, 1

The main channel of communications between London and the mission in Washington, BABOON telegrams (in T236/465–6) were sent from London to Washington, NABOBs the other way (T236/453–9).

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Docs, 132–3). They responded by arguing it would be unwise to postpone the meeting, but ministers stuck to their decision. When Halifax spoke to Clayton as instructed, Clayton was ‘quite happy’ about the postponement and expressed the hope that ‘we could now make early and rapid progress towards broad decisions’ (Docs, 133 note 4).2 On 23 September, Liesching, Robbins, Shackle, Ralph Enfield of the Ministry of Agriculture, George Andrew of the Board of Trade and Gerard Clauson of the Colonial Office sailed from Southampton for New York on the Queen Mary. Before they departed Robbins saw the director of LSE, to assure him that he would return to the School as soon as this mission was accomplished (LCR to Carr-Saunders, 2 November 1945, History of Past Employment, RP); he also lunched with Dick Law (Cockett 1994, 99). The ship was packed to full capacity with returning American troops. The delegation was confined to the sundeck, where they had, however, spacious and comfortable cabins. Full meals were only served twice a day, but the food was ‘marvellous’: Lionel reported to Iris on 23 September that for breakfast that first morning he had treated himself to ‘Apricot Compote Corn Flakes Eggs & Bacon Sausages & Potatoes Toast & Marmalade [and] Coffee ad lib’. As the only open deckspace had to be shared with 200 officers there was ‘[not] much room for promenading’; but Lionel was nursing a sprained ankle he had injured a couple of weeks earlier. He used the enforced idleness to fulfil a long-cherished ambition of reading Byron’s Don Juan all through in nearly consecutive sittings. He was impressed: ‘There are dull passages: in what long poem are there not? But the amazing thing is the way in which, on the whole, one’s interest is sustained. A memorable experience’ (LCR to IER, 28 September 1945). The voyage itself was uneventful: ‘the sea was calm but we were frequently enveloped by mist, and sitting on deck was not very pleasant.’ With large cabins the delegation were able to meet for long discussions of the tasks ahead and to make progress in filling out their brief instructions (LCR to Meade, 29 September 1945, American Journals, RP). At the same time they were apprehensive of the reception they would receive from Keynes, as well as from the Americans. Lionel could not help thinking of the contrast with the Law Mission two years earlier (WD, 221): The same subjects, the same men (with one lamentable absentee, my dear James [Meade]), the same (or much the same) negotiators to encounter on the other side. But what a contrast in mood. Then we had a constructive case to argue, an initiative 2

Skidelsky (2000, 415) is clearly mistaken in claiming that ‘it was not American pressure but a desire to safeguard Britain’s commercial bargaining position which led to the decision, on 14 September, to send out a Board of Trade team.’

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to take, a cause to forward . . . Now our case is defensive, initiative is denied us, there is no question of a cause to be vindicated, only a possible grudging acquiescence in a settlement, acceptable only for extraneous reasons. On top of all this . . . hangs the shadow of possible personal difference within our own ranks precipitated by the wayward impulse and intransigence of one [Keynes] whom we all admire and love.

Lionel commenced his usual diary the day before landing in New York. He told Meade on 26 October (American Journals, RP) that this time it should go only to a few colleagues in the Section and Bridges and Brook outside. Meade in turn sent Lionel instalments of his own diary to inform the delegation of related developments in Whitehall. When Robbins became too busy to keep his diary he continued to make rough notes, some of which have survived. The sources used in this chapter also include the files on the loan negotiations that Robbins retained when he left Whitehall and deposited at LSE (here referred to as Loan files). The Robbins/Cripps ‘instructions’ listed seven points ‘on which we think it is especially important that they should indicate to the Americans that our interest is vitally concerned’: (a) imperial preference (which must be dealt with on the same basis as tariffs), (b) state trading (which should be allowed under rules of good behaviour), (c) quantitative restrictions (to be allowed only in situations of balance-of-payments disequilibrium), (d) agriculture (where some protection for British agriculture must be allowed as long as the Americans protected theirs), (e) export subsidies (which should be resisted), (f) the transition period (essential) and (g) international cartels (where it would be sensible to suggest a consultative body again). Cripps’s colleagues had approved without modification all but (c), where they ‘agreed that the right to use quantitative regulation must be fully reserved to us in the transitional period and that the length of this period must not be regarded as fixed in advance; it must be dependent on circumstances, not on dates’ (GEN89/2 and GEN89/1st meeting, F0371/45699). The supplementary papers prepared on board ship included papers on agriculture and cartels (The position of agriculture under the document handed to us by Mr Clayton on the 4th August, 1945, 26 September, and Article VII – Cartels, 27 September 1945, Washington File No 2 General, Loan). Lionel was glad Enfield was a member of the delegation: not only was he ‘a most charming and intelligent man’ but ‘unlike most members of his department who are almost more sectional in their outlook than the National Farmers’ Union itself, he really understands the nature of the general economic problem’ (WD, 227). But even in London MAF was no longer the obstacle it had been with Fergusson as permanent secretary: his successor, Sir Donald Vandepeer, was, Meade wrote (COD, 160), ‘certainly

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going all out to woo us who, under Lionel’s directorship, have been regarded as the Ministry of Agriculture’s bete noir!’ On arrival in New York, the team spent the day ‘loitering . . . and confabulating with James Helmore’ (who confirmed that Keynes had not been pleased with their being sent out) and took an evening train to Washington (WD, 222–3): ‘New York was hot and suffocating, but nevertheless throbbing with vitality, the shops full of goods, the streets full of people, the breath of helterskelter reconversion in the air.’ In Washington they stayed at the Shoreham Hotel (now the Omni Shoreham) on Calvert Street near Rock Creek Park, while the Keynes party were at the Statler. A resort hotel opened in 1930, Lionel thought it was a great improvement – ‘ever so much more comfortable than the hateful places little better than highclass brothels that I have stayed in before’ – and delighted in the location – ‘just not in the heart of Washington and overlook[ing] the most beautiful vistas of trees’ (LCR to IER, 3 and 13 October). The next morning immediately after breakfast Liesching and Robbins ‘took the bull by the horns’ and went to the Statler to see Keynes. ‘Result excellent.’ Maynard was very cordial and invited them to lunch (LCR to Meade, 29 September 1945, American Journals, RP; WD, 223). Before lunch they attended a meeting in Halifax’s room at the Embassy to decide tactics for Monday’s meeting of the Combined Commercial Policy Committee. Liesching did not want to plunge into detailed discussion at the very first meeting, Keynes suggested they might therefore comment on two American papers (on procedure for implementing the American ITO proposals and the draft invitation to the proposed international conference on trade and employment), and the others agreed. The meeting also settled that Liesching should be on the Top Committee and Robbins on the Finance Committee and that the UK side of the Commercial Policy Committee should consist of Halifax, Keynes, Liesching, Brand, Robbins and Shackle (UKST(45)3rd meeting, Loan).3 Over lunch Liesching and Robbins heard from Keynes what had happened, or rather not happened, on the financial policy front. In his fortnight in Washington Keynes had first, in three meetings of the Top Committee, 3

The two American papers were COM/TRADE 3, US-UK ECONOMIC NEGOTIATIONS, Procedures for Negotiating and Implementing the “Proposal for an International Trade Organization”, and COMTRADE 4, Draft of Proposed Invitation to Certain Governments to Participate in a Meeting Preliminary to the Holding of the Proposed Interntional Conference on Trade and Employment, both 28 September 1945. (COM/TRADE 1 was the latest version of the American Proposals for consideration by an international conference on trade and employment, COM/TRADE 2 Nuclear-Multilateral Approach for the Relaxation of Trade Barriers, 19 September 1945.)

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outlined the UK economic position to the Americans and, in two meetings of the Finance Committee, his proposed solution. The former meetings were chaired by Will Clayton, the latter by Judge Vinson, now Secretary of the Treasury (JMK 24, 466–501). In spite of Keynes’s eloquence, it had become immediately clear that a grant-in-aid was out of the picture. ‘It is clear, too,’ wrote Lionel, ‘that Maynard accepts this completely and is beginnning to be inclined to think it absurd to believe otherwise. I had no difficulty in refraining from saying I told you so.’ But he feared it was going to be difficult to persuade London to accept it (WD, 224). At the end of that first day in Washington Lionel went to a cocktail party at the home of the Commercial Counsellor, J.P. Summerscale, but he did not enjoy it much in the 90◦ F heat and high humidity. ‘As I moved from group to group I felt that I must be leaving everywhere puddles of perspiration on the carpet behind me. I found a general atmosphere of sympathy among my American friends for the circumstances of our mission.’ A much cooler Sunday was spent in consideration of the COM/TRADE documents, before he dined with Frank and Kathleen Lee: ‘Good talk. Pleasant company’ (WD, 224). Monday, 1 October, saw the first of the COM/TRADE meetings, the formal meetings of the Combined Commercial Policy Committee. It was ‘an immense plenary in the conference room of the State Department’ (WD, 225): Clayton was in the chair and the British team were ranged against Henry Wallace, Harry White, Oscar Ryder, Harry Hawkins and Leslie Wheeler, with masses of ‘sitters in behind’, eighteen of them not counting the four secretaries. ‘The proceedings . . . characterised by complete inaudibility of the speakers outside a range of two and a half yards either way . . . were conducted in a mood of great cordiality.’ But as the committee members went through COM/TRADE 3 paragraph by paragraph the British team was disillusioned in its optimistic interpretation of passages referring to preferences. As Clayton had said in London in August, the Americans intended to bargain about tariffs and preferences in bilateral negotiations and then require the UK to eliminate the remaining preferences; in other words, as Lionel noted, ‘Preferences must be extinguished as a price for financial assistance. Naturally we recorded at once sharp dissent . . . ’ According to the minutes (COM/TRADE – 1st meeting), ‘SIR PERCIVALE LIESCHING thanked Mr. Clayton for making the American position so clear. To the British side it was an unacceptable position, but he did not think that this was the moment to direct the full flow of discussion to this particular difficulty.’ Otherwise, wrote Lionel, ‘the going was not bad. On everything but

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preference the Americans seem likely to do all they can to meet us. But on this point clearly there is going to be a battle royal.’4 Much of the commercial policy negotiation, like the financial negotiations, proceeded in smaller subcommittees. One agreed amendments to COM/TRADE 3 and 4 that afternoon (WD, 225; COM/TRADE – 5 and COM/TRADE – 6). Lionel then drafted the lengthy telegram to London reporting on the morning’s meeting (NABOB 106, 1 October 1945). In the evening Liesching, Robbins and Magowan dined with Hawkins, who was ‘delighted that we have come and clearly looks to us to vindicate many of the things which he cabled home from London but failed to get across. In spite of his transparent sympathy and goodwill, we did not neglect to reproach him for the deplorable situation as regards imperial preference.’ Keynes, meanwhile, telephoned Eady in London, sent a telegram and wrote Dalton to try to make it clear there was no prospect whatever of a grant from the Americans, who were more likely to offer a loan at 2 per cent for fifty years, although he thought it might still be worth trying for a non-interest-bearing loan (WD, 225; Docs, 168–70; JMK 24, 512–17). Although there was ‘a grand showdown on preferences’ at the next day’s COM/TRADE meeting and ‘a battle royal on cartels’ at a less formal meeting a week later, it took Liesching and Hawkins and their respective colleagues only ten days to arrive at agreed conclusions on almost everything except preferences. On preferences, Liesching ‘led off superlatively well . . . not too formal, always courteous, correct, clear and uncompromising; almost Churchillian in the peroration about ruthless economic power. The Americans were clearly impressed’ (WD, 226 and 232). In the ensuing sharp debate Robbins intervened repeatedly and bluntly, but to little effect: ‘no country would be willing to negotiate reductions in its tariff if it had assurance in advance that preferences would disappear in any event’; although ‘it was possible to have some sympathy with the direction of Mr. Clayton’s remarks, . . . How could the U.K. be conceived to reach Mr. Clayton’s goal of freer outlets for her products if her bargaining power were taken away at the outset? He suggested, therefore, that an effort be made to find some other approach which would be acceptable both politically and economically to the United States and the United Kingdom’; ‘MR. CLAYTON indicated that the American group would be glad to examine any other proposal which the United Kingdom representatives might wish to make and which would get 4

LCR’s set of the minutes and papers are in Minutes of COMTRADE Mtgs and COMTRADE, Loan. His Loan files also include COMMERCE NABOBs.

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us to the same goal within a reasonable time’ (COM/TRADE 2nd meeting). As the ensuing telegram ruefully noted (NABOB 114, 3 October 1945, Docs, 181–3), ‘As the discussions proceeded, [the] Americans seemed to become increasingly aware of logical weaknesses of their position. Clayton indeed admitted that some of our arguments had great force. But this produced no modification of their demand which they frankly defended on grounds of the political atmosphere of the American scene. To this of course we retorted that our own political difficulties were no less great and our economic position one of much greater difficulty.’ (Given the criticism Clayton faced from the American press and Congress before and after the loan negotiations [Gardner 1956, 196–9; Garwood 1958, 19–40], he probably had a valid point.) For the next few days the committee turned to the other issues. After a quiet day, thanks to a cancelled meeting, on 3 October, Lionel was called to the telephone from breakfast the next morning. His sister phoned from Philadelphia with the disturbing news that their father had been knocked off his bicycle and seriously injured. His life was not in danger but he faced a lengthy convalescence. Lionel could not help thinking that if it had not been for the petrol shortage, which would be prolonged if the UK did not get adequate postwar financial assistance, his seventy-seven-year-old father would not have been riding a bicycle (WD, 226). The accident had in fact happened several days earlier, but even Iris and Anne and Richard had not known about it for twenty-four hours, as they were at Tor Cottage for a week, preparing for the final move back to London by digging up favourite plants to replant at Meadway Close. (As Anne told her grandfather on 27 September, her father had ‘taken the garden firmly in hand and orders us all about in the most professional way. We had just planted or rather sown the back lawn when he left . . . ’) Lionel immediately wrote to his father telling him that ‘we have been plunged into a maelstrom of activity: committee meetings, drafting, cabling from very early in the morning until very late at night. I do not know in the least what is going to be the outcome of our labours: but if we fail it will not be for lack of blood tears & sweat.’ The morning’s COM/TRADE meeting concerned subsidies and agriculture. Enfield made what Lionel thought was a ‘very helpful statement’ comparing the agricultural problems of the US and the UK and the extent to which the former were provided for, and the latter were not, in the US draft convention. He concluded that under the convention, ‘with tariffs as the only means of long-term protection, with domestic subsidies limited in duration, and with export subsidies permitted in the case of commodities in world surplus, it would be impossible for the U.K. to achieve the

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aims of its agricultural policy at all’, a politically unacceptable outcome. Lionel was impressed too with the new US Secretary of Agriculture, Clinton Anderson, who ‘showed more candour than most agricultural ministers of my acquaintance’. When both sides had made it clear they required some agricultural protection, if only for political reasons, Clayton suggested that a small group produce a suitable text, which Enfield and others duly worked out (COM/TRADE – 3rd meeting; NABOB 122, 4 October 1945; WD, 227–8). The small group discussions on matters of commercial policy, unlike those on finance, which Lionel was not attending at this stage, were usually ‘friendly’, sometimes ‘easy going’. Lionel ‘rather enjoyed’ the next formal COM/TRADE meeting on state trading, export taxes and exchange control, where the discussion on export taxes, led by Robbins himself, became ‘highly technical’, prompting Keynes and White to join in (WD, 228–9; COM/TRADE – 4th meeting; NABOB 124, 6 October 1945). A couple of days later the American officials informed Liesching and Robbins that they had accepted the British views on state trading and export taxes, and Lionel was optimistic they would soon reach a compromise on general subsidies and export subsidies (WD, 231). The COM/TRADE meeting on cartels, on which Lionel also led for the British, was more difficult. In his opening remarks Lionel, using the paper on cartels prepared on board ship, criticized the American proposals for assuming US domestic legislation could be replicated in the international field and ignoring the possibilities of conflict with other countries’ laws. He explained that the UK proposal was ‘briefly, to create gradually a body of international case law rather than to set out to establish a statute law’ and suggested a consultative body to receive complaints, investigate and report. Andrew of the Board of Trade then took up the baton and developed the argument in detail (COM/TRADE – 5th meeting). In his telegram the next day (NABOB 142, 9 October 1945) Robbins reported: ‘In the discussion which followed the Americans showed great scepticism concerning the results to be expected from this method. . . . we replied by reversing the argument. It was their method, we contended, that would take time and become bogged down in complexities. . . . At the end of the debate the Americans asked for definite proposals for the amendment of their draft. These we promised to furnish.’5 5

The telegram deliberately omitted an ‘alarming incident’ recorded in his diary (WD, 230– 1), when Keynes had ‘released one of his ironical jibes about American lawyers and rubbed Vinson up the wrong way. . . . Vinson . . . completely lost control of himself and shouted at the top of his voice. Fortunately it proved possible to cut in with a remark which turned the discussion into other channels.’

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When Robbins lunched with Clair Wilcox, the professor of economics at Swarthmore College who was director of the Office of International Trade Policy in the State Department, he thought Wilcox ‘felt we had had the better of the argument recently’ if only because in the plenary sessions the British had the advantage of arguing with American officials who were not properly briefed. As Lionel commented in his diary (WD, 230), ‘This is indeed so. But it was not unintentional.’ The battle royal over cartels involved Andrew, Robbins, Wilcox, Leroy Stinebower, Robert Terrill and John Leddy (WD, 232): We had supplied them beforehand with a draft of the position we should be prepared to accept and they in turn had produced counterproposals. The main point of difference of course was the suggestion that certain cartel practices should be definitely outlawed. We, following our instructions, protested that this involved intolerable difficulties and the danger of the conflict of laws. They not disputing the general reasonableness of our contention yet maintaining that for the sake of the shop window something of the sort was inevitable. All the morning the battle swayed to and fro indecisively. But when we came back from lunch Wilcox produced a redraft which more or less conceded our position. Andrew and I could scarcely believe our eyes. But it was true and after more discussion of an essentially friendly nature we brought away a text which gives us 99 per cent of what we were instructed to ask. We naturally took this with very great reserve, said that we must telegraph home before we could agree to anything which changed our draft which indeed was true. But if the people at home don’t authorise our acceptance of every word we have obtained, they won’t know when they are lucky.6

The penultimate COM/TRADE meeting held on 11 October at the Federal Reserve Board approved the various agreements reached so far (COM/TRADE – 6th meeting). Hawkins, who chaired the meeting, noted that on four of the seven topics still to be formally considered agreed drafts prepared by subcommittees would be discussed that morning, work was proceeding on two others, while ‘preferences would be taken up at a later stage’. The meeting proceeded smoothly, except that Keynes insisted on speaking out of turn on shipping subsidies and had to be diplomatically

6

Bareau recalled (Anglo-American Financial Relations during and since the war, 7.2.51): ‘Keynes jumped in at [one] point and turning to Judge Vinson he said, “Don’t you see our scheme would get things done; yours would merely provide fat livings for a large number of lawyers.” The judge exploded. The position was neatly retrieved from disaster by the soothing eloquence of Professor Robbins. As we left the meeting, the Foreign Office representative said, “That’s put us back three months – and probably a billion dollars.” But Keynes, leaving the Federal Reserve building [sic], did not at all agree. “A most helpful meeting, I thought.”‘ The UK paper was Cartels, Revise, Suggested by U.K. of U.S. draft Chapter V Prevention of Restrictive Business Practices, PROPOSED AMENDMENTS TO COMTRADE, Loan; the telegram NABOB 160, 12 October 1945.

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silenced. At the end Hawkins reiterated that apart from exchange controls and cartels on which work was well advanced, ‘the only remaining issue of critical importance’ was preferences. Afterwards there was ‘A huge lunch . . . Poor conversation, marvellous food’ (WD, 232–3). Lionel found much less enjoyable the meetings with Dominions representatives in Washington (Notes of meetings on 4, 11 October, 4 November, DOMINIONS, Loan). The Australians (without Melville this time) were the most irritating, ‘as usual clamouring for all sorts of information it was not particularly convenient to give’ or ‘surly and unhelpful’, the Canadians the most supportive and helpful (WD, 228, 233). Liesching frequently talked privately with Mike Pearson, now Canadian Ambassador to the US. After the 11 October Dominions meeting Liesching and Robbins went to the Canadian Embassy to drink with Pearson and discuss with him the imperial preference difficulty: Pearson was refreshingly frank. Lionel was now finding life, he told Iris on 12 October, ‘intolerably busy. I get up at 6.30 a.m. and seldom go to bed before midnight. But it is all “work” in the technical sense of the term – arguing, pleading, analysing, drafting. Nothing very colourful in the mode of earlier visits.’ His sprained ankle was also painful, for ‘in spite of using the office car whenever I can, I have to walk about rather more than is good for me’. Instead of spending the weekend of 6–7 October with Caroline and Joe as he hoped, he spent most of it with the rest of the commercial policy team considering the problem of imperial preference and drafting ‘two enormous telegrams’ to London. Caroline came up from Ithan for lunch on Sunday, when they were naturally preoccupied with their father’s accident; she was trying to get a passage to England to see him as soon as possible (WD, 229–30). The next day Lionel wrote to his father, telling him of Caroline’s visit. He also told him: ‘Washington in October is at its best. The weather is reasonably free from rain & heat; and the autumn woods (which run right into the heart of the city) stand out against the clear sky, yellow & brown & livid red with incredible vividness & beauty. I contemplate this scene (as I do now) from my bed room window in the early morning & lament that for the rest of the day I shall be sitting in hot smoke filled rooms desperately trying with tired & over sensitive men to find a solution for one of the most difficult problems which has ever arisen in the course of economic diplomacy.’ The telegrams on imperial preference were sent at the end of that day. The first explained the problem simply (NABOB 132, 9 October, Docs, 200– 3): ‘the Americans are demanding firm assurances from us regarding the reduction and elimination of preferences before they will promise further financial aid. We have told them that their demand in its present form is

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unacceptable; and at the moment debate has been suspended. But this state of affairs cannot last. Events may well take a turn in the next three or four days which if we are in a position to use our opportunities may enable us to find a way out of the deadlock.’ The telegram went on to analyse the American argument (it would be a small economic sacrifice on Britain’s part but a large gesture to Congress) and the British counterargument (it was not purely a matter of economics: the UK should not be ‘forced by reason of financial weakness to abandon even the mere residual tokens of habits which for many symbolise membership of a common community’), on the basis of a note Lionel had written over the weekend to clear his own mind (Draft note on the present position with regard to imperial preference, Imperial Preference Drafts, Loan). In writing that note he had wanted to find some compromise offer that could be made to the Americans in order to persuade them, and particularly Clayton, to retract their extreme demand. He argued that it would be consistent with the obligation of Article VII to offer a reduction of preferences in stages: ‘a reduction of preferences against a reduction of tariffs coupled with an undertaking that at a future date, perhaps three years after ending of the transition period, there should be summoned by the International Trade Organisation a further Conference at which, in return for further reductions of tariffs, there should be further reductions of preference.’ The second telegram asked for authority to proceed on these lines, which were spelled out in some detail (NABOB 133, 9 October 1945, Docs, 205–7). The delegation also asked not to be expected to consult the Dominions representatives in Washington but to leave consultation to the Dominions Office in London. Liesching had been careful not to admit, except to the Canadians, that Clayton had in effect been demanding the end of imperial preference as the price of financial assistance (Cockram to Clutterbuck, 10 October 1945, DO35/1216). When he and Robbins saw Pearson on 11 October, however, they had given him copies of the telegrams to London. They also told him they thought that a Labour government had to be even more careful than a Conservative government not to appear to be abandoning imperial preference. Pearson told them ‘nothing could be more deplorable, from the Canadian point of view’ – the Canadians not being wedded to imperial preference – for the Anglo-American negotiations to break down over imperial preference. ‘Liesching and Robbins, of course, agreed entirely with this. They felt, however, that the Americans were being quite unreasonable in maintaining their present position and that if the British stood firm for a few days, they, the Americans, would modify their position. I hope

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they are right’ (Pearson to Wrong, 12 October 1945, RG25/5773/202(3), LAC). The reply from London did not arrive until the end of the week, but when it came it was ‘very satisfactory’ (WD, 234), permitting the delegation to proceed as they wished; the drafter (presumably Bridges) ‘admire[d] the skill with which you have sought to resolve the deadlock on Imperial Preference’ (BABOON 102, 12 October 1945, Docs, 217–19). Bridges had called a meeting of officials who agreed to advise ministers they should give this permission and Meade and Fleming had briefed their minister (Morrison) accordingly (COD, 151). Waiting for the reply, Lionel took the opportunity to visit Mount Vernon again, this time with Enfield and Liesching (WD, 233–4). It was ‘still as lovely as ever, with its incomparable view over the bend of the Potomac and its atmosphere of a tranquil age with time to plan farms and gardens and to watch in the sun the slow growth of animals and trees. The leaves were beginning to turn and the river was sleepy with sultry mists.’ He enjoyed his postponed visit to Caroline and Joe on the weekend of 13–14 October, telling Iris on 17 October that ‘C. & J. [were] as hospitable as ever – and as kindly’ – Caroline had bought masses of clothes for her brother to take home to Iris and Anne. And, as he proudly reported, he had been buying himself shirts, an inexpensive watch and ‘a very nice raincoat’. On 15 October Halifax and Keynes broached the British ideas on imperial preference in a private meeting with Clayton and Vinson. Clayton rejected them but ‘was not wholly negative’ (NABOB 174, noted in Docs, 219). For the next three days Liesching, Robbins and Shackle discussed them informally with Hawkins and his colleagues in the State Department. ‘The going has been very hard. The State Department officials are without authority from Clayton and Vinson save to attempt to produce an acceptable draft for their consideration. While fully aware of our case and, we suspect, privately completely convinced of its justice and logic, they have had throughout to attempt to draft with an eye on what they could hope to sell to Clayton and Vinson. That in turn has meant their having an eye on what they believed Clayton and Vinson would hope to be able to sell to Congress and the public.’ At last, on the third afternoon, ‘after many soul searching and hesitations’ the Americans produced a draft which was acceptable enough to be forwarded to London. Clayton and Vinson had not yet approved it, referred to as ‘Draft 7’, but the UK delegation wanted to be able to give ‘provisional acceptance’ to the document if they did (NABOB 186, 18 October 1945).7 Lionel wrote 7

There are four drafts dated 17 October in Imperial Preference Drafts, Loan.

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optimistically to Meade on 17 October (American Journals, RP): ‘So far as Commercial Policy is concerned, we have had remarkable success on all fronts except Imperial Preference, where the going is very difficult. I do not despair, however, even here. It is a matter of patience and sufficient ingenuity in drafting.’ Another issue in the commercial policy negotiations which took weeks to resolve was exchange controls and quantitative trade restrictions. Here Lionel enlisted Meade’s help. He had been worried that Keynes – not to mention Eady and others in the Treasury – would insist on asking for the right to use restrictions to an extent greater than the Americans would accept. Hence when Shackle suggested developing the idea of an objective test as it had been broached in the Dominions talks in 1944, which the Treasury had then accepted, Robbins suggested asking Meade for a formula to define the balance-of-payments difficulties under which exchange and/or trade restrictions would be allowed. Keynes agreed and Robbins cabled Meade immediately (WD, 233; NABOB 158, 11 October 1945). This ‘consciously ingenuous request’ set Meade a ‘most exacting’ task, for he had to agree his reply with the Treasury, which took three days of argument mainly with Otto Clarke (COD, 153–4; BABOONs 126 and 127, 16 October 1945). Robbins and Shackle used Meade’s reply in redrafting the relevant paragraphs of the US proposals and put them to the Americans on 20 October (Liesching to Keynes, Quantitative restrictions and exchange control clauses, 19 October 1945, Quotas and exchange controls, Loan). When they saw Hawkins’s redraft a week later they found that it followed their draft except for adding an extra condition: there should be no discrimination in the use of quantitative restrictions during the transition period as well as after it. Liesching and Shackle objected that this would put the UK in an impossibly difficult economic position in the period before sterling was made freely convertible in other currencies. ‘At four successive meetings,’ they afterwards told Lionel, ‘we pressed this point upon him using all available arguments, and warning him that insistence upon his suggestion would render the proposals totally unacceptable to our Ministers, and might indeed wreck the prospects of reaching any agreement upon commercial policy as a whole. . . . [But] we found Hawkins most obstinate and doctrinaire. . . . It was not until after most strenuous and prolonged discussions with Hawkins and some of his colleagues on three separate days and after the exchange of numerous drafts and counter-drafts that, upon Wilcox being brought in, we finally drew from the Americans reluctant acceptance’ of a text now being sent to London (NABOBs 273 and 274, 3 November 1945).

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When Lionel wrote to Meade on 17 October he was ‘much more worried about the finance [negotiations], where all the parties . . . seem to be exhausted and disheartened.’ He told Iris on 21 October: ‘After weeks & weeks of talk everything [is] in a state of solution – no solid crystals deposited anywhere yet awhile – I think we are all feeling the strain. . . . I shall be alright after a day’s idleness; but, as usual on these trips I am worried about Maynard. He begins to have [heart] attacks & his eyes look ashen grey.’ Since the last formal meeting of the combined Finance Committee on 20 September the negotiations had been conducted in private meetings between Halifax and Keynes and Vinson and Clayton. These served only to make it clear that a grant, Keynes’s ‘Justice’, was out and that the terms of a loan so far indicated by Clayton on 9 October constituted a ‘Temptation’ that UK ministers at home determined to resist, while the UK delegation in Washington became more and more desperate to find something better than ‘Starvation Corner’ as they became increasingly aware of the consequences of not receiving any assistance. Although Clayton had indicated that there could be an ‘escape clause’ allowing a waiver of interest payments in difficult circumstances, the Treasury refused to consider it seriously in spite of Meade’s best efforts. Dalton rejected Clayton’s suggestion ($5 billion repayable in fifty annual instalments beginning after five years with an additional annuity of $50m a year to cover interest) as morally and politically unacceptable and instructed Halifax and Keynes to seek a combination of a $2 billion grant and a $3 billion loan. Clayton found this, and Dalton’s alternative of an interestfree loan with repayments of no more than $100m a year beginning in ten years, equally unacceptable (Pressnell 1986, 282–5). On 18 October Keynes tried again, sending an extensive stocktaking telegram (NABOB 177, Docs, 227–33 and JMK 24, 547–55) summarizing the state of the negotiations and American opinion, in an attempt to persuade ministers to be more realistic; drafted after lengthy consultation with Halifax, Brand, Henry Self, Liesching, Robbins and Hall-Patch, it ‘represents our collective opinion.’ On 20 October he reported to Dalton (NABOB 191, Docs, 243–8) another conversation with Clayton and Vinson, whose latest proposals ‘took just the form which . . . we warned you they might, only worse’. There followed ‘a week of suspense’, as Robbins wrote Meade on 26 October (American Journals, RP), while the delegation waited for further instructions from London on the financial side (which they could not expect until after Dalton had delivered his first budget) and for Clayton and Vinson’s reactions on imperial preference. Although Lionel thought that ‘the Americans have undergone a substantial change of heart on this

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matter [imperial preference] . . . there is still a problem of saving their face and London ought not to assume too lightly that there are no limits beyond which we can push them. Certainly, it has been the hardest diplomatic struggle I have been engaged in yet and I am not at all sure that, even if London smiles on the results of our labours, we are out of the wood.’ He was still ‘really worrie[d]’ about the financial negotiations. ‘The date of our return remains as indeterminate as ever.’ Informal discussions on the minor commercial policy issues continued (COM/TRADE 3 (Approved) and COM/TRADE 4 (Approved), 22 October 1945, COMTRADE, Loan). Lionel spent Sunday 21 October ‘more or less in bed to recuperate’ before resuming the usual routine, which he described to his father the next day: ‘We leave the hotel at nine o’clock & thenceforward until dinner time or later we are engaged in meetings or negociations of one kind or another.’ But as well as spending the Sunday ‘doing nothing except compose my mind, read poetry & gaze at this indescribable splendour of red & gold which is . . . blazing in the bank of trees just outside my window’, he saw Jack Viner in the evening (LCR to IER, 21 October). He had contacted him on 1 October, hoping to meet Viner in the three or four weeks he then expected to be there (Viner 22–14). Lionel also gave his father some of his reactions to postwar Washington. Washington is very full & busy. America has sprung back so speedily into peace time habits that apart from butter rationing & some occasional shortage of meat, you would not think there had been a war at all. . . . Prices are up – quite considerably as compared with last year & in many respects living is fantastically dear compared with our standards. But if you have the cash & the place seems full of those who have, it is a middle class paradise – which, in many respects, is very agreable. After five years deprivation it is restful to move about among well dressed & prosperous looking people.

On Friday afternoon (26 October) Liesching, Robbins and Shackle were summoned to a meeting with Wilcox and Hawkins (Tariffs and preferences, 26 October 1945, Imperial preference drafts, Loan). In Liesching’s words (NABOB 229, 28 October 1945): On our arrival it was plain to us that the Americans were in a state of emotional excitement suggestive of extreme elation. When we were assembled round the table, Wilcox said that, although he was not yet in a position to give final clearance to Draft 7, he now had a reasonable assurance of its acceptability to Clayton and Vinson. . . . When the conversation became more informal, the reason for the excitement of the Americans became clearer. It appears that they had had a very stormy session at the U.S. Treasury with Clayton and Vinson and that they had only gained their point

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after a tremendous struggle. ‘My God, I was glad to get out of that room’, said one of them. ‘I was afraid every minute that they would go back on what we had wrung out of them. I wish I could give you a blow by blow account of the match’.

The three Englishmen hid their own excitement, ‘express[ing] interest but . . . indicating that, great as their [the Americans’] political difficulties might be, they must realise that it was possible that the British difficulties would be greater’. Indeed, Cripps’s response (BABOON 157, 27 October 1945, Docs, 262– 7) was to suggest Robbins be flown home to explain the compromise to himself and other ministers. The Dominions Office had been consulting the Dominions, and, as Meade shrewdly commented in his diary, ‘The Labour Ministers [have] discovered the Empire, . . . helped by a well-timed telegram from Australia who argued that we should be prepared to contemplate the absence of dollar assistance and rely on the sterling area’ rather than reducing, let alone eliminating, imperial preferences (McKenzie 2002, 147– 50; COD, 165). Dalton’s thoroughly unhelpful response to Keynes’s telegrams arrived the next day. Harmer and Lee took the first telegram to Keynes at the Statler, where Lionel joined them. Keynes took it ‘reasonably calmly’ but when the second arrived later, Harmer found him ‘white with rage and talking about resigning’. But Halifax was in New York that day and nothing much could be done except to summon him back for a meeting of the whole delegation on Sunday afternoon (Harmer Diary, quoted by Moggridge 1992, 806–7; WD, 237). Harmer recorded the meeting in his diary (quoted in part by Skidelsky 2000, 429): We were all there – H.E. [His Excellency, ie Halifax], R.H.B., M., Liesching, Robbins, H.P., Frank, Henry Self, etc. M. had thought it all out very well and after writing and destroying one or two vitriolic drafts produced a very good one: good tempered but quite merciless in pointing out where London had gone wrong. Some discussion of tactics followed: London had suggested two alternatives, A. which though not silly had little chance of acceptance, and B. . . . which was lunatic and not on the map. M. was anxious to go straight ahead with A. merely pointing out to London that B. wasn’t a starter. We talked him out of this, and persuaded him to give London at least a chance of second thoughts. . . . Finally we went through my draft [of another telegram] with Lionel, who leaves for London tonight and therefore needed all possible briefing. M., R.H.B., Lionel and I stayed to tea with H.E. and Lady H.8 8

Dalton’s telegrams were BABOONs 155 and 156, 27 October 1945, the reply NABOB 230, 28 October 1945 (Docs, 255–61 and 269–71).

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That evening Lionel was driven to Baltimore for the flight to London, by bomber, the next day (WD, 237). Hall-Patch left the same way the following day. London’s alternative A comprised a loan of $2.5 billion at 1 per cent for fifty years with an option on a further interest-free loan of $2 billion as backing for an offer to sterling area countries to make sterling freely convertible for current transactions, in return for which the UK would attempt to write off some of the sterling balances, seek Parliamentary approval for the Bretton Woods Agreements and (assuming the commercial policy negotiations ended successfully) take part in the proposed international trade conference. The Treasury, where Eady in particular was influenced by Cobbold, now Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, who strongly disliked the idea of borrowing at all, had again rejected the idea of a waiver clause. Plan B was to borrow $2.5 billion on commercial terms with no commitments beyond servicing the debt, commercial terms being 2 per cent for fifty years (Pressnell 1986, 293–6). While Robbins was en route to London Dalton received Keynes’s telegram; he cabled back: ‘Try Alternative A for all you are worth.’ He said he could contemplate paying 2 per cent interest on the $2.5 billion as long as the further $2 billion for the sterling area was interest-free (BABOON 158, Docs, 271–2). The delegation decided to do nothing but wait until Robbins and Hall-Patch had had a chance to talk to Dalton and other ministers. As well as advising Cripps on the commercial policy proposals and trying to explain the American attitude on financial assistance to Dalton, Robbins hoped to persuade Bridges and Eady of the need for a waiver clause in any loan agreement. He also hoped to defuse another potential problem which had recently arisen between Keynes and the Treasury. As Meade described it (COD, 164), when Keynes had sent a telegram indicating what he intended to offer with respect to the sterling area, Cobbold and Eady ‘threw a fit saying that we could in effect give the Americans no assurances about getting our sterling creditors to scale down their balances or about the amount to which we could release sterling balances for conversion into dollars. Keynes considers that he has definitely been led up the garden path on this, that in accord with his instructions he has made some verbal assurances on this to the Americans, and that Eady is now going back on him.’ On 31 October, back in London, Lionel first talked to Helmore at the Board of Trade, who was ‘gloom[y]’, learned that the Dominions Office officials were anxious about the Dominions’ probable reaction to the proposals on preferences, and had a ‘stormy meeting with W.E.’ at the Treasury. The next day he did better: in the morning he managed to convince P.A.

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Clutterbuck of the Dominions Office of the acceptability of the preference proposals and in the afternoon – after lunching with Eady and Bridges to discuss the matter of a waiver clause for a loan – persuaded Cripps, for whom he spent the following morning drafting memoranda and telegrams with Helmore and Clutterbuck (WD, 237; BABOON 172, 1 November 1945). Helmore reported to Liesching in Washington on 2 November (ASKEW X 259, AVIA38/12) that ‘Robbins is doing his stuff.’ Meade, who joined in the drafting of the ‘explanation of preferences’, an interpretative document to be issued with the preference proposals, commented more strongly (COD, 166): Apart from confirming in the Treasury the need for a waiver, Lionel Robbins has done heroic work on imperial preferences. Clutterbuck . . . has been persuaded that with minor amendments to Draft 7 (which has been cabled to Washington and agreed by the Americans) [BABOONs 182 and 183] plus a gloss on the interpretation of Draft 7 which we shall be able to publish here and in the Dominions without fear of American contradiction, the present text is one which the Dominions Office can get past the Dominions. . . . The atmosphere has thus completely changed in the course of a day or two.

On 2 November Robbins saw Dalton, for whom he had brought a personal letter from Keynes with a pointed warning that the Labour government would not want to fall into another financial crisis like the last Labour government. Dalton had come to think that, as he later put it (1962, 77–8), ‘Keynes [was] becoming rather sulky and . . . that, as must always be the case, following such negotiations, those who represent us out there and we here at home have drifted into a state of mutual incomprehension.’ Although Lionel was still finding Eady’s attitude ‘pathetic’ (a milder view of Eady than Meade’s), he was able to telephone his anxious colleagues that evening (WD, 237). ‘In the evening,’ Harmer recorded in his diary, ‘a telephone message from Lionel Robbins – very cryptic of course because anyone can listen in to the transatlantic phone, but he said “the ice was beginning to break” in London; also a longish telegram to M. from Eady [BABOON 172 presumably] about the sterling area arrangements which gave rather the same indication. So we ended the day much more cheerful than we had started it.’ Lionel was probably less cheerful, although he was pleased to hear of Liesching’s and Shackle’s victory over quantitative restrictions with the Americans. His sprained ankle meant he had to get around Whitehall with a stick (information from Kit Jones, then Miss Howell, Meade’s personal assistant since July). He was very upset to receive a letter from Carr-Saunders reporting on 31 October that the LSE governors were complaining at the

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continued absence of both Plant and Robbins: they ‘are not unaware of the importance of the work which you are doing, but they would ask to give very careful consideration to the strong claims which the School has upon you at this very critical point in its history . . . [and] have asked me to enquire whether you would be willing to return to the School in the very near future’. As Lionel replied on 2 November, what could he say that he had not already said many times of his intention to return as soon as the Washington negotiations were over – or did the governors want him to resign? He received a very apologetic letter from the director (5 November), who wanted to talk to him before he left London again (Correspondence, RP). On 7 November Carr-Saunders reported to the Professorial Council that there was still ‘no definite date for the return of Professor Plant and Professor Robbins’. Robbins called on Bevin on the Saturday and saw Cripps again on the Monday before the crucial ministerial meeting on Monday night. In between he and Iris dined with the Hayeks on Saturday evening and he visited his father at Hollycroft on Sunday before more drafting until midnight (WD, 237; Hayek to Machlup, 9 November 1945, Machlup 43–15). The ministerial meeting was, according to Dalton’s diary (quoted by Dalton 1962, 78–9), ‘another long go, from 10 p.m. till after midnight, . . . Robbins was there, just back from Washington and, in the end, we agreed on the line to be taken in the latest instructions to Keynes and Co. But it was felt that we should put this to the Cabinet and get it through before Attlee left for Washington for atomic talks with Truman. Therefore, today, we had two sessions of the Cabinet, from 12.15 to 1.30 and again from 4.30 to 7. It was heavy work. . . . In the end it was agreed that we should instruct our delegates, as proposed, with no modification whatever from our plans of early this morning.’ According to the official minutes (GEN89/5th meeting, CAB78/37), Robbins stressed the ‘complete contrast’ he had observed between the attitudes of officials in the Administration and those of Congress and public opinion. He had described it to his father on 22 October: ‘I don’t much like the mood of Congress. The sense of high endeavour which you get from so many of the officials seems conspicuously absent there where the chief sentiment seems to be the unedifying fear of being made a “sucker” by someone or other – especially the wretched British. However, don’t let me become a critic; our people are so apt to see the mote in other eyes and I am sure that we are not a particularly inspiring picture ourselves just at the moment.’ At the meeting ministers agreed to abandon the impractical Alternative B, to allow the delegation discretion in trying for Alternative A with 2 per cent interest if necessary and a suitable waiver clause. On the arrangements

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to be made with the sterling area, which had occasioned dispute between Keynes and the Treasury conducted in acrimonious telegrams between him and Eady, they agreed ‘to use the assistance for the progressive removal of discrimination and to seek a contribution to the solution of the whole situation, including writing down of Sterling Balances by voluntary agreement with each creditor’. The delegation was informed of these decisions immediately (Pressnell 1986, 296–8; BABOONs 205 and 206, 5 and 6 November 1945, Docs, 289–92).9 The Cabinet approved not only the financial proposals in Dalton’s memorandum but also Cripps’s memorandum on the commercial policy proposals. This noted all the main points agreed with the Americans on procedure, imperial preference, state trading, subsidies, quantitative restrictions, cartels and agriculture, and included the preferences formula and the ‘explanation’ of it as well as the revised version of the US proposal to establish an International Trade Organization (CM(45)49th and 50th Conclusions, CAB128/2; CP(45)269, Memorandum by the President of the Board of Trade, Docs, 292–9). The last included a chapter on commodity arrangements, which had, in Liesching’s words at a meeting with the Dominions representatives on 4 November, ‘been left late since it was not a vital point of controversy’ and agreed while Robbins was in London. As Liesching had promised at the Dominions meeting, the Dominions were informed after the Cabinet meetings, albeit in more general terms. They were also told the Americans were intending to publish the proposals at the end of the coming week (BABOON 209, 6 November 1945). While the Cabinet deliberated Robbins and Hall-Patch left London for Washington. With his sprained ankle the flight was ‘incredibly uncomfortable and tiring’, but there was ‘general jubilation’ when he reported to a delegation meeting within two hours of his arrival (LCR to Meade, 13 November 1945, American Journals, RP; WD, 238). He told Iris on 8 November that they had flown from Blackbush airport west of London to Prestwick, from there to Montreal, where ‘there was a special plane waiting which we got into without delay . . . so that by 4 o’clock in the afternoon I was having eggs & bacon after a bath in my own room in the [Shoreham] Hotel.’ According to Harmer (cited by Skidelsky 2002, 430), ‘Lionel Robbins and H.P. turned up about 5 having left London at 11 a.m. yesterday morning, and consequently very tired. But we had a talk and they gave us all the news.’ The news was 9

Harmer recorded: ‘Nothing from London till latish when telegrams arrived giving us a pretty well complete free hand (subject to final Cabinet approval tonight) and we did some hurried drafting of papers for M. to present to V. and C. tomorrow on the main financial proposals.’

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not all encouraging – for instance, ‘Lionel’s description of them [the Labour ministers] all spending endless time discussing the theory of nationalization and doing nothing much about immediate problems . . . [while] most of the senior officials are working to the verge of collapse.’ But even before he turned up at the Willard Liesching consulted him over a new problem on the commercial policy front: Liesching had learned that morning that Clayton took exception to one passage in the ‘explanation’ of preferences, which mentioned the need for the ‘consent’ of third parties (in practice the Dominions) (WD, 238; NABOB 308, 8 November 1945). The next morning they went to see Clayton’s officials. At the State Department, according to NABOBs 308 and 312, ‘We . . . protested at great length . . . that this [objection] rests on a misconception of the process envisaged and that the idea of consent is integral at once to the conception of a bargain and to the way we run affairs in the Commonwealth; and Robbins . . . was able to impress upon them the insurmountable difficulties which would be created in London if they persisted in their attitude.’ The American officials said Clayton was ‘obdurate’ on this point. But Liesching was equally stubborn, and he and Robbins departed saying that they would report a ‘complete deadlock’ to London but hoped the Americans ‘would have something more to say to us after an interval for reflection’. Wilcox replied he did not think they would. Fortunately this ‘Day of Crisis’ had an ‘Afternoon denouement’ (WD, 238). Wilcox telephoned and asked Liesching and Robbins to come and see him, when the American officials reported they had seen their ministers who had agreed not to press for a major modification after all. Lionel told Meade (13 November, American Journals, RP) that he thought this was ‘very largely [due] to the instrumentality of Clair Wilcox who, throughout the negotiations, has been a tower of friendliness and good sense’. From the outset he had been impressed with Wilcox (WD, 231): ‘He is businesslike, firm and courteous. Not so lovable as Harry Hawkins, but certainly of greater stature.’ Lionel had been uncertain whether he needed to return. After this flare up he was glad he had. He was then drawn fully into the financial talks. By this time the original American deadline for completion of both commercial and financial talks had been passed but the COM/TRADE report, cleared with Clayton, was ready to be presented to a formal plenary meeting (NABOB 329, 13 November 1945). He told Meade: But alas, my labours have not ended with the lull on the commercial policy side. M. has insisted upon my joining him in the intimate huddles into which he enters

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with Clayton and Vinson on the financial side almost every day. The experience is interesting but depressing. Much labour and anxiety have brought it about that M’s nerves are now very frayed. He looks ghastly and ashen under the eyes and is none too inclined to take patiently any behaviour which he regards as unreasonable. Moreover, his methods of procedure and preparation of his case are as disorderly and eccentric as L[iesching]’s are orderly and precise. For some reason or other, he treats me with great gentleness and friendliness; and I am continually being called in by the others to make last minute appeals to tone down some telegram or other or to attempt to alter his plans in this way or that. All of which is very gratifying in its way; but, having regard to the magnitude of the issues involved, is more than a little worrying at times. . . . Indeed I don’t think I have ever been quite so worried about public affairs as I have been in the last few days.

He admitted this to Iris. ‘I am beginning to feel very tired,’ he wrote on 12 November, ‘& the real anxiety . . . which I suppress during waking hours, takes its revenge in restless nights & unquiet sleep. . . . The Indian Summer here is now past & the weather has become typical November . . . there is fog around & a temperature not greater than you would expect at home. I shall always remember this autumn in Washington with its incredible beauty of leaves & sky & the tension of the nerves & the tautness of the muscles as one sped in one’s car to important & critical meetings. I suppose that had I been free of care and at liberty to enjoy it I should have noticed its poignancy much less.’ Lionel joined the financial talks just at the point the Americans rejected the proposals the British government had agreed to make while he was in London. There followed not the expected week of formal meetings but a month of increasingly difficult informal ones. Halifax and Keynes had put Alternative A to Clayton and Vinson the morning after the crucial ministerial meeting; it was not well received, especially the idea of an interest-free credit for the purpose of making sterling convertible (NABOBs 295 and 296, 7 November 1945, Docs, 300–4): ‘Although they did not . . . reject any clause out of hand, we were left without any confidence that they would accept . . . [W]e yielded no ground . . . But the wind was . . . taken out of some of our sails by their strong reaction against directly associating any part of the credit with the sterling area arrangements.’ After consulting their Top Committee, they did reject it. Hall-Patch gave a colleague at home his first succinct reaction (Docs, 314): ‘I have not the full details, but the Americans, as we expected here, will simply not look at any portion of the credit being interest free. That cock simply will not fight; . . . . Now we are thrown back on the “other alternative”. But the field is not so clear as it was. The Americans apparently want us to give sterling full Bretton Woods convertibility by June 1946 as a counterpart of any financial assistance. This is a bitter pill.’ Their

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counterproposals on 9 November (which were still informal) were a $4 or possibly $4.5 billion loan with a five years moratorium followed by a fifty years annuity of $31,800 for each $1m of the original loan; this could be described at a loan at 2 per cent but the moratorium reduced the interest to 1.6 per cent. They included a revised deferment clause, which instead of merely waiving the interest when an objective criterion of balance-ofpayments difficulties was satisfied would defer both interest and instalment of capital until the end of the period, but there was an additional condition relating to the level of UK monetary reserves. The US also asked in effect that the UK make sterling freely convertible by 30 June 1946, thus surrendering its transitional period rights under the Bretton Woods Agreements. On this point, Lionel wrote (Draft NABOB, 9 November 1945, marked by LCR ‘Draft not sent’, Washington File No 4 Finance Drafts, Loan): ‘After a brief glance at this paper we replied that it was entirely unacceptable and that we were not willing even to discuss it. After an outburst by Keynes that they were asking what was both impracticable and unreasonable and of a character not to be raised at the eleventh hour, Vinson and Clayton who seemed to have very limited knowledge either of the nature of our difficulties or of the contents of their experts’ paper, seemed not unwilling to beat a retreat in the face of so violent a reaction on our part.’ One reaction, which was possibly Robbins’s and may have been Keynes’s, was to recommend acceptance, as long as some objectionable features of the deferment clause were removed (for instance, that deferment would be at the discretion of the US President) and there was a less definite date for full liberalization of the sterling area. But there was a ‘struggle’ within the delegation about the telegram to be sent to London (WD, 238). Robbins’s draft was not sent and that sent on 11 November (NABOB 324, Docs, 315–16) reported, after giving the monetary terms, that the delegation was engaged in detailed technical discussions with the Americans, in which ‘several tiresome and difficult points have been raised’ and was hoping on Monday or Tuesday (12 or 13 November) to be able to send ‘a revised text of the technical clauses which the Americans might accept’. Lionel was involved in drafting these clauses,10 but by 13 November, when he wrote to Meade (American Journals, RP), We have had a tremendous argument about the waiver, and . . . Harry White has been very fertile of useful ideas. But the critical question of objectivity (i.e. absence of Presidential discretion) has not yet been cleared up and it is quite possible that 10

Heads of financial agreement, undated (with corrections by LCR), Heads of financial agreement, Second Draft 12.11.45 (marked ‘LCR’), Heads of financial agreement, Second Draft 12.11.45 (with corrections by LCR) and Heads of financial agreement, Third draft, 12 November 1945, Washington File No 4 Finance Drafts, Loan.

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within the next 24 hours we may be confronted with a major crisis. If that goes well there still remain our rights in the transition period. . . . The point at issue is the right to discriminate by exchange restrictions or quantitative import control. Their contention is that these rights which are embodied in Bretton Woods . . . and in the draft I.T.O. convention, are rights which they quite understand us wishing to retain if our financial position looks precarious. They urge however that if we have sufficient financial support, we ought not to wish to avail ourselves of them; and they go on to point out – with very great force in my private judgment – that in fact, they mean very little so far as our reserve position is concerned. In all this I cannot help thinking that there is great logical force in their request. But it comes very late in the day and I suspect may be distasteful to W.E.

Harmer and Lee agreed with Lionel and so, now, did Keynes. ‘But I suspect that he himself has not always talked like this – as witness his claims at his last interview with Ministers [in August] – and as usual it may be harder to de-hypnotize folks at home than it was to hypnotize them in the first place.’ He added that he had discovered the telegram Eady sent from London while Robbins was there authorizing the delegation to make a concession if necessary. The existence of the sterling area, and the accumulated sterling balances, bedevilled the negotiations. Keynes had claimed to ministers on 23 August that if the US gave $4 or 5 billion then the UK could go to its sterling area creditors and ask them to cancel part of the balances and agree to release of the rest in instalments; at the same time currently earned sterling could be made convertible into any currency without discrimination from, say, the end of 1946. When he first presented his preferred solution of the UK postwar financial problem to the Combined Finance Committee on 19 September, he said that its aim was ‘the complete elimination of the discriminatory elements in the sterling area system at any rate so far as current transactions were concerned’ and that currently earned sterling and a portion of the existing balances could be made freely convertible from the end of 1946. Vinson and Clayton had wanted to know the proportions in which the sterling balances would be immediately made available, gradually released and written off (JMK 24, 488–90). Pressed again at the next meeting to provide numbers, Keynes mentioned a reduction to $8 billion of an assumed total of $12 billion at the end of 1946 and a possible release of $800m. At that meeting he also stated the amount of assistance sought from the Americans as $5 billion plus whatever was needed to pay for items ordered under lend-lease but not delivered or used by the end of the war (JMK 24, 492–3; $12 billion was approximately equal to £3 billion at the current exchange rate of 4.03 $/£). In October Harry White came up with his own ingenious plan for dealing with the balances: $2 billion would be unblocked but sterling area countries would be required to hold these as

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minimum working balances, $4 billion would be written off and $5 billion funded and gradually repaid in instalments, and the US would then offer to buy the funded balances at a discount, thus making them immediately available for use; the US would also lend the UK $3 billion to cover its current balance-of-payments deficit. Lionel thought this ‘a grand plan’, and Brand and others of the delegation were also enthusiastic, but it received no support from the American or the British Treasury (JMK 24, 531–5; LCR to Meade, 11 October 1945, T230/174; Pressnell 1986, 288–92). Keynes’s original scheme also received little attention as the negotiations over the amount and terms of any loan became acrimonious. When Lionel went to London one of his instructions was to make sure that the government was prepared to offer to make sterling convertible (for current transactions) from the end of 1946 as well as to try to negotiate reductions of the accumulated balances. He thought he had received the requisite assurance from Eady in the telegram sent to Keynes. The day that Lionel wrote to Meade had begun quietly, but in the evening there came one of the episodes in which Lionel had to intervene with Keynes on behalf of their colleagues. Maurice Bridgeman of the Petroleum Division of the Ministry of Fuel and Power, in Washington for the renegotiation of the 1944 Oil Agreement (see Chapter 15), pointed out to the delegation that if the UK offered not to discriminate against dollar imports that would take away the right allowed in the new Oil Agreement to discriminate against dollar imports of petroleum in the transition period. When Bridgeman also noted that this would be a costly concession, Keynes tried to claim Bridgeman was wrong (WD, 238–9 and 244). Robbins tactfully pointed out that while the Chancellor had agreed to offering non-discrimination in the transition period he had done so ‘on the understanding that nondiscrimination means the test of commercial considerations only, that we are free to make long-term contracts with regular suppliers, and that subject to the principle of commercial considerations we can have as much state purchasing of imports as we wish’; London might usefully be reminded of this (LCR to Keynes, 13 November 1945, Oil, Loan). The next morning, after ‘a night’s reflection’ had reluctantly persuaded Lionel that Bridgeman might be right, he tried to defuse the issue by arguing that even if Bridgeman was right the concession might nonetheless be worth making. ‘To get things into proper perspective,’ he wrote in a memorandum to his colleagues (Oil, 14 November 1945, Oil, Loan), ‘it should be realized that what is at stake is our rights during the transition period.’ In that period it ought to be possible by means of, say, an oil import board, to minimize the use of dollars for oil imports; even if it were not and ‘we . . . have to face the unpleasant alternatives of adding appreciably to our foreign expenditure or insisting

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on exceptions which may well lose us the loan, I am quite clear which risk I should take’. The delegation could perhaps appeal to the Americans to keep the special provision with respect to oil. But if they decided not to do this, they would have to be ‘very explicit’ with London in pointing out the expensive consequences of non-discrimination in the transitional period: ‘London’s answer then presumably will be to tell the Americans that we cannot agree to make the sacrifice of our transitional privileges. The Americans may then realize that the sacrifice demanded is more serious than they thought. But they may not. Then we shall be right up against it.’ After another evening meeting (WD, 239) Keynes agreed London could be told that the concession would be expensive only with respect to oil imports and would not be unduly expensive if the amount and terms of the loan were satisfactory (NABOBs 353 and 358, 18 November 1945, Docs, 329–31). Then the US draft financial agreement arrived (U.S. Draft memorandum of understanding on financial matters, 14 November 1945, Washington File No 4 Finance Drafts, Loan). It contained several objectionable features relating both to the deferment clause (although Presidential discretion had gone) and to the sterling area arrangements, and it included the requirement that sterling be freely convertible for current transactions no later than 31 December 1946. Among the objectionable features were an escape clause providing for the deferment, not the waiving, of annual payments of interest and capital, a criterion relating the use of the deferment clause to the level of UK monetary reserves as well as to the state of the balance of payments, extension of the early convertibility commitments to countries outside the sterling area with which the UK had made wartime bilateral payments agreements, and a requirement that any acceleration of the rate of release of sterling balances would necessitate an acceleration of the repayment of the US loan. Harmer (quoted in Moggridge 1992, 809) found ‘M. in bed looking very shaken and white, and all he could say is that we had better pack up and go home.’ Keynes’s health was seriously deteriorating, as Lionel was in a close position to observe because his ankle was now so swollen that he had to share Keynes’s car for even the shortest journeys (Robbins 1971a, 209). The negotiations became a nightmare. Halifax took charge of the situation at the COM/FIN meeting to discuss the American draft, the first formal meeting since 20 September, stating that the British could not discuss the draft and could only send it to London for instructions. Lionel noted: Ambassador at meeting. M. holds forth. Consternation. Americans – Eccles’ (WD, 239). According to Harmer (partly quoted in Moggridge 1992, 809 and Skidelsky 2000, 434), ‘The meeting was fixed for 3 p.m. [15 November] No longer an informal

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meeting like all the earlier ones with V[inson] and C[layton] but a full dress meeting of the Finance Cttee, in Vinson’s room. So we all went along. H.E., M., R.H.B., L.C.R., H.P. and myself, with Frank as Secretary. . . . H.E. said his piece extremely well – with great dignity and effect but perfect good temper. It caused something of a stir. V. and C. said at once it was a draft put forward for discussion, not an ultimatum, and urged us to discuss it. So having started by saying we could not do so we proceeded to for some two hours. This made clear that [Marriner] Eccles [Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board] was the real trouble: and there were some heated passages. M. not at all in good form. . . .

The Americans decided to hold another formal meeting after further technical discussions. The latter were ‘very trying . . . with M. almost uncontrollable. Very painful at times and it didn’t do any good’, according to Harmer, but they did produce slightly revised American drafts.11 And commercial policy became a concern again (WD, 238–9). In London the Dominions Office was receiving the predictable responses in its consultations with the Dominions. Australia in particular was making a ‘frightful nuisance’ of itself by refusing to accept any commitments to trade liberalization in advance of the projected international trade conference, and drumming up support for its position from New Zealand and South Africa (COD, 171; McKenzie 2002, 151–3). In Washington Liesching and his colleagues were anxious to get final clearance from London to hold the last formal COM/TRADE committee meeting to approve its report. As he explained to Helmore (NABOB 348, 17 November), because ‘Com Top Committee will have to act quickly if and when the Financial agreement is “in the bag”’ it needed to have the COM/TRADE report. Having already had one postponement of the meeting, he requested clearance in time for a meeting on Monday 19 November. Cripps was prepared to go ahead without the agreement of the Dominions, but not before he had sought and obtained some revisions in the wording of the COM/TRADE report. This necessitated another postponement of the final COM/TRADE meeting (NABOBs 366, 367, 19 November 1945). On Sunday morning, 18 November, the delegation completed eight telegrams in which they sent the US proposals to London along with detailed statements of the difficulties (NABOBs 355–62, Docs, 323–35). In the afternoon Lionel, suffering from migraine, tried to get some sleep (WD, 239). 11

US Draft memorandum of understanding on financial matters, 16 November, Frank Lee to Frank Coe (US Treasury), 17 November 1945, and US Draft memorandum of understanding on financial matters (Revise as approved by U.S. Top Committee, November 17th, 1945) (marked ‘LCR’), Washington File No 4 Finance Drafts, Loan.

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The next few days, though days of suspense, were slightly less tense, judging from both Robbins’s notes and Harmer’s diary. On Monday, after an informal meeting on the COM/TRADE report (COM/TRADE 10, COMTRADE, Loan) in the morning, a formal COM/FIN meeting was a ‘long session with Americans drawn into talk after all. Best afternoon’ (WD, 239). As Harmer described it, ‘Again a full committee. Again H.E. took charge and did it well. But it was less dramatic and more temperate. Not that we got very much closer together. Indeed one point – the question of the stg. area arrangements – looks like wrecking the whole business. . . . M. was very good – much more himself – and though Eccles was again incredibly trying it all passed off fairly smoothly. We are to send further telegrams to London tomorrow’. According to the official minutes (COM/FIN4th meeting, NABOB 382 and FRUS 1945 6, 162–7), Vinson ‘felt that definite progress had been made in the discussions at the technical level’ and was ‘hopeful’ that further discussions would reduce the differences between the two sides before a final document was sent to London. Halifax, on the other hand, admitted the delegation would first have to report the differences to London and he ‘feared that on some points it might prove impossible to come to a closer understanding until the views of the authorities in London were known’. In the meantime, however, he suggested they could discuss some of the difficulties, which they did. The minutes also indicate the way Lionel was involved at this stage of the negotiations. On the amount of the loan, when Eccles asked whether the British had taken account of the assistance they might receive from other countries, ‘Lord Keynes and Professor Robbins replied that due account had been taken of such assistance. A sum of $4 billion represented the minimum amount of new money which the U.K. would require from the U.S. – after taking into account assistance from other countries – in order to assume the obligations of multilateral trade and to maintain adequate reserves, having regard to the magnitude of the estimated cumulative deficit in the U.K. balance of payments.’ Lionel also intervened on the matter of the waiver, pointing out that he was ‘confident that the authorities in London would take the line that the inclusion in the agreement of any criterion directly based on reserves would be bound to create suspicion and misunderstanding between the two countries . . . ’ On the provision that if the UK increased releases of sterling balances to more than $175m a year it would also have to accelerate its loan repayments to the US, ‘Lord Keynes and Professor Robbins said that they fully appreciated the spirit in which the revised U.S. draft had been put forward, but they feared that the formula proposed . . . was not acceptable. The U.K. would not in practice be able to increase its payments

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on the U.S. credit and the figure of $175 million . . . would therefore be regarded as constituting a “ceiling”’ on the amount of the sterling balances the UK would be able to repay to its sterling area creditors. ‘There was of course no divergence of interest in this matter between the U.S. and the U.K. It was in the interests of the U.K. that the amounts paid to the sterling creditors should be kept as low as possible. But for the U.K. to predetermine that issue in an agreement with a third party before any negotiation whatever had been begun with the countries concerned was a course which was quite out of the question: it would inevitably prejudice the negotiations and might jeopardise more fundamentally relations within the Commonwealth.’ After the COM/FIN meeting Keynes told Lionel that he was exhausted; and after the telegrams were despatched the following day there was ‘Frightful gloom’ (NABOBS 370, 371, 372, 373, Docs, 335–48; WD, 239). Lionel wrote Iris in this mood the following day: ‘We meet & we telegraph home & we meet again, but so far to no purpose. . . . ’ He was seriously worried about Keynes. He found his behaviour in the financial meetings frustrating: ‘you often watch what seem to you priceless opportunities vanishing for want of an understanding how they are to be handled. I am quite sure that L[iesching] and I could have brought off an agreement on finance by now, whereas I am [not] sure that Maynard will bring off anything at all. . . . His state now is truly pathetic. He has confided to me that he feels at the end of his reserves. . . . What happens if he goes sick I don’t know. I believe the rest of us could finish up quite satisfactorily. But whether we should be allowed to is doubtful.’ There were few breaks for relaxation. He had talked to his former boss John Anderson at a cocktail party at the Embassy on 12 November (Anderson was in Washington with the Prime Minister for talks with President Truman on atomic energy) and he dined with Aaron Director and his wife on 21 November. The Keyneses celebrated his forty-seventh birthday on 22 November (which happened to be Thanksgiving Day) with lunch at the Statler. There were also lunches with Gram Swing, the US journalist and broadcaster, on 23 November, Walter Lippman on 26th, the economist Selig Perlman on 27 November. On the Monday after Thanksgiving he and Liesching threw a party for a few American and Canadian officials, including Wilcox and Pearson (WD, 238–40; LCR to IER, 26 November 1945). He lunched one day with Walter Gardner of the Federal Reserve Board, who told Per Jacobsson a few months later (Jacobsson Diary, 23 March 1946): ‘Keynes had probably been the best man the British could send. . . . [But] he often was too sharp . . . too impatient and showed it too much, which irritated many . . . [and] he was thought to be too clever, so

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that he really did not gain the confidence of the other side. Robbins had been over; he was not so brilliant, but he could really convince by giving an impression of transparent honesty and frankness. Robbins had done very well as an assistant to Keynes in the debt negotiations.’ Lydia wrote on 29 April 1946 (Correspondence, RP): ‘In that long struggle how splendid you were, he loved to be in contact with you, remember how we lunched at the Statler, on your birthday?’ Lionel had originally hoped to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner with Caroline and Joe but the British government did not recognize the holiday and the delegation held an evening meeting. He did get some rest in the afternoon when he wrote to his father, telling him that he was going to bring home for him a copy of War and Peace: ‘It is nearly as long as the Holy Bible and is the stock reading for slow convalescences. Incidentally it is unquestionably the greatest novel ever written.’ He had already (8 October) recommended Balzac’s novels for reading in bed. During his own sleepless nights he had been rereading Shakespeare’s tragedies (LCR to IER, 13 October 1945). At the evening meeting he put forward his own ideas on the vexed question of the waiver or deferment clause (WD, 240). He argued that contrary to the delegation’s previous preference for a waiver of interest in time of balance-of-payment difficulties suitably defined over the American offer of deferment of debt service until the end of the repayment period, the latter might be superior. It would avoid the difficulties the Americans were making over the definition of balance-of-payments difficulties and it would provide greater relief in a bad situation because both interest and capital would be excused – ‘What is to happen fifty years hence [when the deferred capital repayment would have to be made] is not nearly so important.’ He suggested that the delegation, rather than continuing to insist on a waiver, should ask the Americans to return to their idea of deferment and propose that repayment of sterling balances should be subject to the same provision. ‘A scheme of this sort would have the virtue of simplicity. It would be easily comprehensible to ministers and to the public at home. And I cannot help thinking that there would be just as much chance of getting away with it over here as with the more complicated formulae we have been considering.’ Brand supported this idea in principle but he was less sanguine that Clayton would accept it (LCR, The waiver, deferrment and the pari passu principle, 21 November, Brand, Waiver, deferment and the pari passu principle, 23 November 1945, Washington File No 2 (General), Loan). When a telegram from London suggested another variant of a waiver clause, Lionel protested to his colleagues (The Waiver, 24 November 1945, Washington File No 5 Finance New Phase, Loan) that this was foolish: ‘It would really be too silly

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to surrender one half of what we want plus a compromise in order to have compromise only.’12 The UK government’s reaction to the US draft financial agreement arrived on Saturday, 24 November, following a ministerial meeting the night before (telegrams 11789 and 11790, Docs, 354–6; GEN89/6th meeting). The initial reaction in London had been highly unfavourable. According to Meade (COD, 176–8), ‘The Treasury and the Bank had hysterics . . . ’ Dalton wanted to reject all the unsatisfactory provisions in the US draft, even at the cost of a breakdown of negotiations, but his ministerial colleagues, especially Bevin, warned him not to run that risk. Morrison, briefed by Meade and Fleming, also attacked the Treasury position at the ministerial meeting. Attlee’s telegram (11790) gave a list of terms the government would accept as well as the conditions it would not. At the delegation meeting to discuss the telegrams there was ‘moderate satisfaction’ (WD, 240), and it was decided to prepare a note of the reaction for the Americans, which Halifax and Keynes handed to Clayton and Vinson on Sunday. Since Dalton had complained that the draft financial agreement had become too complicated and asked for a simpler agreement in which the UK would not be obliged to complete negotiations with sterling balance holders and make sterling freely convertible by the end of 1946 or to rank the American debt above all other external debts, it is hardly surprising that Vinson and Clayton were ‘considerably taken aback’ although they ‘did not react too violently’ (Keynes to Dalton, 25 November 1945, Docs 356– 8 and JMK 24, 596–7). Keynes was summoned to a technical meeting at the Treasury: Robbins accompanying him thought it was a ‘Good meeting’ (WD, 240) and Keynes reported to London (NABOB 397, Docs, 368–70) that the officials ‘seemed more conciliatory than at any [financial] meeting this delegation have attended since they came to Washington’. At a subsequent formal meeting (COM/FIN 5th meeting, 26 November) the Americans went some way to meet the British on the waiver/deferment issue, by allowing a waiver of interest rather than deferment of debt service and withdrawing their request for a definite UK monetary reserve criterion for the operation of the waiver (NABOB 404, Docs, 375–8). Lionel reported this little progress to Iris: ‘Another week past and still no signs of getting away. We had a slight break in the jamb yesterday when the Americans showed signs of recognizing the impossibility of our yielding on certain points on which up to now they have insisted. But every step has to be argued out, first with them & then (in nine cases out of ten) with 12

LCR was right: the waiver clause never operated as originally devised and in 1957 was replaced by deferment of annual repayments including interest (Pressnell 1986, 321).

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London – that is, with that wayward, irascible & pigheaded White Knight who calls himself Wilfred [sic] Eady; and although Maynard whose spirits rise on very small provocation now talks of catching the Queen Mary on the 30th, I personally think that the chances are very small indeed . . . ’ But the delegation was deeply shocked by news from London, which came first in a telephone conversation Frank Lee had with Eady. Lee learned that Dalton, who confirmed this in a telegram later, was not now prepared to commit the UK to make sterling freely convertible for current transactions by the end of 1946 (WD, 240; BABOON 303, Docs, 371–2; Pressnell 1986, 313–16). The delegation, especially Keynes and Robbins, felt betrayed. ‘Some very troubled days followed. M. at the point of extreme nervous tension and on the verge of physical collapse; Lydia in floods of tears at almost every occasion; and all of us in a pretty bad state of mental and nervous exhaustion. Telegrams passed to and fro’ (Harmer Diary quoted in Moggridge 1992, 812). Lionel cabled Bridges (LETOD 388, 26 November 1945, AVIA38/1121): You will remember that fears that such a withdrawal [of the offer to liberalize the sterling area by the end of 1946] was implied in certain telegrams from Eady were the subject of the strong representations which I brought to you on my recent visit. When I told Eady of these fears he assured me with great emphasis that they were ill founded and that his dispute with Keynes related to the quantification of cancellation and not to the offer of liberalization which still stood. 3. At my suggestion therefore a personal telegram was despatched to Keynes telling him that he was under a misapprehension. This was followed by Eady’s BABOON 189 which said specifically that he agreed to paragraph 11 of NABOB 215. This paragraph began: ‘The Government of the U.K. would be prepared, however, on the basis of aid on a scale appropriate to the size of the problem to proceed not later than the end of 1946 (my italics) to make arrangements under which the current earnings of all sterling area countries would be freely available to make purchases in any currency area without discrimination.’ 4. On my return here I used my best endeavours to assure Keynes that his suspicions had been misplaced and that London stood by the offer which it had authorized him to make. If the offer is now withdrawn I feel acutely that I have been an instrument of his deception. 5. [Moreover] . . . to withdraw from a position which we have been authorized again and again to assume and to take back the proposal which was the most attractive offer we had to make to the Americans, must certainly put us in a very poor position just at the moment when there seemed some hope of breaking through. Indeed I am sure that I do not exaggerate when I say that if this withdrawal is persisted in it must wreck the negotiations. 6. You know that I am not given to gestures. But I feel that I must say that if Keynes feels that as a result of this cutting away of the ground under his feet he must tender

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his resignation, I should feel in honour bound to go with him, I am too deeply implicated in conveying to him from Eady what I believed to be a true statement of the position. 7. I do not wish to say behind the back of any colleague what I would not say to his face. I should be grateful therefore if you would show this to Eady.

As he wrote to Meade on 28 November (Miscellaneous, Loan), ‘strong as is my awareness of the deficiencies of Maynard’s conduct of his relations with London, my sympathies on this occasion are whole-heartedly with him. That Eady should have known better than Maynard what Maynard originally projected and expounded for months in London and at the Cambridge meeting with the Canadians [in May 1945] is not plausible; and his attempt to hide his mistake by denying it and forcing Maynard into a humilitating position is most discreditable. Indeed, as you probably know, I felt bound to send a private communication to Bridges to say that, if Maynard felt compelled to resign – and the danger is a very real one – . . . I should feel that I had in honour no alternative but to go with him.’ However, he was hoping he would not have to – and still hoping the mission would pull off a satisfactory settlement in the end. Bridges replied (DOTEL 212, T236/441) that he had been through all the relevant telegrams and come to the conclusion that there was ‘a genuine misunderstanding’. Keynes and Robbins held off resigning for the time being. Nonetheless Lionel dined at the Lees in ‘Great Despondency’ (WD, 240). The delegation sent several telegrams that week, protesting that they needed the authority they thought had been granted, but to no avail: after a Cabinet meeting on 29 November the government sent a draft which the delegation knew would never be accepted by the US government (NABOBs 400 and 417–20, Docs, 372–5 and 403–9; Confidential Annex to Cabinet Conclusions CM(45)57, Docs, 389–94; BABOONs 314–17, Docs, 394–8). Keynes again threatened to resign. Lionel now thought his own resignation was so likely that he had better write to Iris (on 1 December) to explain what had happened if she saw his resignation announced in the newspapers. ‘It is Wilfred Eady who is the evil genius, if indeed genius is exactly the appropriate word, of this squalid business. It was Eady who swore to me with oaths & curses (so to speak) that he had no difference of opinion with Keynes on this matter about which he now wishes him to stand in a white sheet & declare he was wrong to the Americans: and, although I am willing to believe that he was not lying to me, the alternative hypothesis that he did not ever understand what was in Keynes mind concerning the central thesis of the case Keynes was to argue with the Americans, is so damaging to his claim to even normal intelligence, let alone a position in which he

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controls issues affecting the lives & happiness of millions, as to make the situation, at least from the point of view of the public interest, if not of private morality, much worse than the hypothesis of deliberate deception.’

He feared, though he admitted he had no proof, that it had been Eady, ‘fighting for his own skin and reputation, who has brushed aside all our reasonable arguments & instead of restraining the disposition of ministers to impulsive & crude action, has stood aside to watch him [Keynes] overidden & repudiated’. Although resignation would get him home early, Lionel did not want this to happen: ‘It would imperil the negociations & terminate my connection with the civil service in a way which would be highly distasteful to me; and I am bending all my energies to finding ways of making it possible for Maynard to stay on without feeling completely humilitated.’ He took up an earlier suggestion of Keynes’s that Eady might be asked to fly over and cabled Bridges asking him to come (WD, 240–1). Dalton readily agreed, later (1962, 83–4) claiming it was his own idea. While the delegation was sitting around wondering what to do with its latest instructions from London (Harmer Diary), ‘a telegram arrived, personal from Bridges to L.C.R. in reply to a like one of Lionel’s, to say that he was coming over by plane. We decided we should wait for his arrival and H.E. got the P.M.’s authority for us to do so [by means of NABOB 423, 30 November, and BABOON 329, 1 December]’; Bridges, with Alec Grant of the Treasury, left London at three hours’ notice. Meanwhile discussions with Wilcox and others at the State Department over the procedure and timing of publication of the commercial policy agreement had been continuing, involving mainly Liesching and Shackle. They eventually produced agreed texts of statements for Clayton and Halifax to make when the financial and commercial agreements were simultaneously published (WD, 240; NABOBs 390, 391, 392, 394 and 398, 26 November, 406, 27 November, 414, 415 and 416, 30 November 1945). The final plenary meeting of the Combined Commercial Policy Committee was held on the morning of 1 December, immediately before Bridges arrived from London (COMTRADE 7th meeting; NABOB 429, 2 December 1945). The denouement then came quickly. Bridges spent the day of his arrival in conferences with the delegation, partly at the Willard and partly at the Embassy (WD, 241). On the next day, which was a Sunday, he attended two long meetings of the Finance Committee (COM/FIN 6th and 7th meetings, 2 December 1945, FRUS 1945 6, 185–8). In the morning the two sides presented their drafts and the Americans insisted on theirs; in the afternoon the US text was accepted with a few modifications; just before midnight it

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was sent to London (NABOB 435, 2 December, NABOBs 441–6, 3 December, Docs, 411–12, 414–23). Robbins’s notes of that ‘Day of wrath’ are expressive (WD, 241): ‘Morning meeting. Exactly as anticipated, humiliation. American draft considered. . . . 4 hrs struggle. Change of style. Telegrams. We await our fate.’ At this point Halifax noted in his diary (Birkenhead 1965, 555): ‘We all felt by the time we had finished that we knew pretty well what they [the Americans] would give and what they wouldn’t. In the light of this telegrams were dispatched to London which the party brought up [to the Embassy] to discuss with me at 10.45 p.m. We got through them by about 1 o’clock in the morning, and now we sit back to see whether London will accept or break. Bridges says they will grumble but accept.’ The Labour government did accept, but not without a last-ditch struggle over the early date for sterling convertibility, which Lionel did not bother to record. Bridges warned Attlee and Dalton (in NABOB 446) that the compromise on the sterling area arrangements the delegation had finally secured – that the arrangements with the sterling area countries would be completed, and currently earned sterling be made freely convertible, not later than one year after the effective date of the agreement (but discrimination in any import restrictions would still have to go by 31 December 1946) – was ‘only won by hard fighting’ and ‘I do not think we shall be able to push them any further on this.’ His ‘general conclusion’ was that ‘we now know pretty well what we can and cannot get, and that there is not much left to argue about’. Attlee summoned the US Ambassador (Winant) to 10 Downing Street and told him that he did not think Parliament would accept the Bretton Woods Agreements (which had to be debated before 19 December) if the UK were to be deprived by the loan agreement of the five-year transitional period allowed by the Bretton Woods Agreements (Winant to Secretary of State, 3 December 1945, FRUS 1945 6, 188–9; Pressnell 1986, 322–4). The Combined Finance Committee in Washington met again on 4 and 5 December. On the 4th Halifax stated he had been authorized to accept the whole agreement, subject to the ministers’ reservation. Vinson and Clayton responded that they could not compromise on the length of the transitional period. Bridges and Robbins had no better success than Halifax (FRUS 1945 6, 190–3). That evening Attlee told Bridges to try for a postponement of the end of the transitional period to 31 December 1948. Vinson had to be found and extricated from a lively party at the Statler; he told Halifax, Keynes and Bridges he did not think this would wash. Informed of this, Attlee, Dalton and Cripps agreed that Halifax could sign the agreement but asked him to try for 31 December 1947 (BABOON 349, NABOB 463–5, BABOON 350,

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Docs, 428–32 and 440–1; Pressnell 1986, 324–5). When Vinson and Clayton formally refused, later in the morning, Halifax said the agreement would be signed without alteration (FRUS 1945 6, 193–4). The last days of the mission, between the formal meetings, were occupied with frantic final drafting, of the financial agreement and the joint statement on commercial policy, which were to be published together, and of the agreed settlement of lend-lease, which had been the special responsibility of Lee and Harmer during the many weeks of the loan negotiations (NABOB 470, 5 December 1945; Pressnell 1986, 325–6). The financial agreement (Pressnell 1986, 416–20), which would come into effect following Congressional approval, provided the UK with a line of credit of $3.75 billion, to be repaid in fifty annual instalments beginning on 31 December 1951, with an annual interest rate of 2 per cent. It included a clause allowing a waiver of interest (but not deferment of capital repayments) when the UK government was concerned about its exchange reserves and the IMF certified that UK visible exports plus net invisible exports were on average over the previous five years less than the average of UK imports during 1936–8. (As already mentioned [see note 12] the waiver was later replaced by deferment – with the result that the loan was finally paid off on 29 December 2006.) The conditions relating to sterling area arrangements, other exchange arrangements and import arrangements required that currently earned sterling be made freely convertible without discrimination not later than one year after the effective date of the agreement and any quantitative import restrictions must cease to be discriminatory not later than 31 December 1946. As for the accumulated sterling balances, the UK ‘intends to make agreements with the countries concerned, varying according to the circumstances of each case, for an early settlement . . . on the basis of dividing these accumulated balances into three categories’: freely convertible, to be released in instalments and ‘adjusted as a contribution to the settlement of war and post-war indebtedness. . . . The Government of the United Kingdom will make every endeavour to secure the early completion of these arrangements.’ (For the agreements actually made see Chapter 18.) In the lend-lease settlement (Pressnell 1986, 420–2) the United States generously provided another $650m, as a ‘complete and final’ settlement in which ‘both governments have provided full cognizance of the benefits already received by them in the defeat of their common enemy. They have also taken full cognizance of the general obligations assumed by them in Article VII of the Mutual Aid Agreement . . . and the understandings agreed upon this day in respect of commercial policy.’ In his last, unnumbered NABOB telegram on 7 December (General Finance Telegrams, Loan) – ‘let it be blessed’ – Keynes commented that ‘we might

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conceivably have done better on the financial terms but scarcely on those wretched strings’ but emphasized the ‘comprehensive lend-lease settlement which you [the UK government] will, I think, regard as a greater achievement the more you study it; especially if you knew how this business started and how it might have turned out.’13 The commercial policy agreement was published as a white paper, Proposals for Consideration by an International Conference on Trade and Employment (Cmd 6709). In its six chapters it incorporated all the modifications to Hawkins’s proposals of the summer negotiated in October and early November, most of which have been described earlier. After meetings of a Preparatory Commission (of which Meade was a member) in London and Geneva in October 1946 and April 1947, the conference was eventually held in Havana, Cuba, in November 1947–March 1948. Although the Havana Charter for an International Trade Organization was not ratified, many of its principles were incorporated in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiated in Geneva in April–October 1947. As for commodity policy, on which Lionel had wasted so much time over three years, chapter V allowed for intergovernmental commodity agreements in certain, limited circumstances. Under this ‘severely restrictionist policy towards restrictionist policies’, as Penrose (1953, 84) described it, there had to have been determined by a special investigation that there was either a ‘burdensome surplus’ which was ‘accompanied by widespread distress to small producers accounting for a substantial proportion of the total output’ and could not be corrected by ‘the normal play of competitive forces’ or ‘widespread unemployment’ in the industry which could not be corrected ‘rapidly enough to prevent widespread and undue hardship to workers’ by market forces. Any commodity agreement had to conform to certain principles: open to accession by countries other than the original members, equal representation of consumers and producers, provisions for securing adequate world supplies of the commodity and for expansion of output from the most efficient producers. These requirements remained in the Havana Charter (UN Conference on Trade and Employment held at Havana, Cuba, from November 21, 1947 to March 24, 1948, Final Act and Related Documents). There was no mention of buffer stocks. Martin of the Ministry of Food was scathing in his criticisms of chapter V (Martin to Wall, 10 January 1946, and Martin, Anglo-American proposals regarding intergovernmental commodity arrangements, MAF83/2787), but others have 13

As Gardner (1956, 208) noted, the settlement ‘certainly surpassed expectation’: the wartime lend-lease account of $20 billion was wiped out and some $6 billion in surplus property and lend-lease remained in Britain at the end of the war.

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been more charitable. As Rowe (1965, 158–61) pointed out, ‘it is absolutely clear that commodity agreements which observe the principles laid down in the Havana charter . . . [would] be vitally different from the commodity schemes of the inter-war period; if only because of the absolute insistence on an expansionist approach, on equal representation of consumers and producers, and on a procedure of establishment and general supervision operated by the United Nations.’ (Rowe pointed out, of course, that not all postwar commodity agreements have conformed to these principles.) The Financial Agreement between the Governments of the United States and the United Kingdom (Cmd 6708) was signed by Halifax and Vinson, flanked by Keynes and Secretary of State Byrnes and with Bridges, Robbins and Liesching standing behind them, at 10.30 a.m. on 6 December (photograph in Docs). Robbins’s and Liesching’s position is entirely appropriate: without them there would have been no commercial policy agreement, without which there would have been no financial agreement or lend-lease settlement. Immediately before the signing Lionel wrote a note to Iris and a slightly longer one to his father: Just a line to let you know (although you will have seen it in the papers) that all our tribulations are over & that despite immense difficulties we have brought off a settlement which (if we are wise) not only averts the danger of complete financial debacle but should also make possible a healthy restoration of our fortunes & better economic relations all round. In a way I feel more moved by this than by the end of the war. That came so long after our emotions were used up & had been so clearly expected that in the event it seemed almost prosaic. Whereas with this (with issues hardly less momentous at stake) the outcome was in doubt until the very last minute. Indeed we only finally reached our conclusion at 12 o’clock on the last day that settlement was possible if the exigencies of our parliamentary timetable were to be met. It has all been most anxious & most exhausting . . . but I thank heaven that I was able to participate. I cannot conceive a better cause or better companions to work with.

That night Keynes gave a dinner party for the whole delegation. Harmer recorded: ‘M. made a brilliant speech, and H.E. and Lionel were also in good form.’ The delegation then scattered – Brand, Bridges, Liesching, Shackle and Harmer to Ottawa for a few days, the Keyneses to New York for the weekend – until they met again in New York to embark on the Queen Elizabeth at noon on 11 December. Lionel spent two days ‘clearing up’, which included writing on 8 December to Viner (Viner 22–14) and to Carr-Saunders (Robbins Personal File B, LSE) to tell him he was about to sail home and would apply for his release from government service as soon as he got back. He tried to see Machlup but he was away (Machlup to LCR, 29

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January 1946, Correspondence, RP). He went to Ithan on the Sunday, where he and Joe (Caroline having managed to get a passage to England thanks to her brother’s representations at the Embassy) celebrated with Chablis and oysters (LCR to IER, 26 November 1945; LCR to Joe Herben, 27 December 1947). Before he saw Joe he wrote to Iris on 9 December, telling her about the festivity: The Ambassador was there & Bridges & we nearly all made speeches (I made a very long one) exulting in our deliverance & praising our various leaders. I don’t expect ever to participate in such a festivity again – pure unalloyed joy & delight, golden memorable eloquence, loving kindliness & friendship all round. One mustn’t get things out of perspective: things are never as good or as bad as they seem; but just for once to feel that ‘The World’s great age begins anew’ – that was a good memory & one which I shall cherish as long as I live and I know that all who were there felt the same.14

The end of Robbins’s government service came a little later. The voyage home was cold, as usual on the North Atlantic at that season, but calm. For most of the delegation it was ‘little but a long sleep’ (Robbins 1971a, 210). On arrival at Southampton Keynes went to the House of Lords to listen to the debate on the Bretton Woods Agreements; he spoke, frankly and convincingly, the next day (JMK 24, 605–24). Lionel and Iris went to hear him. Lionel told Pressnell (Pressnell 1986, 341): ‘After Keynes’s speech . . . the atmosphere had completely altered . . . and he came into the lobby to talk to . . . [us] more elated and flushed with triumph than I had ever seen him before, even at the last meeting at Bretton Woods.’ That evening Lionel went to see Bridges and asked to resign, as he told Keynes a few weeks later (21 February 1946, Keynes BA/1). Bridges agreeing, Robbins wrote his last note on Cabinet Office stationery (to Charles Webster) on 1 January 1946 (Webster 23/5). Norman Brook wrote him a farewell note just before Christmas (quoted in Chapter 12). He did not see Eady before he left; Eady was disappointed, but Lionel probably was not (Eady to LCR, 5 and 29 January 1946, Correspondence, RP). The Robbins family had just spent their first Christmas in London since 1938. 14

Bareau (Anglo American Financial Relations during and since the war) recalled that LCR ‘told us he felt happier that day, than on V.J. day. We had, he hoped, with the help of this agreement, escaped from the menace of a return to the Dark Ages. We had laid the foundation stone for a more decent and better world.’

15. Lionel Robbins, Richard Law, John Maud at Hot Springs, VA, 21 May 1943

16. This happy breed of men . . . ’ (cartoon from Fortune, August 1943): from left to right R.R. Enfield (seated), John Maud (with pipe), Richard Law, Redvers Opie (with tennis racket), Edward Twentyman (seated), Lionel Robbins

17. Lionel and Iris on holiday in Wales, July 1943

18. Delegate’s card, Bretton Woods, 1944

19. The family at Hollycroft, December 1945: (standing) Anne Robbins, Rowland Robbins, Nancy Robbins, Richard Robbins; (seated) Iris Robbins, Mother, Agnes Robbins (Rowland’s wife) with Baby Ruth, Lionel Robbins

20. 10 Meadway Close, Hampstead Garden Suburb

21. Jacob Viner at Meadway Close

22. Lionel Robbins and Friedrich Hayek at the wedding of Laurence and Esca Hayek, 15 July 1961

23. Lord Drogheda, HM The Queen, Lionel Robbins leaving Bracken House, 27 November 1962

24. 4 Marine Parade, Lyme Regis

25. Lionel at 4 Marine Parade

26. Arriving at New Delhi, 16 December 1964: Lionel Robbins with A.K. Dasgupta and D.S. Kothari (to his right), Tarlok Singh and Dr S.R. Sen (to his left)

27. Concentration: Lionel Robbins listening to Axel Leijonhufvud at the Conference of University Professors, Montauk Point, Long Island, NY, September 1967

28. Lecturing at Bologna, 1971

29. Lord Goodman and Lionel Robbins at a party at the Royal Opera House

30. The naming of the Lionel Robbins Building: Lionel and Iris Robbins, Sir Huw Wheldon, Ralf Dahrendorf, 27 July 1978

EIGHTEEN

Return to the School

When Lionel Robbins returned to academic life he was, he warned Iris on 9 December 1945, ‘changing my way of life again & it will all be strange & perhaps something of an anticlimax’. Beyond the immediate task of preparing new lectures, he had to resume his position as the senior professor of economics at LSE and rebuild the depleted department after its wartime losses of staff. He could no longer be the ‘young professor’ hardly older than the junior lecturers; he was now (almost) an elder statesman: to students like Ralph Turvey coming from LSE in Cambridge, where Hayek had been in charge of the Economics Department, he was a ‘strange figure coming from the real world of Whitehall’.1 He also had to reestablish his own intellectual reputation in the profession. The first task he found congenial but the first few months were disturbed by personal sadness; the second went well at first but was then made harder by the losses of close colleagues in 1947 and 1950; it was not until his first (and only) sabbatical leave in 1950 that he set to work in his new chosen field, the history of economic thought. Until then he drew heavily on his wartime experience to make his way back into academic economics; at the same time he was deeply worried and increasingly distracted by the deteriorating UK economy and the economic and financial policy of the postwar Labour government. This chapter covers the first two years of this transitional period. In the following two and a half years, the subject of the next chapter, he managed in spite of heavy teaching and administrative duties to return to the States three times, a habit he would have liked to continue. On 21 February Lionel wrote to Maynard Keynes (Keynes BA/1). After commenting that ‘after all our anxieties, I was able to walk out a free man 1

I am very grateful to William Baumol, Anne Bohm, Dorothy Hahn, Henry Phelps Brown and Ralph Turvey for their recollections of the School in the early postwar years.

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just at the moment at which I should always most have wished to be able to go’, he told him that since then he had been nursing his sprained ankle and ‘reading the latest textbooks & articles with the enthusiasm of a fresher. How good it is to come back to one’s subject after a really long break with all the cobwebs of habit & past prejudice blown out of one’s head. I don’t know how I shall like the School – which has suffered much during its years of exile. But I like reading my books and preparing new courses of lectures far more than I should have imagined likely.’ Lionel had agreed with the director of LSE that he would not lecture until the Summer term. He then offered a short course on British PostWar Economic Problems, which he repeated in 1947. He explained in his first lecture that because he could not talk about the wartime policies, he would ‘maintain continuity as best I can by continuing on policy tack but looking forward rather than backwards’ and examine the salient problems of the postwar position, including the external problem, manpower and productivity, finance and the problem of inflation. He also began to prepare a long course of lectures on The Theory of Economic Policy (including Public Finance) to give in 1946/7. He later summarized its content as ‘a simplified Economics of Welfare plus a little Theory of Public Finance plus J.M. Clark on the legal framework’.2 In the Calendar he described it as ‘the application of economic principles to the main problems of public policy’. He would start with the general objectives of economic policy and the methods of achieving them, move on to the problems of a closed economy, discussing planning as well as employment policy, and end with international problems, including monetary, commercial and commodity policies. His reading list included Pigou’s Economics of Welfare, J.M. Clark’s Social Control of Business, Meade’s Introduction to Economic Analysis and Policy and Dalton’s Public Finance (replaced by Ursula Hicks’s Public Finance a year later). He also gained an opportunity to comment regularly on economic policy. While he was in Washington Alwyn Parker of Lloyds Bank had written to him on 23 November telling him that Lord Balfour of Burleigh, about to become chairman of the bank, wanted Robbins’s advice on the employment of a young economist in a new statistical department. Parker also told him that it was proposed to restart the publication of Lloyds Bank Review as a quarterly (Miscellaneous, Loan). In February 1946 Lionel was asked to act as a general economic consultant to the bank and an adviser to Parker as 2

LCR to Carr-Saunders, 8 December 1945, LCR Personal File B, LSE; British Post-War Economic Problems, May 1946; A note on problems arising in connection with next year’s programme of lectures and classes, 11 February 1948, Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.49, RP.

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editor of the review. He told Carr-Saunders that, as Carr-Saunders put it to the Chairman of the Governors, Sir Otto Niemeyer, on 25 February, he ‘would limit his advice entirely to economic questions, and would not offer any opinion on commercial policy. As to the time [involved] . . . he would go along and lunch with these people and convey his views in conversation, though, as he says in his letter, he might occasionally write a memorandum’ (LCR Personal File B). For this he would receive 300 guineas a year – a useful addition to his professorial salary of £1500 (£1700 from 1 October 1946). He accepted once the governors gave him the necessary permission in March (Balfour of Burleigh to LCR, 11 March 1946, Correspondence, RP). Lionel quickly took steps to meet up with old friends in academic life, notably Dennis Robertson, who became a frequent visitor to Meadway Close, and Alic Smith of New College, whom he visited in Oxford, perhaps partly to talk about the prospects of Richard’s going up as an undergraduate (Robertson to LCR, 15 January, 2, 8 and 16 April, Smith to LCR, 24 January 1946, Correspondence, RP). Richard had left school the previous July and was doing his compulsory military service in Italy; his father was encouraging him to think of spending at least a couple of years at Oxford before art school and to read English rather than PPE. His sister Anne, whom Lionel would also have liked to have gone to Oxford or Cambridge, had gone up to University College London in October 1945 and was reading Intermediate Arts, but she was tempted by the BSc(Econ) – to which she switched at the end of the year.3 Lionel’s father was recovering slowly but steadily from his accident. Caroline reported from Hollycroft on 31 January: ‘Father gets on all right but is not what I would call cheerful on the whole. However now I’ve just got his will copied and some stuff typed he seems calmer’. But Iris’s father had a severe stroke early in 1946 and died on 3 March. There was a memorial service at St Dunstans-in-the-West, Fleet Street, on 12 March and a service at the parish church in Monks Risborough the following weekend (Koss 1973, 311). Lionel was named, along with Clive, as an executor and trustee and took on the correspondence with the lawyers and the management of AGG’s estate (A.G. Gardiner’s Estate April 1946-Dec 1947, RP). Lionel continued to see his Economic Section colleagues, who gave him a farewell dinner on 7 March (COD, 239): ‘Lionel made a delightful speech of reminiscences of our early days in the New Police Building when we slept 3

LCR to Richard Robbins, 12 January 1946; Anne Robbins to RRR, 27 September 1945; LCR to IER, 22 October and 26 November 1945.

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with the Scotland Yard detectives in the cellars of Scotland Yard through the 1940 Blitz, and during the day under Arthur Greenwood and Francis Hemming paced the corridors saying that we would resign because we were given nothing to do! Times have changed since then.’ On Easter Sunday (21 April) Keynes died. Lionel had not seen him since December and learned of his death from the Monday morning newspapers (Robbins 1971a, 212). He attended the memorial services in Westminster Abbey on 2 May and in King’s College Chapel the following Saturday. He had written immediately to Lydia Keynes: ‘ . . . Maynard has given his life for his country and the kindly values as surely as if he had fallen on the field of battle’ and those who had been with him on the missions to North America grieved for the loss of ‘our wise and gallant captain’ and for Lydia. Keynes’s achievements might ‘yet save from chaos and old neglect what remains of western civilization. But today it is difficult to think of anything save the price – one of the most remarkable and lovable men of this or any other age’ (LLK/5/229/76 quoted in part by Skidelsky 2000, xv). Lydia was ‘touch[ed] . . . deeply . . . He was my captain also’ (Lydia Keynes to LCR, 29 April 1946, RP). Norman Chester wrote immediately to Lionel, knowing the news would have come as a personal loss. ‘You know, probably more than anyone, what his contribution has been during the past few years to Britain’s economic and financial policy; there were those odd, exasperating times when his judgment seemed to have departed, but when I think of all those innumerable occasions when his advice and forceful support caused bad Treasury policy to be turned into good, how we are going to miss him in these troubled years ahead.’ Lionel would have to take up Keynes’s mantle since he was ‘now the leading “political economist” in the best sense of the term’. ‘You are the only person now who can handle these international economic questions as a public figure, working for the Govt but not of the Govt. James [Meade] and Marcus [Fleming] are too snowed under with lots of other tasks and even so neither has your stature, capacity for diplomacy, power of exposition and ruthless determination. So unless the powers that be are particularly stupid you look like having to shoulder some form of public duty again; and even if they should temporarily be stupid, you must write about these matters’ (Correspondence, RP). For the time being academic matters took priority. The Summer term at LSE was exceptionally busy. Viner arrived for his long-planned visit at the end of March and, apart from trips to universities outside London, lived with the Robbinses for three months. He spent his first month preparing for

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his lectures, which included the Marshall Lectures at Cambridge on 29 April and 6 May, five public lectures at the School on Commercial Policy in the Post-War World and a lecture course on Economic Factors in the History of Power Politics 1600–1946. In May and June he also ‘saw a good deal of the top civil servants and had frank discussions with perhaps a dozen MPs on both sides of the House. I also went to four or five City lunches given for me . . . and I attended . . . a lively informal “liberal” dining-group which met at the Reform Club on Thursdays.’ At Meadway Close he ‘had the advantage of frequent visits of economists from outside London, for whom the Robbins’ house was a London haven, and of a series of dinner parties at which wartime colleagues of Robbins in the Government Service were guests. I also spent considerable time at the American Embassy, where Harry Hawkins consulted me on problems on which we had worked together in Washington in the past few years.’ Iris and Lionel were very hospitable and helpful but, as he also reported to Willits of the Rockefeller Foundation on 22 July, life in postwar London was not easy: besides bureacratic ‘red tape’ and inadequate secretarial help, the poor travel facilities ‘(no private cars, taxis scarce – practically non-existent in the suburbs – bus queues, slow schedules on the Underground) meant that I used hours to get around’. Robbins reported to Willits on 30 July that the visit had been a great success: ‘His lectures aroused great interest among the students and the staff and it was a really great privilege to have him sitting around in the Common Room to talk to all and sundry about the vast range of matters on which he speaks with authority.’ He had been very fortunate to have Viner’s companionship and conversation ‘during these difficult months when I have been painfully reading myself back into academic habits’ (Rockefeller Foundation RG1.1/401/ 74/972). On 11 June he told Frank Lee that his father’s slow recovery and his fatherin-law’s illness and death had meant that ‘my first half year of academic life – it is almost that now – has been much less tranquil than I had hoped and I am greatly looking forward to getting away in July for my first long vacation.’ Lee had written from Washington on 31 May to say he had now been posted back to London. At the same time he warned Lionel that the Executive Directors of the IMF had unanimously recommended him for the post of Chief of the Research Division of the IMF. ‘I imagine that for a good many reasons you would not wish to leave England and academic life . . . [But] all those concerned with the organisation of the Fund were at one in thinking that you were the obvious and admirable choice for the post. Harry White was particularly enthusiastic’ (Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP).

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Lee was quite correct that his friend would not want to move to Washington. Apart from family responsibilities, Robbins did not think he would be happy as an international civil servant. If I were really keen on making money there have been business offers [which he did not specify] even more attractive, and if I felt that my duty lay in the sphere of the public service, I think I should have preferred to remain in Whitehall where I made so many friends and where I found conditions of work so congenial. But I am more than ever convinced that the reconstruction of academic life is a matter of prime importance and, although I do not expect I shall ever be able to do the various things I planned to do before the war, I think I can see pretty clearly ways in which I can help. . . . unless you and Bolton [UK executive director of the IMF] can think of very strong arguments to the contrary, I think the probability is that I shall be inclined to stick where I am.

White had indeed said ‘he would rather see him [Robbins] as the Chief Economist of the Fund than any other person’ (except perhaps Viner) and Bridges had been asked to sound out Robbins. But no enquiry came. After an American journalist asked him ‘Why haven’t you accepted that post they have offered you at the Fund?’, Lionel thought first to ask Machlup to find out what had been going on but then decided to tackle Bridges himself. According to Bridges, ‘Sir Wilfrid Eady and I saw Professor Robbins. . . . We agreed to send a telegram [to Washington] explaining that we regarded the request to know whether Robbins could be appointed as Head of the Research Division as having been withdrawn. We should also add that we understood that Robbins had become aware that the request for his services had been made, and that we had informed him of the situation. We undertook to tell Professor Robbins what had been said.’ According to the telegram, it was British officials who had decided not to ask Robbins because they did not want to jeopardize the appointment of an Englishman to the post of head of Operations at the Fund.4 According to Meade (COD, 288–91), it was Sir Wilfrid Eady who had decided Lionel should not be asked. Meade was also worried that in the current negotiations with the sterling area countries the Bank of England, supported by Eady, was making arrangements not in accordance with the promises made to the Americans in Washington in 1945. At the official University of London dinner for Viner, he and Lionel talked privately to Waley ‘and tried to put the fear of God into him about the folly of this procedure’. 4

Telegram No 15 EAGER Washington to Foreign Office, 21 May, LCR to Bridges, 21 June, Bridges to LCR, 24 June, note by Bridges, 25 June, and Bridges to LCR enclosing Telegram No 39 EAGER, 27 June 1946, T273/38, TNA.

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During a family holiday in Cornwall in the first three weeks of July, Lionel worked on his entry on Cannan for the Dictionary of National Biography, with the help of his new and highly efficient secretary at LSE, Miss Beven, who had arrived in April. She was to be invaluable to him for many years – and to his biographer: in that first summer she completely organized his filing system and made a start on sorting out his books and pamphlets (Beven to LCR, 5 and 22 July 1946, Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.46, RP). In August Lionel spent as much time as possible working at home. As he told Richard on 2 September, ‘I have set myself some pretty dull reading to get through before the end of the vacation and . . . I sit down to this fairly steadily several hours each day. There is a little work to be done at the School (where I now have a secretary) some two or three days a week; and we have been out sometimes to plays & operas. The weather has been almost unmitigatedly beastly.’ Hayek hoped that Lionel was writing an obituary article on Keynes for Economica. There is no sign that he ever did so. Instead he lent Austin Robinson his Bretton Woods and After journal to help him with his article for the EJ (1947) and later commented extensively on the draft.5 In September, during a few days at Whiteleaf and a fortnight with Iris at Weymouth, Lionel was preparing a long memorandum on wartime economic policy for Bridges, who had asked him to contribute to an official symposium. Miss Beven sent his draft to Bridges, Chester and Dennison at the end of the month (Miss Beven to LCR, 6 and 27 September 1946, Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.49). But the symposium never appeared and Robbins eventually published the paper in his next collection of essays (1954b, 201–24). At the time he was glad to complete the task, which, he told his son on 21 September, ‘had been hanging over me like a dark rain cloud’. Lionel very much enjoyed Dorset, as he also told Richard. Weymouth was ‘a beautiful town, almost entirely Georgian in its architecture. At the time of George III, who used to live here every summer, it was very fashionable. Since then it has fallen on evil days and is now only patronized by small shopkeepers & their families and the proletariat. This makes for a certain dinginess, additional to the normal accumulated delapidations of war. But it preserves the architecture almost without change with the result that you have easily the loveliest front of any seaside town I am acquainted with.’ Despite poor weather he swam every day and he and Iris enjoyed long walks on the hills behind the town with their marvellous views, ‘on one side the sea 5

Hayek to LCR, 18 August 1946, CORRESPONDENCE; LCR to Robinson, 2 July 1946, Robinson to LCR, 29 January and 12 March, and LCR to Robinson, 10 March 1947, Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP.

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& the harbours, on the other a vast stretch of Dorsetshire with Dorchester (Thos. Hardy’s town) in the middle distance’. They also revisited Swanage, finding it ‘woefully knocked about & shabby [with] the beaches . . . hardly cleared of obstructions & the promenade . . . still cluttered up with great concrete blocks’, and Lyme Regis, where they were ‘most agreably surprised [by its] charming surroundings and a very pleasant feeling on the front’: they resolved to return on another vacation – and eventually bought a house there. As he also told his father on 28 September, his bedtime reading was Froude’s Life of Carlyle: ‘one of the best biographies I have ever read – so well written, so clear & so fair. . . . Far from putting you off that old bear, it makes you want to see what good you can in him. Difficult that perhaps; for he had nearly all the instincts of a Nazi, including I was interested to observe, most violent anti-Semitism.’ When LSE had returned to London in October 1945, it could inhabit only some of its buildings which were damaged, dirty and delapidated. A year later, the School had reoccupied all its old premises and most of its prewar staff had returned from wartime employment. At the same time student numbers were greatly increased, especially by ex-servicemen and other students from overseas. The demand for places, particularly in the graduate school, was intense (Dahrendorf 1995, 361–3). The outstanding American economist, William Baumol, who became a close friend of Lionel and Iris Robbins, likes to tell the story of his initial rejection letter from L.G. Robinson, Dean of Postgraduate Students (18 March 1946, Baumol Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Duke University). Informed that he could reapply for the following year, he immediately wrote to enquire when he could submit his application. On being shown the letter by Robinson’s assistant, Robbins is reported to have said, ‘He really wants to come. Let’s let him in.’ Baumol arrived in October 1946 as a master’s student, quickly transferred to the PhD and began to teach classes to firstyear undergraduates; in the Summer term he was made a parttime assistant lecturer (Agenda for Standing Committee 27 May 1947). Worried about his health, Robinson asked the director to promote his assistant, Anne Bohm, to Assistant Dean or Secretary of the Graduate School (Robinson to Carr-Saunders, 28.5.46, Staff Questions I, RP). An exile from Germany since 1938, with a doctoral degree in English from Berlin, she had answered his advertizement in the Cambridge Evening News in 1941 for ‘a research assistant who could type, speak German and was versed in History’ (Stern 1997, 24). After a year she had taken over the job of assistant to the dean, and she kept the job when LSE moved back to London. When

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Robinson was ill in the Lent term 1946 she had done most of his work. She now became, and remained for thirty-seven years, the Secretary of the Graduate School, working very closely with Lionel, who chaired the Graduate School Committee (Robbins 1971a, 216–17). When Robinson died in 1957, she assumed his role among her duties. The staff in economics in 1946/7 comprised Frederic Benham, Friedrich Hayek, Arnold Plant and Lionel Robbins as professors; Vera Anstey, Ronald Edwards, Nicholas Kaldor and Frank Paish as readers; and as lecturers or assistant lecturers Frederick Brown, Ronald Coase, Arthur Lewis, Asik Radomysler, Gilbert Ponsonby, Peter Bauer and Jean Roxburgh (soon Mrs Kerrigan).6 Durbin was a parttime lecturer since his election as a Labour MP in July 1945. Hayek was teaching the history of economic thought, Kaldor General Principles of Economic Analysis and Problems of Public Finance for economics specialists, Benham the theory of international trade, while Roxburgh and Radomysler shared the Elements of Economics for first-year students and Robbins gave his new Theory of Economic Policy course as well as his short course on British Post-War Economic Problems. Lionel persuaded two friends in the City, Paul Bareau and Manning Dacey, and Keith Horsefield, who was still in government service, to teach courses in banking and currency, while the Cassel chair in banking and currency held by Robertson was vacant (LCR to Director, 2 October 1946, Staff Questions I, RP). Benham left in January 1947 to become Financial and Economic Adviser to the Governor-General of Malaya and Borneo. The Appointments Committee had just recommended the establishment of two new chairs in labour economics and in accounting and two new readerships in public finance and in commerce (and was about to ask for three more new readerships). Besides the two Cassel chairs, there were then two new chairs, four readerships and a dozen lectureships or assistant lectureships vacant in the Economics Department.7 In the spring of 1946 Robbins had sought the help of Henry Phelps Brown in Oxford (while he and Kaldor consulted 6

7

Bauer, a Cambridge graduate, who had worked for Guthrie & Co East India merchants and Malayan rubber growers in 1939–42 and come to the School on a Leon Fellowship in 1943, had been appointed a lecturer in 1946; he was appointed to a new Readership in Agricultural Economics a year later and, after a University Lecturership in Cambridge 1948–60, Professor of Economics with special reference to Underdeveloped Countries and Economic Development in 1960 (Standing Committee 24 June 1947 and 19 February 1960). Roxburgh had been appointed to an assistant lectureship in 1945 (Standing Committee 3 May 1945). Standing Committee 20 November and 20 December 1946, 28 January 1947; LCR to Scriven, 3 October 1946, Staff Questions I, RP.

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Robertson and others in Cambridge) in trying to fill some of the junior positions (correspondence in Staff Questions I, RP). In the spring of 1947 he went up to New College one Saturday afternoon and asked Phelps Brown to apply for the new chair in labour economics. After Phelps Brown met the Board of Advisers on 27 May, Lionel wrote to James Meade: ‘The interview went off splendidly. Henry was at his most polished and most urbane and unless something very unexpected happens, I should say that he would be definitely elected a member of the staff within the next six weeks’ (Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP). Brown held the chair until early retirement in 1968, when he returned to Oxford (Hancock and Isaac 1998). Lionel tried again to persuade Marcus Fleming to leave the Economic Section and take the currency and banking chair, drafting ‘an enormous screed . . . explaining in detail why he will be misconceiving his public duties if he turns us down’ although he was correctly not optimistic of success (LCR to Hayek, 29 April 1946, Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.49, RP). But in February 1947 the professors of economics asked the governors to ask the University to take steps to fill the international trade chair; the Standing Committee agreed on 25 February and, as in 1944, nominated Liesching to represent them. Lionel approached Meade, who he knew was increasingly unhappy as director of the Economic Section while Dalton, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, listened only to the advice of the Treasury officials. According to Margaret Meade, Lionel could be ‘extraordinarily persuasive’: when Meade had been offered the Chair of Political Economy at Glasgow three years earlier, Robbins had assured him ‘you wouldn’t like that, you’d miss the excitement, being at the centre of things, making a difference, etc etc’, but when it came to the LSE chair, it was ‘You must come, you’re wasted in Whitehall, etc etc.’ In March CarrSaunders forwarded Meade’s curriculum vitae to the University in strict confidence and with Liesching’s full approval (Carr-Saunders to LCR, 17 March 1947, Director Correspondence April 1946-Dec 1954, RP). Meade’s appointment was announced in May, along with that of Richard Sayers to the banking and currency chair and W.T. Baxter to the new chair in accounting. Meade’s was the best appointment Lionel ever made: it was at LSE, where Meade stayed until he succeeded Robertson as Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge in 1957, that Meade accomplished the work in international economics for which he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in 1977 (Meade 1951 and 1955). Lionel’s administrative duties soon included all the major School committees: he was back on the General Purposes Committee in 1946 and on the Court of Governors and its Standing Committee in 1947. He was still the

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representative of the Faculty of Economics on the Senate of the University and began attending its meetings again in February 1946. He served on the Boards of Advisers for the four chairs in economics and for several of the readerships.8 (Bauer, Brown, Coase and Lewis were all promoted; Lionel’s former Economic Section colleague, Ronald Tress, was appointed reader in public finance.) He was consulted by his friends at other universities about their appointments. George Allen, for instance, when he moved from the University of Liverpool to UCL, sought Robbins’s advice in rebuilding the Department of Political Economy, especially since he needed a replacement for Paul Rosenstein-Rodan who was leaving to join the World Bank (Allen to LCR, 30 November and 6 December 1946 and 30 January 1947, Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP). John Jewkes, consulting Lionel about a successor to Hicks, who had left Manchester for Oxford, told him that ‘this university looks upon you as its most important adviser on appointments in Economics’. On this occasion Robbins seems to have advised Jewkes to wait until a really good candidate was available (Jewkes to LCR, 13 and 20 February 1946, CORRESPONDENCE, RP). A year later he was asked for his opinion of Ely Devons (then a reader at Manchester) and Arthur Lewis. While he declined to rank them, he was particularly complimentary about Lewis’s lecturing and research. Lewis, who came from St Lucia, had obtained a First in the BCom at LSE in 1937 and, when the Colonial Office rejected his application to join the colonial service for posting to the West Indies, began a PhD under Plant; a year later the School offered him an assistantship, ‘apparently as its first black staff member’. He was quickly promoted and was one of the best teachers at LSE in Cambridge during the war. In 1947 he was turned down for the chair of economics at Liverpool purely on grounds of race, in spite of the strong support of Carr-Saunders, who then suggested his appointment to a newly created Readership in Colonial Economics (ie development economics) at LSE. Lewis was offered the chair at Manchester in November 1947, not long after he was appointed to the LSE readership.9 Lionel soon revived his graduate seminar, first jointly with Viner in the summer term of 1946, when they concentrated on international 8

9

GPC 16 January 1946; Professorial Council 29 January 1947; Court 27 March 1947; Senate 20 February 1946, ST2/2/62. LCR’s fellow governors included Frederic Harmer and Alec Spearman, whom LCR had suggested, along with his old friend Georg Tugendhat, to the director on 12 June 1946 (Director Correspondence April 1946–Dec 1954, RP). LCR to L.J. Pugh, 8 July 1947, Testimonials April 1946–31/8/50; LCR to Barrett Whale, 11 June 1947, Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP; Tignor (2006, 17–22, 37–8).

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economic relations (LCR to members of the Economics Department, 29 April 1946, Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.49, RP). In 1946/7, at Coase’s suggestion, the whole year’s discussions, held on Tuesday afternoons and attended by up to fifty staff and graduate students, revolved around the economics of public utilities as exemplified by the Tennessee Valley Authority set up in the 1930s. The graduate students presenting papers included Baumol, Robert Solo, Ralph Turvey and Dorothy Hahn (n´ee Salter). Solo has been described (Elliott 1996, 300–2) as ‘an authentic midwest American original’ and characterized by Karl Popper ‘as “a man who could not be taught but had to think out from the beginning whatever he knew”.’ A Harvard undergraduate before the war, where he had been a student of Edward Chamberlin and J.K. Galbraith, as a doctoral student at LSE under the joint supervision of Popper and Robbins he shifted from economic theory to the methodology and philosophy of economics (for which he is probably best known although he has published prolificly in several fields of economics). Turvey remembered him as a ‘very funny, very extrovert American’.10 Turvey was still an undergraduate, who gained First Class Honours in the BSc(Econ) in 1947, but he had come to LSE in October 1944 as a second year student, having passed the Intermediate Examination externally, so that by 1946/7 he was effectively a graduate student. Robbins regarded him as ‘a young man of quite outstanding attainments . . . [even] before graduation’ (LCR to Miss A.D. Charles, 25 November 1946, Testimonials April 1946–31/8/50, RP). As in the 1930s the student members of the seminar were a cohesive group: Turvey remembered that they ‘argued very intensively, spent evenings together. Dorothy [Hahn] used to cook. Arguing until all hours’. The group included besides Baumol and Turvey, Dorothy and Frank Hahn, David Finch, David Knox and Graeme Dorrance. Lionel thought Baumol was ‘the ablest economic theorist we have had in the seminar for many years . . . quite the ablest since Lerner . . . [and] moreover, an excellent expositor and a most charming man’. He thought Frank Hahn, who ‘contributed considerably to the liveliness of . . . discussions’ in the seminar, was not well supervised by Kaldor and was ‘not in the Baumol/Turvey class yet awhile’, but he supported his applications for posts at Birmingham and Manchester in 1948. Robbins was also impressed by the Australian David Finch and thought he would have been offered an academic post in the UK if he had not wanted to return to Australia. Dorrance was a Canadian graduate student who had worked under Rasminsky at the Bank of Canada and was already ‘a first-class 10

Solo did not in fact gain his PhD at LSE, but at Cornell, in 1953, on industrial organization.

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technician’.11 Like Baumol he was appointed an assistant lecturer by the end of the academic year. Another Canadian, David Knox, a 1947 graduate of the University of Toronto, was appointed an assistant lecturer in 1949. Baumol, who held the role (of most argumentative participant) in the early postwar seminars that Kaldor had in the 1930s, thought the ‘really important thing [about Robbins’s teaching in the late 1940s] was the way he ran the seminar. [It was an] incredibly efficient machine for stimulating ideas, exchange of ideas.’ Phelps Brown, who attended the seminar in 1947/8, recalled that Robbins had ‘no gospel to preach’: as the graduate students took turns in discussing journal articles ‘Lionel might intervene gently for purposes of clarification as discussion went on.’12 As in the 1930s Lionel delivered his main course of lectures twice, on Tuesdays at 11 a.m. and again on Wednesdays at 7 p.m. for the evening students. With meetings and gatherings on other evenings this made for long days at the School. And, as Viner had found, travelling in London was time-consuming. On 15 October, when Theodore Gregory had been giving the first of three public lectures on ‘The outlook for India’, Lionel was stopped and cautioned by a policeman for riding a bicycle without lights in Rotherwick Road, Golders Green (notice from Metropolitan Police, 19 October 1946, CORRESPONDENCE, RP). He had also not been feeling well during the summer. Within a month of the start of the Michaelmas term he feared he was overdoing it. On 1 November he wrote to the director: ‘I am under doctor’s orders for a trouble which I deferred dealing with during the war for fear that it should involve my withdrawal from tasks which seemed to be of some national importance; and I am faced with the necessity of some curtailment of my hours of work. At the present time . . . I seldom cease work before midnight or have any time to spare at week-ends.’ He had decided he was on too many University committees – although ‘I do not find committee work difficult, and I like the work. . . . Had I wanted committee work I could have had full scope where I was’ in Whitehall – and wished to resign his membership of the Senate. When he talked to Carr-Saunders a couple of days later he gave him a medical certificate, which indicated the trouble was ‘Duodenitis (Hunger Dyspepsia) a precursor to Duodenal 11

12

LCR to Machlup, 27 January 1949, LCR to Arthur Lewis, 1 March 1948, LCR to Registrar, University of Tasmania, 10 November 1947, and LCR to whom it may concern, 20 December 1946, Testimonials April 1946–31/8/50, RP. Hahn got the lectureship at Birmingham. Conversations with Baumol, Princeton, March 1991, and Phelps Brown, Oxford, March 1993.

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Ulcer’ as well as ‘severe attacks of migraine’.13 He submitted his resignation from the Senate the same day (Senate 20 November 1946, ST2/2/63). Roy Allen took Robbins’s place on the Senate, giving up the chairmanship of the Board of Studies in Economics, to which Robbins was then elected.14 Lionel also remained on the Committee of Management of the Courtauld Institute. When he attended its meetings for the first time since before the war, it was discussing the possibilities of expansion of the Institute: according to the minutes for 15 November 1946 (Courtauld Institute Archives), ‘Professor Robbins urged that the present moment was the right one to bring forward any schemes of expansion and hoped that such a scheme would be included in the quinquennial programme’ for 1947–52. With respect to expansion at LSE, however, he had mixed feelings. He told Carr-Saunders on 5 March 1946 (Director Correspondence April 1946-Dec 1954, RP) that he was ‘not opposed to expansion as such . . . [although] temperamentally I prefer societies of moderate size’, but he was worried that a proposed increase of regular students at LSE from 900 to 2300 would require a proportionate increase in academic staff which could ‘make havoc of the ethos of the School’ and make existing teaching arrangements unworkable. He would prefer a 50 per cent increase (to 1350 regular students) and an expansion of social science teaching at the other London colleges. The School had nothing to lose: ‘We should always do the bulk of the graduate teaching; no college in London could ever catch up with our 50 years start with the library. But we should have more outlets for our graduate students and more support in the councils of the University.’ In 1946/7 the number of regular students reached 1462, of whom 937 were fulltime undergraduates and 175 postgraduates. When the School put in its application for its first postwar quinquennial grant from the University Grants Committee (UGC) at the end of 1946, its target was around 1850 regular students including 350 postgraduates. This would require a large increase in staff and space, especially in the library for both books and readers. The quinquennial grant was in fact generous and the total student population (including occasional and parttime students) soon reached 3000, where it remained through the 1950s and 1960s, but without 13

14

LCR to Carr-Saunders, 2 October, 1 and 4 November 1946, Director Correspondence April 1946-Dec 1954, RP. The University committees he listed were: Senate, Academic Council, Finance and General Purposes Committee, Subcommittee in Arts Theology Music & Economics, Professoriate Committee, Scholarships Committee, Publications Committee, Delegacy of the Institute of Education, and Committee of Management of the Courtauld Institute. Senate 22 January 1947, ST2/2/63; BSE 5 February 1947, AC8/17/2/3.

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a solution to the problem of inadequate accommodation.15 Lionel was distressed by the state of the library. He complained bitterly to the Librarian in May 1946 about the new location of statistical publications when he had just spent ‘three-quarters of an hour looking [without success] for one figure [in the Federal Reserve Bulletin] which was to be mentioned in one sentence in one lecture’. He complained equally bitterly to Hayek, who was on the Library Committee, about the economics as well as the statistics section in October 1946. He persuaded the Professorial Council to ask the Library Committee to consider moving the Statistical Library back to its old location, and he used his position on the GPC to raise the matter there too. As he admitted to the librarian, he found it hard to adjust to ‘the sharp contrast between the present arrangements and those that I have been used to for 25 years’.16 He was still complaining about the accessibility of journals three years later. In November 1946 Lionel received from his former Section colleague, Stanley Dennison, now a fellow of Gonville and Caius College and secretary of the Board of the Faculty of Economics, an official invitation to give the Marshall Lectures at Cambridge in the Lent term 1947. Dennis Robertson urged him to accept: ‘I feel sure that out of the material for your new course at the School you could, without too great burden, distil something which would be of great interest and value to us.’ Lionel was not so sure, but the invitation was too tempting to refuse, and he agreed to give the lectures in the Easter term (but declined the Faculty’s invitation to act as an examiner for Part II of the Economics Tripos in June). By March 1947, when he could not think of a better title for the lectures than ‘Some problems of economic policy’, he had ‘spent several weeks trying to crystallise out in some definite direction, but nothing seems to fit into this particular form’, and he was beginning to regret having taken on the commitment ‘without being more certain that I had something worth while to say’.17 In January 1947 Robbins published his first postwar article, ‘Economic prospects’, in Lloyds Bank Review (1947a). As The Times noted on 14 January, 15

16

17

Carr-Saunders to LCR, Quinquennial estimates, 6 December 1946, Director Correspondence April 1946-Dec 1954, RP; Dahrendorf (1995, 370–2). ‘Regular students’ included those studying for certificates as well as first or postgraduate degrees. LCR to G. Woledge, 16 May, LCR to Hayek, 8 October 1946 and 28 March 1949, Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.49, RP; Professorial Council 16 October 1946; GPC 20 November 1946. Robertson to LCR, undated, CORRESPONDENCE; LCR to Austin Robinson and LCR to Dennison, 5 December 1946, LCR to Dennison, 10 March 1947, Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP.

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it was ‘his first public pronouncement since he left his war-time work in the Cabinet Offices’. Taking stock of the progress of the UK economy since the autumn of 1945, he drew attention to several features of the mixed picture. On the external front, the rapid increase of exports in 1946 had surpassed expectations but rising commodity prices were making imports more expensive and the government was spending large sums in Germany on the army of occupation and food for the civilian population; insofar as exports were sold on credit or out of accumulated sterling balances, they did not help to reduce the balance-of-payments deficit. Domestically, the speed of reconversion and transfer of resources to peacetime uses was encouraging, but there was still a severe shortage of manpower and a danger of inflation due to rising wages; here a particular worry was the effect of rising prices on the size of the food subsidies used to stabilize the cost-of-living index since 1941. However, while ‘[t]hese problems, the man-power shortage, the wage inflation, the cost of living subsidies, are gradually becoming known; and we may perhaps hope that in due course . . . appropriate measures may be devised to deal with them’, there was another more serious problem of whose implications the general public was not sufficiently aware. It was well known that coal stocks might be inadequate to meet domestic demand if the winter was at all severe; what was not realized was that the chronic coal shortage threatened the progress of the export drive and that any slowing of the export drive would be disastrous for the balance of payments. Furthermore, the UK should be exporting coal as it had before the war. Coal production could not be increased just by asking the existing labour force to work harder; there had to be more miners; given the domestic manpower shortage the only solution was to recruit foreign labour. The winter of 1947 is a ‘strong contender among meterologists for the title of the worst British winter on record’ (A. Robertson 1987, vii). In heavy snow and freezing conditions the coal shortage became a major fuel crisis in February. Robbins was far from alone in predicting such a crisis and senior government ministers, warned by their officials, including the Economic Section, since 1945, had been worried – except for the Minister of Fuel and Power, Emanuel Shinwell. On Friday 7 February Shinwell announced that coal stocks at power stations were so low that the supply of electricity to industry in London, the southeast, the midlands and the northwest of England would be suspended from Monday and cut to five hours a day to domestic consumers. In the next month, until the weather changed, unemployment rose over 2 million (Dow 1964, 22). On 12 February Robbins wrote to the editor of The Times, pointing out that the fundamental cause was not deficient coal stocks but deficient supply due to the labour shortage.

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The nationalization of the coal mines on 1 January was irrelevant. Even without a cold winter, ‘we should still have been heading for a smash owing to defective coal supplies’. Moreover, as he had stressed in his article, the worst aspect was the effect on the balance of payments. Unless there were another 100,000 men in the mines, ‘the domestic situation next winter will be as bad as it is now and the balance of payments position decidedly worse . . . the hope of getting into some sort of equilibrium before the American loan is exhausted will have almost faded. We shall be confronted with the prospect later on of external difficulties beside which our present troubles will seem insignificant.’ Robbins’s letter brought him many supportive responses. Some appeared in The Times, which had commended Robbins’s view in its leading article on the day of publication (14 February). He was criticized by those, notably Thomas Balogh, who challenged the need for foreign labour. Some who agreed with his argument, such as Hubert Henderson and the secretary of the Pit Ponies’ Protection Society, feared a flood of immigrants would cause friction in the coal fields. But Lionel did not like the alternative of industrial conscription: as he put it to one correspondent, ‘Conscription for the army is bad enough in peace-time, but conscription to work down the mines would surely be regarded as worse. At any rate, I am pretty clear that that would be the view of my own son who is now kicking his heels in one of the armies of occupation in the Adriatic and I am bound to say I have much sympathy with that point of view myself.’18 Lionel wrote to Richard himself on 16 February: ‘You will have seen from the papers what a frightful mess everything is over here. I am beginning to get quite sick of this government, though I do not yet see an alternative. They have let us down so badly about coal supplies, that you may well be pleased that you are not in London and I am afraid that this is only the beginning of our troubles. I have been so troubled about all this that I have plunged into public controversy . . . and I fancy I shall remain in that state for some months or even years to come.’ Lionel was ill with influenza during the weeks of the coal crisis. He missed only one of his Theory of Economic Policy lectures (which his daughter was attending) but, he told Austin Robinson on 10 March, it was only ‘by staying in bed when perhaps it was unnecessary [that] I have at last succeeded in throwing off a cold which made me almost incapable of any intellectual effort whatever’ (Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP). In the 18

Letters and clippings in Letters about Coal, RP. LCR wrote a second letter (published on 28 February) in response to one by Henderson on the manpower problem, in which he made it clear that while he agreed with Henderson’s contention that the overall manpower shortage was a product of inflation, his proposal to recruit foreign labour for the mines did not rest on the diagnosis of overall manpower shortage.

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lectures he had now reached employment policy, his topic for the rest of the term. In the Michaelmas term his large topics had been Distribution and Incentive, The Choice of Goods, and The Use of Resources. At the outset he had emphasized the distinction between pure theory, which was scientific, and economic policy discussion, which was inevitably normative: ‘Theory is there. But the norms are there also[:] . . . given certain social ends [such as stability in the national income or a more equal income distribution], given the way people behave in economic relations, this is the rational way to achieve those ends.’19 As the nature of the economic problem is the scarcity of goods, he had begun with the extreme of scarcity, siege conditions, and with the problems of rationing, including wartime points rationing. This led on to ‘the heart of the general question of distribution and incentive’: to illustrate the dilemma between equalizing rewards from work and providing incentive to productive effort he quoted Adam Smith on the remuneration of university professors, with whose conclusions (payment by results) he did not agree, before devoting a couple of lectures to ways of providing incentive and ways to reduce inequalities, bringing in not only the role of the price system but also the provision of family allowances and earlier systems of poor relief. On The Choice of Goods he described the limitations of the price system and the resulting need for public goods (when the benefits were indiscriminate) and government controls such as town planning (when there were indiscriminate disbenefits). For the rest of the Michaelmas term he had been concerned with criteria for the rational use of resources in any sort of society: ‘Not how should the use of resources be organized – collectivism, private enterprise, guilds, co-ops, etc. But to what pattern should the use of resources, however, tend to conform? What is the rational distribution of resources?’ The answer was the application of the opportunity cost principle, whether it was a Crusoe economy, the British war economy, where the single aim of winning the war simplified the problem of allocation, or a peacetime economy, where the problem of multiple ends required some sort of market or market reckoning to be able to value goods. He went on to derive the many corollaries of the opportunity cost principle and to provide practical illustrations from, for example, British agriculture or about to be nationalized industries such as coal.20 In the Lent term he discussed collectivism, describing the 19 20

Lectures on Theory of Economic Policy, RP. Anne Robbins’s notes, POLICY Robbins 1946–7, provide the dates of the lectures. The corollaries were: the costs which have to be balanced against gains are future costs; in a changing world there is no presumption that different industries should remain the same size (for example cereal farming or the railways); the profitability of an industry is not a just criterion of the use of resources; efficiency is a relation between prices and costs, not

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contributions of Mises, Lange, Lerner, Hall, Dickinson and Hayek to the socialist calculation debate; laissez faire, where after dealing with what the classical economists meant by the term he described the shortcomings of the system; and the mixed system, where he included employment policy, international aspects of employment policy and commodity policy. He warned his audience of his own bias, rather like Dalton used to do in his lectures in the 1920s: ‘I am against [collectivism]. I have written against, spoken against. Not only intellectual [but also] emotional repugnance. I shall be as careful as I can. But you have had notice.’ He also related a conversation with Dalton: I well remember discussing Lerner with one of present ministers (H.D.) Not when a public servant – or I shouldn’t be telling you. I explained [my] reaction to [reading] Mises. [He was] Most sceptical. That not my idea. I want industries organized as a whole so that I can say ‘I want you to expand and you to contract – just like that.’ I am afraid this [is] very typical. No idea in Whitehall of competitive state enterprise.

The shortcomings of the laissez-faire system, on the other hand, included the distributional consequences, which were aggravated by inheritance of private property, the problem of monopoly, the lack of provision of public goods and the problem of inadequate aggregate demand with resulting involuntary unemployment. On employment policy he first pointed out that the appropriate target was a high level of employment, that there were different types of unemployment and different theories of unemployment but that because ‘[we] do know that deficiency of aggregate demand causes deflation [the] object [of] policy [should be] to avoid this – and inflation!’ He elaborated several possible methods: Bagehot’s prescription for financial crises; the use of Bank Rate as proposed by Hawtrey, which he criticized as insufficient; public works, where there were practical difficulties but the planning of public investment was important; the control of private investment by interest rates and tax policy; and deficit finance, whose dangers could be avoided by using automatic stabilizers. On the relation between wages and employment there was ‘No clear agreement on effect . . . But complete agreement on one thing – what happens in state of high employment if [wage] increases beyond a certain point . . . either Unemployment or Inflation. This [is] a great problem of a technical concept (for example British agriculture); each productive operation should bear its own costs (in the coal industry for example); as far as possible all scarce factors involved in any operation should be priced (for example road pricing).

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future. Some urge central control. Others say learning from experience. Yet others say that eventually action on aggregate demand [will be] confined to action to secure high employment at current or slightly rising [wage] rates.’ On the international aspects of employment policy he explained the rationale of the IMF and IBRD and Keynes’s buffer-stock scheme. Under commodity policy he also discussed other, less desirable schemes intended to help primary producers, including the interwar restriction schemes and the world food board being proposed for the FAO by Sir John Boyd Orr. As he had commented to Harold Wilson, who was at the FAO preparatory commission in Washington, on 11 December 1946, ‘Having, so to speak, sunk a good deal of intellectual capital in commodity policy at Hot Springs, I have really been very anxious about this conference’ and Orr’s ‘halfbaked . . . project’ which tried to combine a buffer-stocks scheme with a two-price system (Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP). He had received a copy of the plan from Orr in the summer of 1946 and discussed it with the Minister of Food, John Strachey (COD, 314). The Easter vacation saw the first meeting of what became the Mont Pelerin Society. Hayek, flushed with the success of The Road to Serfdom, had conceived the idea of forming an international society of scholars who shared his concern at the drift away from free-market economics towards totalitarian planning. It might be called ‘the “Acton-Tocqueville Society” [though] this is merely to indicate the kind of philosophy which would have to inspire the common effort and the definite name of such a society would have to be a matter for further consideration’. Having obtained some financial support in Switzerland with the help of a Swiss businessman, Albert Hunold, and in America for the travel of American participants, he had invited a large group of (mostly) economists from the US and several European countries to an ‘informal meeting’ at the Hotel du Parc, Mont-P`elerin sur Vevey, Switzerland, for ten days in April 1947. He received thirty positive replies very quickly, one of them Lionel’s because Hayek was ‘counting very much on [his] support’ (Hayek 1994, 132–4; Hayek to LCR, 28 December 1946, Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.49, RP). Lionel travelled with Jewkes most of the way to Basel on Sunday, 30 March. On the Paris train he met Lord and Lady Woolton, who treated him to lunch. When he and Jewkes reached the hotel, they immediately took the opportunity for a long walk, enjoying the views of Lake Geneva from the lower slopes of Mont P`elerin (2080 metres). At the end of the day Lionel wrote to Iris: ‘The hotel surpasses all expectation – at any rate in position. The air is marvellous & the walks in the vicinity spectacular &

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enchanting. . . . I have had nothing like it since our Austrian holidays.’ In the evening most of the other guests arrived: ‘Mises is here and R¨opke, Rappard & Machlup & a powerful American contingent [including Frank Knight, George Stigler, Aaron Director and Milton Friedman]. I think our talks may be fruitful, though I fear that Mises will be a disturbing element; when I hear him talk I feel almost a red.’ He also feared he would not be able to visit Richard in Italy after the conference because he did not know Richard’s exact whereabouts and he still had his Marshall Lectures to prepare. (As Dorothy Hahn, who was acting as secretary for the conference, remembered, Richard managed to come and meet his father at the conference.) Hayek allowed plenty of time for informal discussion and for excursions. As Lionel told Iris on 3 and 6 April, the participants were taken to the chateau at Coppet (the home of Mme de Stael) on the Thursday – Lionel would ‘have enjoyed [it] more had I not had to argue in French with a French economist who did not understand English’ – and on Saturday and Sunday on ‘a grand tour’ by special train to Schwyz and the great Benedictine monastery of Einsiedeln, founded in 934 but rebuilt in the early eighteenth century, ‘a superb example of Austrian baroque’. Besides the excursions there were three 21/2 hour sessions a day and the discussions were ‘strenuous’. Hayek’s plan was that after he gave his opening address on the Tuesday morning, 1 April, the participants would discuss the procedure of the rest of the conference and the afternoon and evening sessions would discuss ‘“Free” Enterprise or Competitive Order’.21 The morning session went smoothly but by the evening Lionel’s fears about Mises had been realized. He had learned how Mises’s views had developed when Mises submitted part of his ‘epilogue’ for the Spanish edition of Socialism to Economica while Hayek was in New York in May 1946. Hayek was inclined to accept it but Lionel was not. He told his fellow-editors (Ashton, Benham and Allen) on 24 June (Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.49, RP): ‘Hayek has set us a teaser. Mises is a very distinguished man who, on account of his occasional errors of over-emphasis, has received far less than his deserts from the academic world. I cannot myself think, however, that this is a very good article.’ At the conference, Lionel told Iris on 3 April, he still found Mises ‘very charming in private’ but ‘he made a most dreadful exhibition of himself – attacked us all calling us Socialists & Interventionists & indulging in a degree of irrelevance quite unbelievable to those who did not know 21

Mont Pelerin Conference 1–10 April 1947 Agenda, Folder MPS The Mt Pelerin Conference April 1947, Mont Pelerin Society Box 13, Hoover Institution. The minutes of the sessions are in Folder Mont Pelerin Society 1947 Records Manuscripts, Mont Pelerin Society Box 14.

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his prickly temperament. I did my best to coax him into a better mood and so did Fritz [Hayek]. But alas in vain & some of the Americans were provoked to pretty bitter language well deserved but creating a very difficult atmosphere.’22 Mises’s reaction to Robbins’s emollient remarks was another outburst, according to the minutes: ‘All the trouble with monopolies springs from the way in which government policy is fostering monopoly. Why do people attack the monopoly, and not the patent law, the tariff, etc.?’ – to which Frank Graham of Princeton tartly replied: ‘I fear that Professor Mises is 100% wrong in his answer to Professor Robbins. Perfect freedom exists in the jungle. There is no law there. I think if we carry out the suggestions of Professor Mises we shall be in the jungle.’ Robbins found himself closer to the American economists than to the Europeans. In the discussion on ‘The problems and chances of European federation’ on Thursday morning he was reported as emphasizing Britain’s difficulty in joining a European union, namely the Commonwealth: While they are united by bonds of sympathy of interest with the U.K., they are also united by strong bonds to the U.S.A. I fear that that such a [European] union would involve not merely political, but also economic associations, and I think these economic associations might prove disruptive to the unity of the Western world. . . . Canadians would be in an impossible position. I don’t think the U.K. would be pleased to join such a block, unless all other hopes had been abandoned.

The French economist Maurice Allais responded that he saw ‘no solution other than a [European] federation’. Stigler correctly predicted on 7 April that ‘there will be a wide split between the American and Continental economists’ on macroeconomic policy: the US was concerned with full employment and worried about deflation, the Continental Europeans with reconstruction, even of the gold standard. R¨opke spoke for several Europeans: ‘Even if I believed in most of Keynes, I would hesitate to say so publicly. I believe with Rueff that the great danger is not deflation, but inflation.’ Lionel made his own position quite clear: I find myself in the reverse position to Professor Roepke, who was Keynesian, and is so no longer. There was a time when I thought Keynesian stabilisation schemes utterly reprehensible, but I have gradually been forced to believe that these ideas were not so wrong. . . . 22

Milton Friedman (Friedman and Friedman 1998, 161) ‘particularly recall[ed] a discussion . . . in the middle of which Ludwig von Mises stood up, announced to the assembly “You’re all a bunch of socialists,” and stomped out of the room, an assembly that contained not a single person who, by even the loosest standards, could be called a socialist’.

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It is very difficult to escape the conclusion that there is a problem of stabilising the aggregate aspect of the economy. . . . [It is] much more difficult to give a satisfactory relationship between total employment and level of wages than I used to believe. . . . I don’t think flexible wage rates are the complete answer to a drop in aggregate demand. Possible remedy-timing of public investment. I always tended to assume that people in charge of public treasuries could hardly be so silly as to plan their expenditure without any regard to the state of the cycle. But it is not so. The state tends to go the same way as the herd. Even within the limits of the most classical view, we would still do well to point out to states that they should not aggravate the situation. . . . [But there were limits to this remedy.] We should favour some degree of automatism, and those policies which interfere least with the usual market mechanism. Unsolved problem for the future of liberalism: to discover automatic stabilisers which will work for the system as a whole. Essential if we are to persuade the peoples of the world that liberalism has something to offer them. We are obliged to admit that there have been sins of omission before. I think there is nothing to lead us to believe that Say’s law, or anything like it, operates in the modern world.

As the historian of the Mont Pelerin Society (Hartwell 1995, 40–5) has emphasized, there were long diffuse discussions of the aims, and the name, of the society. After Machlup suggested Lionel might ‘write out a statement over-night, and present it at breakfast’ – to which he responded he could dictate it after breakfast – he was asked to prepare a redraft of the original statement prepared by Hayek and Jewkes among others. As Friedman later recalled, Robbins ‘was the only one capable of writing a document with which everyone could agree’ (conversation with Milton Friedman and Aaron Director, Stanford, 17 May 1994). Approved by all except Maurice Allais, the Robbins text has remained the official statement of the aims of the Mont Pelerin Society. Agreement on the ‘meaningless’ (Karl Popper’s opinion) name of the society was reached only at the concluding session on 10 April.23 For reasons which will become clear later, this was the end of Robbins’s active involvement in the society. He did not attend the almost annual conferences which began in 1949 and he resigned a year later. He never mentioned the society or its founding in his autobiography. Lionel first met Friedman just before the Mont Pelerin conference: Director, Friedman and Stigler had crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth, 23

Allais did not join the society in 1947, but he resumed his correspondence with Robbins soon after the meeting (Allais to LCR, 17 April, 2 May and 2 July 1947, Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP).

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spending several days in London, when Director introduced Friedman to Robbins. At the conference Lionel also met Frank Knight again and asked him to come to lecture at LSE as Viner had done. Knight was not sure Lionel was serious until he received the offer from the Rockefeller Foundation to finance the trip. He then agreed to come for the Summer term 1948.24 While Lionel was in Switzerland he met his student friend G.L. Mehta, who was in Geneva with the Indian Delegation to the International Trade and Employment Conference; they arranged to meet again in London in May but Mehta had to return home early because his wife was ill (Mehta to LCR, 26 April, 4 May and 14 June 1947, Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP). R¨opke, meanwhile, complained to Robbins that the British military authorities were treating him as though he had been a Nazi and sought his help in his claim of a room for himself in his sister’s house in the British Zone of Germany. Lionel said he would do what he could and did indeed raise the matter in ‘very high quarters’, but it was several months before R¨opke was at all reassured.25 Lionel gave his Marshall Lectures on 25 April and 2 and 9 May. He disarmed his Cambridge audience by describing his difficulties in writing them (Robbins 1947c, 1–3): ‘For six years I had been engaged in non-academic pursuits. For the last year I had been engaged in a painful effort at reeducation – I can now just begin to trust myself to put a curve on the board and to engage in mild altercation with my friends who are in better training. But that, at this stage of my intellectual re-conversion, I should put before you theoretical novelties and new analytical constructions was unthinkable.’ Because the war had provided an empirical test of many prewar theories, he ‘propose[d] to put to myself, as it were, some of the larger questions of economic policy and to ask: to what extent have my views on these matters been modified or confirmed by the experience of war; to what extent do the needs of the contemporary situation call for reformulation or reaffirmation of doctrines to which in the past I have been led to attach importance?’ 24

25

Knight to LCR, 21 June, LCR to Knight, 27 June, Knight to Carr-Saunders, 24 July 1947, Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP. When the Rockefeller Foundation had first indicated willingness to help finance a successor to Viner, the LSE Appointments Committee had thought of Stigler, but he was unavailable: Agenda for Standing Committee 20 December 1946 and 19 March 1947. R¨opke to LCR, 22 April and 14 June, LCR to R¨opke, 1 and 12 May, 29 September 1947, 1947, Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47; R¨opke to LCR, 6 November 1947, Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47–31/12/48, RP. LCR had contacted Hall-Patch at the FO (Miss Beven to LCR, 18 August 1947, Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.49, RP).

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In that first lecture, when he discussed the functions of the price system in the distribution and production of goods, he repeated many of the arguments of his Theory of Economic Policy lectures at LSE but made more use of his wartime experience of government decision making. In his second lecture on the rationale of the war economy (ibid., 29–56) he utilized his memorandum for Bridges. Financial measures, however drastic, could not produce the goods for the war effort or raise the revenue to pay for them without inflationary borrowing fast enough. Direction of labour, physical controls on production and rationing of consumer goods were inevitable. The question was rather why were they effective? As he had told his students, the answer was the simplification of the problem of choice to one overriding end, victory, to which everything else was subordinate. This illuminated the postwar economic problem: ‘You can no longer express the object of economic policy in terms of a single concrete objective. . . . Housing, capital re-equipment, the needs of the balance of payments, the insistent demand of the consumer for something more on which to spend his money, all in their manifold complexity of details jostle shoulders, so to speak, struggling for higher allocations of resources.’ The third lecture, on the control of production in peacetime (ibid., 57–86), began with the transition, where although he readily conceded wartime controls could only be abandoned gradually he argued that the threat of inflation necessitated the use of financial policy, specifically a reduction in public expenditure and a surplus budget. He admitted he now thought macroeconomic policy would be needed after the transition to maintain aggregate demand and employment and, acknowledging the influence of Keynes and Robertson, that ‘I think this is the point on which I am most conscious of a change of point of view, not, I think, due to the war, but rather to the cumulative effect of reflections on pre-war controversies tested in relation to a somewhat new quantitative perspective.’ At the same time, given the danger of inflation in a fully employed economy, he thought the aim should be to maintain aggregate demand ‘at a level which, at current or slightly rising rates of wages, would secure a reasonably high level of employment and utilization of resources’. He indicated his preference for automatic stabilizers to get round the political and administrative problems of manipulating public investment. He came finally to the great question of collectivism versus competition, where his war experience had if anything strengthened his prewar convictions. The ideas of Lange and Lerner for planning based on price calculations were attractive but he could not persuade himself it would work in practice: in this connection he told the story of his conversation with Dalton (without naming him). He was also worried about the potential

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loss of personal liberty in a planned economy. Quoting Keynes (1936) on the advantages of individualism, he pointed out the need to improve the workings of a market system in order to reap those advantages.26 The lectures were well received, at the time and when they were published in September 1947.27 Robertson thanked him warmly for the ‘triumphantly successful’ lectures, with most of which he agreed (The Economic Problem Reviews, RP). A few weeks later he indicated where he thought he and Lionel stood in relation to other British economists. He ranged a spectrum of ‘non-planners’ in this order: Hayek, Jewkes and Devons, Dennison, Robbins, himself, Henderson. Putting himself to the left of Robbins he noted: ‘This the right order, I think, in respect of (e.g.) location of industry. Should perhaps be reversed in respect of “planning for employment” where DHR is perhaps now the more sceptical’. In general Lionel’s economist friends agreed with his position, as did former close colleagues in Whitehall. Although Norman Brook writing on Cabinet Office notepaper said he would ‘forbear from saying to what extent I agree with your findings!!’, he admitted to enjoying Lionel’s report of his conversation with Dalton – as, for that matter, did Laski, who had read the book twice ‘with immense admiration’ in spite of his ‘deep reserves about its unstated assumptions’. Gorell Barnes, who agreed with ‘seven-eighths of what you say’, asked for details of the references to Lange and Lerner. Lionel told him that Lerner’s ‘attitude to these matters has changed considerably in recent years in the direction of something more like the approach outlined in my lectures’ – a statement which Lerner 26

Schumpeter’s (1949, 374n) reference to LCR’s change of mind caused LCR to write to him on 11 November 1949 (Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49–August 1950, RP): If I heard that a certain Robbino, an inhabitant of Florence, addressing a learned society at Verona, had said that he was indebted both to the Montagus and the Capulets, I should infer that he was trying to be nice to both and to suggest that perhaps their feuds were not so important as their common membership of the town of Verona. But if I am to judge from your footnote reference . . . I should gather that you would infer that the aforesaid Robbino was an out and out Capuletian . . .

27

Schumpeter replied on 15 December that LCR’s letter had brought ‘tears to my guilty eyes and blushes to my care-lined cheeks. The only thing I can say in extenuation of my misconduct is that what I wanted to convey was not that Robbino was an out and out Capuletian but that he stood in the place across from which the Montagues and the Capulets are shooting at one another.’ CUP wanted to publish the lectures, but LCR thought Macmillan should be given the opportunity if they could publish them as quickly, which they could: S.C. Roberts to LCR, 30 April, 27 May and 12 June 1947, Cambridge University Archives UA Pr.C.R 133; LCR to Daniel Macmillan, 15 May 1947, and subsequent correspondence with Daniel and Harold Macmillan, Correspondence with Publishers 1946–30.9.55, RP.

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confirmed when he wrote to say that he had been reading the lectures and found himself ‘even in closer agreement than I had supposed’.28 The book was welcomed by the Financial Times (22 September) as ‘a sketch of a badly needed new philosophy of economics – one that will be neither madly collectivist nor unrealistically laisser-faire’ and by The Economist (20 September) as ‘an argument in the great academic tradition, formal, dignified, the work of a highly civilised man addressing a highly civilised audience . . . a re-evaluation of the main tenets of liberal economics, the economics of free enterprise and the price system, in the light of war experience . . . [from which] emerges . . . a body of generalisations and of directives for future work which either Marshall or Keynes would have approved’. Harrod reviewed it for the Times Literary Supplement (18 October), noting by way of conclusion that ‘Professor Robbins declares himself in favour of what is loosely called a “full employment policy” . . . He also expresses radical views in favour of securing a more equal distribution of incomes, by means of taxes and allowances, than has usually prevailed under capitalism. . . . But Socialists will find no friend. This authoritative recapitulation of the case for individualism by an illustrious economist, with a philosophical background, is most timely.’ The reviewer in the leftwing Tribune on 24 October, Dudley Seers, recognized Robbins was not a friend of socialism: although welcoming his ‘recantation’ on employment policy he did not think it sufficiently contrite or completely ingenuous (clippings in The Economic Problem Reviews, RP). When James Meade resigned as director of the Economic Section, Robert Hall was appointed in his place. An anonymous article in the Tribune on 4 April 1947 applauded the appointment of a socialist economist. The author, widely known to be Balogh, went on to claim that the Section had originally been staffed by ‘an exclusive lot of extreme laissez-faire liberals, among them Professor Jewkes, Professor Robbins, Austin Robinson and Meade’, who had opposed (!) rationing and planning. Under Robbins the Section had been ‘shaping the policy of a return to an uncontrolled multilateral market system’: the ITO proposals were ‘primarily a joint effort of Professors Robbins and Meade and not, as is generally but wrongly assumed, of American origin. The Americans, of course, were delighted, as the British proposals served . . . [their interests].’ Lionel was incensed, on Meade’s account even more than on his own: he resolved never ‘to take part in any discussion, 28

Letter from Robertson, Meade, Hicks, Robinson and Gorell Barnes in Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47; letters from Henderson, Proctor, Lee, Brook and Laski in The Economic Problem Reviews; Lerner to LCR, 23 July 1948, Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47–31/12/48, RP.

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whether oral or written, with which T. Balogh was associated’ given his ‘accusations of bad faith and despicable motive’ (LCR to E. Chamberlin, 17 February 1949, Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950, RP).29 On 8 May, Hall enquired whether Lionel might be willing to serve as an expert on the Employment and Economic Stability Subcommission of the UN Economic and Employment Commission, since his name had been put forward by the Canadian representative on the Commission. Meade had also been nominated, in his case by the Belgian and Norwegian representatives, but had declined. Lionel also declined, on 9 May, for two reasons (Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP). One was that he was so busy, but the other, which ‘weighs with me almost equally’, was that he was not sure his name would be acceptable to ministers: ‘I am frankly surprised, and even faintly disgusted, at their apparent unwillingness to take any steps to defend in public against the scandalous attacks of the “Tribune” the men who served them loyally and faithfully throughout the arduous and difficult years of the war.’ Lionel did not have the same problem when another opportunity of public service came his way. On 9 June John J. McCloy, president of the IBRD, informed him that the executive directors had recommended him for membership of the Bank’s Advisory Council. Lionel agreed after McCloy cabled to reassure him that the duties were not expected to be onerous – perhaps only one meeting, in the USA, in the first year – and telling him that all the other nominees, including Sir Arthur Salter as chairman, had accepted. Carr-Saunders urged him to accept: ‘The invitation is clearly no small compliment and the meetings should be interesting and valuable to you even if the Board of Governors does not accept the advice given to them’ (McCloy to LCR, 9 June and 19 August, Carr-Saunders to LCR, 30 August 1947, CORRESPONDENCE, RP). The Committee of Management of the Courtauld Institute of Art met between two and six times a year. Lionel missed the 25 February 1947 meeting (when he was ill), when he was appointed to serve on the Board of Advisers for a new director to replace Tom Boase, who had been elected President of Magdalen College Oxford. The next meeting, on 16 May, was 29

The clipping of ‘Professors in Power’ is in Miscellaneous Correspondence, RP. Hall was the author of The Economic System in a Socialist State (1937), but although he described himself as a socialist he was ‘not a particularly active member’ of the Labour group at Oxford in the 1930s (Jones 1994, 41). LCR stuck to his resolution until he and Balogh were both members of the House of Lords in the 1970s, refusing, for instance, to attend a European Youth Campaign conference in 1957 organized by Meade because Balogh would be there (LCR to Meade, 30 November 1956, Economists Correspondence August 1956-April 1958, RP).

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a large gathering, a joint meeting of the Committees of Management of the Courtauld and the Warburg Institutes, to discuss the latest plans of the new building in Woburn Square, Bloomsbury, in which they were competing for space. Lord Lee was absent, seriously ill. The building was to include a picture gallery to display the paintings given by Samuel Courtauld and those Lee had offered to bequeath to the Courtald Institute; Lee had strong views on the way his collection should be displayed and had been threatening to rescind his offer if his wishes were not met. According to the minutes, Courtauld spoke first, saying that he also spoke for Lee and reporting that he had consulted the architect who had revised his original plans so as to enlarge the gallery. After the head of the Warburg and then the ViceChancellor and the Principal of the University had said that the revised plan was acceptable to them, ‘Lord Crawford said that he had also consulted Lord Lee and confirmed Mr. Courtauld’s statement. Professor Robbins said that he had also seen Lord Lee and felt that the revised plan met his wishes.’ Robbins recalled this visit (1971a, 244–5): I was deputed to visit him in person . . . In prospect this was a very difficult assignment. Lord Lee was a fierce and, in some respects at least, an arbitrary man, with extremely strong tastes and a dominating will . . . and in the exchange of letters in the matter under dispute, he had shown himself utterly intransigent. In the event, however, the negotiation was rendered very easy by an completely irrelevant circumstance . . . [that Lionel’s father had known Lee as Minister of Agriculture in 1920]. ‘If Lord Lee gives you a promise, he will keep it,’ he had said to me more than once. Whether this was true or not I cannot say: . . . But its repetition worked wonders with Lord Lee, who glowed with satisfaction at this tribute to his virtue. Thereafter the going was easy . . . How vividly the scene comes back to me – the dying consul of Empire on his enormous bed, with his red dispatch case open and his will and other relevant documents scattered about the coverlet.

The new gallery opened in October 1958. In addition to Courtauld’s Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and Lee’s Italian primitives, it displayed the fine collection of early Italian paintings Thomas Gambier Parry offered to the Courtauld in August 1947, and the Witt Collection of drawings, which Sir Robert Witt bequeathed to the Courtauld in 1952. Lee died in October, Courtauld less than two months later, and in March 1948 Robbins was elected to succeed Courtauld as chairman of the Committee of Management. Before Lee’s death the Board of Advisers for a new director recommended Anthony Blunt, who as reader in the history of art at the Institute was ‘a home-grown rising star in art history’, although Lee had tried to persuade Boase to stay on. Robbins was reelected chairman of the Committee of Management every year until 1975. According to

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Blunt’s biographer (Carter 2001, 363), ‘Meetings of the Courtauld’s Management Committee, which was populated by the great and the good, such as the Warburg’s Ernst Gombrich, were carefully choreographed in advance by the Director and his Chairman, Lionel Robbins. . . . [One staff member recalled:] “The actual meeting would go on for less than an hour. Robbins would say very little but somehow no one else managed to get a word in.”’ In the chapter of his autobiography devoted to his academic life in 1946– 61, Robbins left many things unsaid. He included his longstanding friendships with Robertson and Viner, which were important to him at this time; he made little mention of Hayek or Kaldor. In Kaldor’s case this is because he left LSE permanently in 1947. Since 1940 Kaldor had been given leave of absence from LSE three times: in 1943/4 to work parttime for the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, in 1945 to serve as a member of the US Strategic Bombing Survey and at the end of 1946 to advise the Hungarian government (N. Kaldor – Record of leave of absence, Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.49, and LCR to Carr-Saunders, 17 January 1947, Director Correspondence April 1946-Dec 1954, RP). He was also still living in Cambridge. When Gunnar Myrdal, visiting London at the end of May 1947, asked him if he would like to head the Planning and Research Section of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, Nicky told Lionel immediately, indicating that he would like to apply for another leave of absence. Myrdal also talked to Lionel. After ‘giving much anxious thought to this matter over the week-end’, Lionel wrote Nicky on 2 June that he did not want to support an application for a year’s leave because he himself would have to take over Kaldor’s teaching, in particular the long General Principles of Economic Analysis course, on top of his existing courses, since he could hardly ask another member to take over for only one year. Having so recently returned to academic life he felt this was ‘too big a sacrifice for me to undertake’. He was prepared to support the proposal for a longer leave, but he warned Nicky the LSE governors might not agree (Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.49, RP). Kaldor therefore applied for a three-year leave. On 24 June the Standing Committee considered the application, which was supported by the Appointments Committee, and decided by a majority not to grant it. Carr-Saunders told Kaldor that Lionel ‘went on supporting [his] application to the end’ (Kaldor to LCR, 28 June 1947, Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.49, RP). Kaldor then applied for a one-year leave and went to spend the summer working for Myrdal in Geneva. Although he had not yet decided to stay longer in Geneva, he suggested that Lionel find another teacher for the Principles course in

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1946/7 – thus leaving Lionel in the uncomfortable position of not knowing how he would have to spend his own summer. Lionel warned Nicky on 18 July (Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.49, RP) that he would not support his new application and at a special meeting of the Appointments Committee on 11 July and in the Standing Committee on 22 July he pointed out that an absence of a year would cause ‘considerable difficulties’ for the Economics Department. The governors denied the request and Nicky reluctantly resigned (Kaldor to Carr-Saunders, 21 August 1947, LSE MINUTES 6/28). After the bitter winter, the summer of 1947 was hot. Spending the month of July in London, Lionel wrote to Richard, who was still in Italy, on 27 July: ‘We are in the middle of a heatwave & for the greater part of the day I have done nothing but lie more or less prostrate & completely naked on my bed upstairs. I have read a book by K. Clark on Leonardo da Vinci, it is true; but that is so easy to read that I turned to it spontaneously rather than to the detective story which was the other alternative.’ But on other equally hot days he was working very hard in case he had to give the Principles lectures. ‘I hate the thought of all the work involved particularly the repeat lectures in the evenings. But I am beginning to be interested again in this part of the subject & if I have to lecture on it it is not out of the question that I shall turn the lectures into a book.’ A week later he had been reading ‘a German work on Principles of Economics which promises to be of considerable help to me in my lectures next year’ – presumably Walter Eucken’s Die Grundlagen der National¨okonomie (see Chapter 19) – and he had retrieved a copy of his prewar Principles notes from Stanley Dennison. He admitted to Frank Knight: ‘Had I life enough and time, I should enjoy it, for after this interval it has all the interest of comparative novelty. But I work slowly’ (LCR to Dennison, 28 and 30 July, LCR to Knight, 31 July 1947, Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP). The summer was a time of economic and financial crisis, just as Lionel had feared. During the first half of 1947 the current account of the balance of payments was deteriorating: aggregate demand and consumers’ expenditure were rising, partly because of expansionary monetary policy; imports were rising rapidly, only partly because of rising import prices; and the rapid export growth of 1946 had slowed down (Howson 1993, 184–5). The Anglo-American Financial Agreement committed the UK to restore full convertibility of sterling for current account transactions one year from the date the agreement came into force and hence on 15 July 1947. In a piece on ‘The economic outlook’ for the Sunday Times on 6 July (1947b) Robbins noted that already half the American loan had been drawn and

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that if present trends – slow growing exports and fast rising imports – continued the loan could soon be exhausted. The fuel crisis could be blamed only for some of the lag in exports. ‘The plain fact is that in our present straitened circumstances we are aiming at more than we are willing or able to perform. . . . [W]e cannot hope at once to increase exports by 75 per cent, to raise consumption and to carry through the vast programmes of housing and capital development which are now being attempted.’ As well as pruning ambitious investment programmes, the government should raise taxation to reduce consumption, cut government expenditure and budget for a surplus. ‘Hence’, he concluded, ‘in the anxious months that lie ahead, our hopes and fears must be concentrated more than usually on the Chancellor of the Exchequer. For on him, to a greater extent than as yet he has been willing to acknowledge, or perhaps even to realise, depends our main hope of coming through without something like major disaster.’ Douglas Jay, now a Labour MP and a financial journalist for The Economist and the Daily Herald in the 1930s, wrote a letter in reply, which was published on 13 July. He agreed that greater efforts had to be made to achieve external balance but disagreed that they should be made by ‘clumsy financial controls’ rather than ‘much more accurate physical ones’. He also did not think exports could be increased as much as Robbins hoped and recommended drastic import restrictions. Lionel did not think much of this defence of government policy and wrote a counterreply, in which (as he described it to George Schwartz on 16 July) ‘I adopted my best come-now-let-us-reasontogether manner & pretended to take him very seriously.’ As a result, he told Richard on 27 July, Jay sent him ‘a private letter this week to say that we don’t really disagree very much’! Meanwhile, ‘the position gets worse, the government does nothing & the prospect of running through our dollars before the winter is out becomes more & more menacing. . . . I suppose in the end we shall come to our senses. But not before we have had some very bad shocks & passed through some quite grisly experiences.’30 The dollar drain had accelerated as soon as sterling was made convertible. When Lionel wrote to Austin Robinson on 31 July he wondered: ‘Does not the present rate of withdrawal from the dollar fund mean that the thing which Maynard always dreaded most has actually come true and that somebody at the Treasury or the Bank has failed to make proper provision 30

LCR’s letters to the editor of the Sunday Times and to Schwartz are in Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP. Jay was probably quite truthful in claiming he agreed with LCR, judging by the initiatives he took when he became Economic Secretary to the Treasury in December 1947 (Howson 1993, 211, 224–5). LCR had known Jay since he was an undergraduate at New College in 1926–9 (Jay 1980, 32–4).

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to stop some leakage on capital account? I well remember that on many occasions Maynard said to me that if the then current ideas of how to deal with the sterling creditors and Europe were to prevail we should be involved in a colossal disaster “ten times as great as 1931”’ (Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP). When he wrote to Richard on 4 August, he was even more explicit: It has been a disturbing week. . . . On Wednesday it was announced that we had drawn another £75,000,000 of the American loan making some £432,000,000 since March. This is out of all relation to our day to day needs & it appears that we must have been allowing capital withdrawals to Egypt & Spain & such like places – a most incredible piece of folly. This stirred me up very much. It brought back all the struggles and apprehensions of the Washington negotiations, for I suspect that the leakage is due to a technical blunder against which Keynes & I warned the powers that be again & again. I have written a very cautious letter to the Times [on 31 July] asking for more information, and I have induced Alex Spearman to put down questions to the Chancellor driving the inquiry home.

Spearman asked the questions in the House of Commons on 5 August. Dalton responded that he would prefer to reply in the Debate on the State of the Nation which was to open the next day (HCDebs vol 441 cols 1288, 1290). Robbins was quite right to suspect capital outflows were running down the reserves – but the government did not admit it explicitly at the time. For many months, especially since Keynes’s death, he had been worried that the Bank of England with the acquiescence of the Treasury was making unduly generous agreements with the holders of sterling balances which went against the spirit if not strictly the letter of the commitments the government had made in the Anglo-American Financial Agreement. As he knew, his worries were shared by Meade and by Brand, who was still in Washington. They did not trust the Bank or Eady, Alec Grant and Otto Clarke in the Treasury; Brand suggested Lionel might talk to Bridges (COD, 290; Brand to LCR, 3 July 1946, CORRESPONDENCE, RP). But Lionel did not think he should try to exploit wartime friendships to influence the Treasury – although he did wonder from time to time whether he should exploit an older friendship and contact Dalton himself to remind him of Keynes’s fears (LCR to Dalton, 10 November 1947, Miscellaneous Correspondence, RP). Since the US ratification of the loan agreement in July 1946 the Bank and the Treasury had been negotiating supplementary payments agreements with Argentina and several other countries providing them with ‘transferable accounts’ from which sterling could be transferred into other countries’ transferable accounts or into already convertible ‘American accounts’. At

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least one of these countries, namely Belgium, had taken advantage of this convertibility before July 1947, which led the Treasury, and outside commentators, to hope that the date for general convertibility under the loan agreement would not intensify reserve losses. The date came and the dollar drain accelerated. The vague figures Dalton gave the House on 7 August were not reassuring. The authorities themselves did not have accurate estimates of capital movements or other components of the balance of payments (Cairncross 1985, 152–62; Pimlott 1985, 482–4). The suspension of sterling convertibility was announced on 20 August, while Iris and Lionel were on holiday in Zermatt, Switzerland, after a mission to Washington led by Eady had succeeded in negotiating the avoidance of legal default on the loan agreement. As Fforde (1992, 159) commented, ‘For the exhausted Eady the crisis was the peak of his career.’ In September, on holiday with Iris and Anne in an uncomfortable, badly furnished and flea-infested farmhouse on Anglesey, North Wales, Lionel, who had already been corresponding with Roy Harrod over what Harrod would say about the convertibility crisis in his book (1947), attacking the Labour government’s economic policies, was preoccupied with writing a long article for Lloyds Bank Review (Harrod to LCR, 10 August, and LCR to Graham Hutton, 2 October 1947, Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP). He told his son on 30 September: ‘It was about the economic crisis and whether it was because I was worked up at the unnecessary wreckage of so many of the plans I myself had helped to concoct or whether it was because of an intrinsic difficulty in the exposition of the subject, it took me much longer than I expected & took much more out of me. I don’t remember writing anything which made quite such demands on my nervous energy.’ ‘Inquest on the crisis’, which appeared on 17 October, is one of Robbins’s most powerful articles and one of the most cogent analyses of the causes of the crisis. The editor thought it was ‘both in matter and form, on a par with Keynes, and is easily the best article we have ever had in LLOYDS BANK REVIEW’. It attracted extensive press comment, invariably complimentary, even from those, like The Collery Guardian, which had been critical of his earlier pieces.31 With hindsight its opening paragraph (Robbins 1947d, 1) seems over-dramatic: ‘It may be remembered that, when Mr. Churchill addressed the House of Commons on the morrow of the Munich agreement [in 1938], the first thing he emphasized was that we had suffered a major defeat. Similarly, in any review of the present crisis, the first thing that must be stated 31

Bundle of clippings labelled ‘Lloyds Bank Review – October 1947 Inquest on the Crisis’, which includes Parker to LCR, 3 October 1947, RP.

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is that we are victims of a dreadful catastrophe. . . . It is the biggest disaster in our long economic history.’ But that the Labour government would take the drastic measures it took under a new Chancellor of the Exchequer in the autumn could not then be foreseen. The US European Recovery Programme suggested by Secretary of State General Marshall in June was still only in the planning stage. At the beginning of 1948 Robbins told Knight that he thought it ‘quite probable’ there might be another balance-of-payments crisis that year (Letters to and from Economists 1.1.47–31/12/48, RP). He began with the question: ‘How comes it that loans which were expected to last five years should have been nearly used up in just over a twelvemonth?’ Before surveying the possible answers, he defended the loans, since it was now natural to ask whether it had been worth taking them in the first place. As in 1945 he could not see a rational alternative. Hence, ‘I shall continue to assume that the main question we have to answer is, not whether it was wise to borrow, but rather why, having borrowed, we so quickly found ourselves in so parlous a position? Why have we run through the loans so quickly?’ In seeking an answer, he conceded the effects of adverse external factors, such as the rapid postwar rise in primary product prices and the depressed conditions in continental European countries, and stressed the ramifications of the coal shortage. But he now squarely blamed the government for unduly expansionary macroeconomic policy and for allowing capital outflows not required under the terms of the loan agreement. The inflationary aspects of current macroeconomic policy were twofold: the investment programme was too ambitious; and interest rates had been too low under the cheap money policy. The resulting strong domestic demand deflected resources from production of goods for export. He criticized Dalton and his officials for completely ignoring the implications of domestic financial policy for the balance of payments. ‘All schools [of economists] have united in urging upon the Chancellor the dangers of the situation and the urgent necessity of cutting our coat to suit our cloth. But like Pharaoh of old, with each successive warning the Chancellor has hardened his heart, has reproached friendly critics with wishing to bring about deflation, when all that they urged on him was to prevent inflation, and has proceeded, with sublime insouciance, on the assumption that the foreign balance and internal finance had nothing to do with one another.’ As for capital exports, the using up of the American loan was far greater than the current account deficit; there had to have been a massive leakage of capital. This could not be blamed on the loan agreement because that required convertibility only for current account transactions. So ‘how did it come about that . . . we found ourselves in a position in which we were

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losing capital?’ He noted the payments agreements ‘of bewildering easiness’ made with Argentina and other sterling holders. He noted there could have been transfers of funds out of the sterling area through other countries in the sterling area. He wondered whether the UK exchange controls had in fact been too weak. ‘We are entitled to ask whether there may not have been too great an inclination on the part of the Government to rely on mere gentlemen’s understandings concerning how the right of withdrawal should be exercised, when the situation was one of such peril that the chief danger was not that the gentlemen might be offended if they were not treated as gentlemen but that those who were not gentlemen might take advantage of the privilege if they were treated as they were?’ He did not dwell on the implications for future policy: drastic import restrictions were now inevitable, coal production should be increased, a budget surplus should be achieved by expenditure reductions and tax increases, etc. (The cheap money policy had already been abandoned in the spring.) But he did take the opportunity to express his continued support for the ITO and its rules against discrimination in trade. Robbins’s article was soon used by Liberal and Conservative MPs to attack Dalton. In the Debate on the Address on 24 October (HCDebs vol 42 cols 384–98) Dalton responded that ‘my old pupil, Professor Robbins, a very talented economist’ was ‘not fully informed – that is natural, as he is now no longer in Government service – on some of the subjects on which he writes’. The ‘old pupil’ wrote afterwards to The Times, in a letter published on 27 October, not so much to defend his article, because he had not offered any estimates there, but to take issue with Dalton’s interpretation of the figures he had given in the debate. Waldron Smithers, Conservative MP for Orpington, also used the article, recommending all members to read it. Lionel took exception to his further comment that ‘I am glad that the London School of Economics had produced one professor who did not come under the influence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’ and wrote to point out that Smithers was being unjust to his colleagues and to the School. Smithers had written to Robbins before the debate, asking for guidance in putting questions to the Chancellor, and Robbins had obliged, but Smithers did not receive his reply in time. Robbins advised him that he should ask a simple question, ‘what was the size of our adverse balance on current account in the period January/August, 1947, and what was the magnitude of our net drawings on the American and Canadian loans?’ He might also ask Dalton to distinguish between categories of capital exports. Smithers duly asked these questions on 30 October. Dalton’s immediate answer was a current account deficit for January–June 1947 of £350 m and drawings on

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the American and Canadian loans for January–August 1947 of £682 m and £65 m respectively. In a written answer he claimed that it was impossible to answer the second question.32 Dalton also wrote to Lionel, apparently somewhat apologetically. In a long reply on 10 November (Miscellaneous Correspondence, RP) Lionel told Dalton what he would have recommended if he had still been an official adviser in July 1946. He would have told the sterling creditors that their balances had to be blocked but would be repaid at a rate of 1 per cent per annum (plus perhaps a token rate of interest) beginning at the same time as Britain’s repayments of the US loan and subject to the same waiver arrangements and could be repaid sooner to creditors who followed the US and Canadian example of scaling down the debt. He would have recommended this even though he was well aware of the ‘howl of indignation’ that would have arisen and of the political difficulties with India and Egypt, for on the one hand it would have been an honest declaration of inability to pay all the debts and on the other the government could have subsequently offered India and Egypt special assistance. He still thought this would be advisable in the autumn of 1947. As he told Oscar Hobson on 29 October (Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP), ‘When . . . we come to talk about the morality of the matter, I think we have to consider not only the exact degree of our obligations in respect of balances which are often largely made up of payments for services such as digging trenches round Alexandria, but also of the honourable obligations which we entered into with the United States.’33 Dalton introduced a supplementary budget which brought in some of the necessary measures on 12 November. They included a ceiling on the cost-of-living subsidies and increases in purchase tax and profits tax and in the duties on beer, wine and spirits and helped to produce a budget surplus for the 1947/8 fiscal year of £636 m rather than the 1946/7 deficit of £586 m (Howson 1993, 164–6). The next day he resigned, over an inadvertent leak 32

33

Smithers to LCR, 19, 25 and 31 October, LCR to Smithers, 23 and 28 October 1947, Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP; HCDebs vol 442 cols 435–6, vol 443 col 268. Hobson thought LCR was inclined to exaggerate the leakage of capital. Lionel admitted in another letter to Hobson (17 October): ‘Of course . . . my feelings are complicated by the fact that I do privately believe that there has been very bad management in this particular respect. I cannot believe that the drain could have happened if Keynes had been there to look after the spending of this money. I know that he designed as the coping stone of his financial edifice the creation of safeguards which would have done much to make it impossible, and I feel sore and bitter that the men he left behind have carried on the tradition with so little imagination and resource.’

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of some of the contents of the budget. Cripps, who had been Minister of Eonomic Affairs since March, succeeded him. Dalton and Robbins remained on friendly personal terms; once Dalton was out of office they met and corresponded as they had in the 1930s. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, Ludwig von Mises used the opportunity of Robbins’s sending him copies of his Marshall Lectures and his Lloyds Bank Review article to attack him. In an extraordinarily confused and rambling letter sent on 12 November, he first made it clear he disapproved of Robbins’s acceptance of exchange control and of restrictions on sterling balances accumulated during the war – while at the same time saying he would not challenge these – and then claimed that Robbins had ‘declare[d] that the Americans had grossly violated, if not the letter, then certainly the spirit of current account convertibility’ – this apparently because of Robbins’s criticism of the UK authorities’ reliance on gentlemen’s agreements to prevent withdrawals beyond those required by current account convertibility. Here Robbins had, according to Mises, ‘shifted the discussion from the field of a dispassionate economic inquiry into the field of moral indictment’ by accusing Americans of ungentlemanlike conduct. He was scandalized that ‘you, the British nation’s outstanding economist, find fault with a provision of the loan agreement the only purpose of which was to remove one of the barriers to trade between the two countries. Having in all the years of my career vehemently fought the widespread myth that free trade and the gold standard are cunning devices of “perfidious Albion” to exploit and to cheat gullible foreign peoples, I must protest . . . ’ And so on and so forth. Lionel was understandably upset. He defended himself vigorously on 27 November: [Y]ou must realise that you accuse me of doing exactly the opposite of what for the last six years I have felt myself under the most pressing obligation to do, and what, up to the date of receiving your letter I imagined I had done pretty well, namely, on every possible occasion, private as well as public, to defend the precious fabric of Anglo-American relations. . . . I am confident that if you were to enquire, either in Washington or London, you would find that this claim is not unjustified; and you would certainly find that, over here, since Keynes’ death, I should be regarded as one of the chief apologists for the Loan Agreement . . . Even when I was an anonymous civil servant I have been accused of undue partiality to the American point of view. I have been attacked . . . ‘for selling out to America.’ I have been accused of rabid Americanophilia. But, never before have I been reproached for attacking the Loan Agreement or for statements derogatory to America. I do beseech you to believe that . . . your strictures rest on a complete misconception.

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It was little use. In another long though slightly more polite letter of 27 December, Mises claimed Robbins was advancing ‘a new argument against current account convertibility’ to add to ‘the old mercantilist list of the evils of free trade and the gold standard’. Lionel started to draft another reply but he did not send it (Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47–31/12/48, RP). When Mises’s magnum opus, Human Action (1949), appeared, Lionel was relieved that the more sympathetic Lachmann was reviewing it for Economica. He told Lachmann on 15 February 1950 (Letters to and from Economists 1 January 1949–August 1950, RP) that, while he agreed it was a major work, ‘I still beg to think it has superficial faults – intolerance towards those he disagrees with and sometimes what those who do not know him will appear to be wilful misunderstanding, which may prevent it having the hearing it deserves. Moreover, I completely agree with you that he commits the major error of identifying the logic of choice with the whole field of economic action.’

NINETEEN

The End of the Transition

By the time Mises wrote to Robbins in November 1947 the Michaelmas term was well underway. With ‘the curse of Kaldor’ (as he described it to Kaldor on 22 October 1948 [Kaldor NK7/2/12]) upon him, Robbins was delivering Principles lectures four times a week (Wednesday and Friday mornings and Tuesday and Thursday evenings) as well as The Theory of Economic Policy on Friday evenings. Other mornings were taken up with correspondence and academic chores, afternoons with committees and his dozen graduate students as well as the seminar. He was worried about his father, who had collapsed while working in his garden one day in October (ICR to LCR, 7 October 1947). By December he ‘looked so end-of-termish and preoccupied’ when Norman Chester saw him at the Reform Club, that Chester could not bring himself to ask Robbins for his promised contribution to a volume on the war economy (Chester 1951). He told Chester he was ‘living the life of a monk . . . [not] the kind of life I intended to lead when I left the public service’.1 He wrote an equally gloomy letter to Caroline’s husband, Joe Herben, on 27 December. Thanking him for a present of cigars, as well as for earlier gifts which had helped to sustain the standards of consumption of the Robbins household since 1940, he would not volunteer to do the same for Joe some day, ‘for that would imply that the U.S. (which is the hope of the world) would also have to go through this valley of the shadow of frustration & mediocrity – which God forbid’! He was not optimistic about Britain’s immediate future in spite of the possibility of Marshall Aid. One of the few 1

Chester to LCR, 13 December, LCR to Chester, 17 December 1947, Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47–31/12/48, RP. LCR had promised to write on the role of the economist in government. He never delivered the paper, although six months later he was still intending to, writing to Norman Brook on 23 June 1948 to obtain a copy of his memorandum for the Machinery of Government committee in 1943 (Miscellaneous Correspondence, RP; see Chapter 13).

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bright spots on the horizon was that Richard should be demobilized by the spring and would go up to New College in the autumn, after a spell as an art student at Goldsmiths where his uncle Clive was teaching. Fortunately for Lionel, Iris and Anne insisted he should have a short seaside holiday in Brighton before the new term: as he told Chester on 16 January (Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47–31/12/48, RP), ‘They could not prevent me from working, but they managed to get a good deal of fresh air into my lungs.’ Robbins gave the Principles lectures for three years. He kept Kaldor’s description of the course in the LSE Calendar – ‘the general principles of the theory of value and distribution, money, employment and fluctuations’ – and most of his reading list – Marshall’s Principles, Wicksell’s Lectures, Boulding’s Economic Analysis (1941), Stigler’s Theory of Competitive Price (1942), Fisher’s Theory of Interest and Keynes’s Treatise and General Theory – adding Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, Robertson’s Money and (in 1948/9) Walter Eucken’s Grundlagen der National¨okonomie and the AEA Readings in Business Cycle Theory (1944) and Readings in the Theory of Income Distribution (l946). Robbins had met Eucken of the University of Freiburg at the Mont Pelerin meeting. Invited to give the University of London Special Lectures in Economics at the School in 1948/9, Eucken came in March 1950, contracted influenza and died as he was getting ready to deliver the last lecture.2 Lionel had learned of the AEA series when he was asked for permission to include his article ‘On the elasticity of demand for income in terms of effort’ (1930c): he responded by asking for a sizeable fee and Fritz Machlup had to write to him on 29 January 1946 to explain the nature of the series (Machlup 61–1). As American academic books were hard to obtain in early postwar Britain, Lionel wrote to Machlup in 1948 ‘in the usual British role of supplicant for Lend-Lease assistance, a part I am getting very sick of having to perform these days’, asking him if he could persuade the publishers to send him a copy of Readings in the Social Control of Industry (1949). He had asked Hayek, when he was in the States in 1946, to obtain Stigler’s Production and Distribution Theories (1941), and he took up the offer made by the Foundation for Economic Education after the Mont Pelerin conference to provide ‘liberal literature’ for British and European liberals, to obtain (among other items) von Neumann and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour 2

LCR to Eucken, 17 July 1947, Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47, RP; Miss Beven to Albert Hunold, 28 March 1950, Mont Pelerin Society Box 2. Eucken’s Grundlagen, first published in 1940, was translated by Terence Hutchison (Eucken 1950); his LSE lectures were published with an introduction by John Jewkes (Eucken 1951).

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(1944) and Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947).3 As for Stigler’s textbook, he told Stigler on 17 December 1947 (Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47–31/12/48, RP): ‘When sixty copies . . . were placed on the table in the School bookshop . . . having been gathered together with infinite pains by the management of that bookshop, the students sallied forth from the main building like bees issuing from a hive to a newly discovered jam pot, and the entire stock was exhausted within an hour.’ As in the 1930s Robbins began his Principles course with three lectures on the historical background and the subject matter of economics. But instead of a division of price theory into statics, comparative statics and dynamics, his new principle of division, following Eucken, was ‘a) The centrally planned economy b) Exchange economy’; the former assumed no markets or money and thus used a Crusoe-type analysis. He also included macroeconomics. Judging from student notes,4 he assumed more technical sophistication on students’ part than he had in the 1930s but this may have been the result of compressing the microeconomics into two terms. The microeconomic content was not very different from that of the later prewar lectures, including as they did the innovations made by Hicks and Allen, Lerner, Joan Robinson and others in the 1930s: indifference curve analysis, isoproduct curves, monopoly, oligopoly, imperfect competition etc. It is easy to understand why students were so eager to get hold of Stigler’s textbook: it was used extensively in the lectures and students were frequently referred to it. In its first edition, however, it covered only ‘the usual introductory material on methodology and the theory of competition’, so that students wanting a textbook treatment of monopoly and imperfect competition had to read Boulding (1941). But Robbins also provided detailed references to relevant journal articles at the end of each of his lectures. In macroeconomics he covered the quantity theory, especially the cash balance approach; the nature of savings and investment; classical and liquidity preference theories of interest; the consumption function and the multiplier; the IS-LM model; and economic fluctuations, in that order. For 1947/8 he only had time, in his final lecture on 2 June, to provide a sketchy outline of three theories of the trade cycle: the pure monetary theory, the psychological theory and underinvestment. Anne Robbins attended her father’s Principles lectures in 1947/8, as did several of her friends from UCL, whom she also used to take home for tea on 3

4

LCR to Machlup, 15 March 1948, Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47–30/12/48; LCR to Hayek, 29 April 1946, Leonard Read to LCR, 14 April 1947, Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47; LCR to Read, 21 November 1947, Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47–31/12/48, RP. Anne Robbins, ‘ROBBINS Analysis’ [1947/8].

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Sundays. Another UCL student (Newman 2000, 707) remembered them: ‘They were not really great lectures, possibly because he was still recovering from the excitements and exhaustion of his wartime role as an economic adviser. But I still vividly remember a day when he spoke of the visit of the “aged Cassel” to LSE in the 1920s, to lecture on Fundamental Thoughts in Economics. As he recalled this event on the lecture platform, this massively lion-headed large-gestured man Robbins slowly shrank before our eyes to become small, elderly, fussy, a minor character out of Ibsen or Chekhov.’ For one of the LSE students (Wiseman 1989, 12) these were ‘the first of his lectures I attended. It was a skilful performance; how skilful I fully appreciated only after I became a teacher myself. For perhaps forty minutes, the fundamentals of the topic were laid out in a generally accessible fashion. In the last ten minutes, we were taken on a brisk tour of the frontiers of knowledge, so that the budding specialists took away a perception of the things they needed to know more about.’ Stigler visited LSE in March 1948 to give five public lectures (Stigler 1949), which he called ‘The Transmogrification of Economics’ as they were on disparate topics such as classical economics, monopolistic competition and the mathematical method in economics. Afterwards Lionel told him that the ‘universal opinion’ was that they were the best for the last eighteen years (Stigler to LCR, 5 January, LCR to Stigler, 22 March 1948, Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47–31/12/48, RP). Lionel was also looking forward to Frank Knight’s visit for the Summer term, when, given the shortage of accommodation in London, he and Iris offered to put him up at Meadway Close. He was hoping Knight would follow Viner’s example and give a couple of short courses of lectures and attend the graduate seminar; Knight had agreed on 11 February (Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47–30/12/48, RP). For that year Lionel had decided the seminar should concentrate on various applied problems in international economics and he was planning that the last two papers on commodity policy and on international investment would be discussed during Knight’s visit (ms note in Seminar Papers II, RP).5 The following year, as a result of his return to lecturing on Principles, he wanted the seminar to focus on ‘Unsettled problems of theoretical economics’, especially value theory, where he envisaged discussion and comparison of the 1930s and more recent literature (‘Seminar. 48–49. Unsettled problems of theoretical economics’, Seminar Papers II, RP). It cannot have been entirely successful; a year later he ‘proposed to run this seminar on 5

The two papers were given by Puey Ungphakorn, an undergraduate at LSE during the war and now a PhD student of LCR’s, and J.S.G. Wilson, an Australian research student working under Plant’s supervision, who was appointed to a lectureship in 1948.

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lines somewhat different from those which have prevailed recently’: after a paper on ‘Recent developments in economic theory’ by a professor visiting from the University of Copenhagen, the graduate students would give papers on topics connected with their own research (General economics seminar, Session 1949–50, 26 October 1949, Seminar Papers II, RP). One result of Robbins’s taking over the Principles course was that the economics courses required of all BSc(Econ) students in their second year comprised forty lectures on Principles from Robbins, ten on the structure of industry from Plant and twenty on labour from Phelps Brown, and in their third year twenty on international economics (Meade), ten on national income and finance (Tress) and twenty-five on theory of economic policy (Robbins). As he asked his colleagues on 11 February 1948, ‘Is there not too much Robbins?’ He also asked them if there were not too little applied economics, especially since the loss of Arthur Lewis’s course on the world economy since 1919 (A note on problems arising in connection with next year’s programme of lectures and classes, Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.49, RP). His policy course was therefore dropped, while Sayers provided a course on money and the balance of payments and Phelps Brown offered Problems of Applied Economics. The economic theory courses provided to economics specialists included Baumol on economic dynamics. He had wanted to lecture on the theory of profits but Robbins ‘persuaded’ him otherwise and the lectures resulted in his first book (1951) (information from William Baumol). Lewis’s course became his famous Economic Survey, 1919–1939 (1949), Phelps Brown’s A Course in Applied Economics (1951). When Robbins began to prepare the Principles lectures he put off or declined other writing or lecturing commitments. He agreed, however, to lecture to the Economic Society of Zurich in the Easter vacation of 1948 (and at St Gallen while he was in Switzerland) and to give the annual Finlay Lecture in University College Dublin in May 1948.6 In both countries he spoke on ‘International economic disequilibrium’. He was still concerned about the UK balance of payments, writing to The Times (23 February 1948) pointing out that the latest figures suggested the UK was still wasting scarce dollar resources by allowing excessive capital exports. But while he was concerned that domestic inflation was putting recovery of the current account of the balance of payments at risk, he did not sign a manifesto to that effect which Ralph Hawtrey tried to organize in early 1948. This was because he 6

LCR to W. Bickell, 29 September and 14 October 1947, Letters to and from Economists April 1946–31/10/47; LCR to W.A. Johr, 30 January 1948, George O’Brien to LCR, 22 November, LCR to O’Brien, 9 December 1947, Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47–31/12/48, RP.

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still disliked collaborative efforts after his experience with Beveridge’s Tariffs (1931b) and because Hawtrey’s draft exclusively emphasized Hawtrey’s favourite remedy for inflation (dear money).7 Writing to The Times again on 31 March, he urged that Stafford Cripps’s first budget should produce a large surplus – which it did, although Cripps had not raised taxation much, Dalton having done so in his last budget (Howson 1993, 105 and 216). In his lectures (tss in Speeches & Articles on Public Affairs Postwar, RP) he explained that by international economic disequilibrium he meant imbalance in the balance of payments. While it was hardly surprising that there should be disequilibrium after a major war, it was surprising that there had been so little progress towards equilibrium in three years since the war. Or, to put the question another way, ‘Why is there a dollar shortage? Why a dearth of means to buy American exports?’ This was paradoxical: alluding to Keynes’s 1946 argument that a postwar dollar shortage was improbable, he pointed out that the circumstances in which such a shortage might occur, namely a severe US depression and the collapse of US lending, were the exact opposite of the current situation. In answering the question it was not sufficient to use special explanations such as bad harvests for there was ‘one circumstance more widespread in its occurrence’, namely, inflation. Inflation, by which he meant ‘increases in the volume of spending incommensurate with increases in productivity’ rather than rising prices ‘which are a symptom rather than a cause’, would adversely affect the balance of payments even when prices and imports were controlled. It ‘means, in effect, a continual pull from the home market on the resources (the men, the materials, the capacity) which otherwise would have been available for production for export. I have no doubt at all that this is what has happened in Great Britain, and I strongly suspect that it is the explanation of what has happened elsewhere.’ If he was correct in this, Marshall Aid would only provide a breathing space; the recipients must use it to put their own houses in order and their first duty was therefore ‘to STOP INFLATION’. If it was desired to avoid higher interest rates there was the method of the budget surplus. But that was just the first step. If deflation in deficit countries was ruled out, as it should be, then sooner or later some exchange rates would have to change. At present it was impossible to estimate appropriate exchange rates; a deficit country should not contemplate exchange-rate adjustment as long as it could sell extra exports. Moreover, the IMF should be brought 7

Hawtrey to LCR, 30 January and 10 February 1948, Anti-inflation meeting 12th February, Draft for basis of discussion, The menace of inflation, HTRY 6/6/6, Hawtrey Papers, Churchill College Cambridge; Hawtrey to LCR, 18 February, Anti-inflation Manifesto, Second Draft, The Menace of Inflation, LCR to Hawtrey, 25 February 1948, Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47–31/12/48, RP.

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into play; although it had been of little use so far, he still believed it was ‘indispensable’. He also still believed there was a need for an international trade organization to lower trade barriers. Having found ‘this session especially burdensome . . . what with anxiety about the Pater & the general bloodiness of the public outlook here’, he enjoyed his Easter travels. ‘My Swiss trip was a pleasant change . . . I lectured at St Gallen & Zurich and then stayed a few days at the lat[t]er place with some friends [Albert Hunold and his wife] who have a villa by the lake. The weather was lovely & I had three days’ quite delicious laziness basking on the terrace or dawdling about in the town looking at shops & eating ice meringues etc in coffee houses. I also visited the wonderful collection of impressionist art of Oskar Reinhart [in the gallery annex of his home] at Winterthur & saw quite a good performance in German of Peer Gynt.’ Since his sister Caroline had recently sent him a new suit, ‘it was really quite a change for once again to be the well dressed Englishman abroad.’8 Frank Knight had arrived in London on 2 April. When Lionel returned from Switzerland Iris and Anne went away for a short holiday, leaving Lionel and Knight with Richard, who was now demobilized and attending art school. In this all male establishment Richard was cook and, Lionel told Caroline on 2 May, ‘has looked after us very well’. Lionel was reminded of the visit when Knight was in London again in 1965 and Lionel found him ‘now just on eighty, still the same cross between a sage & a mixedup kid’ (LCR to ICR, 21 September 1965). One weekend Lionel accompanied Knight to a meeting in Oxford of the Carlyle Club, a private dining club, where they stayed at All Souls. He reported to Caroline that he and A.L. Rowse were ‘now on the best of terms’. As his sister knew, her fellow historian, who had taught parttime at the School in 1931–5, had savagely attacked the LSE economists in the 1930s for their rightwing views (Rowse 1979, 193–7); on 6 September 1947, after she had been visiting Rowse in Cornwall, she had passed on ‘a special message . . . from Leslie Rowse who announces he now thinks as you do and hopes you’ll write more letters to the Times and generally missionarise these troubled peoples’! Lionel told her: I went up to him before dinner & said how nice it was to meet after all these years. After dinner he invited me to take a turn round the quad & informed me (very handsomely I must say) that he had come to believe that on some of the points on which we differed in the old days he had now come round to my way of thinking. I think this was very decent of him. Whether he is now more right than he was then I shouldn’t like to say, everything in this funny world being so much open to 8

LCR to ICR, 16 February and 2 May 1948; LCR to Hunold, 19 December 1947 and 8 April 1948, Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47–30/12/48, RP; Frehner and Frehner (1993, 9–11).

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question but it’s not often you meet anyone who has the guts to say that he was mistaken, especially when the mistakes if they were mistakes involved such frontal attacks on his opponents. I was very bucked & wrote to him afterwards sending him a copy of my Cambridge lectures. We then had a good time cursing our mutual enemies.9

The Robbinses took their family holiday at Charmouth near Lyme Regis, from which Lionel left to embark on the Queen Elizabeth on 9 July. On arrival in New York he went immediately to Ithan to stay with Caroline and Joe, where Frank Lee, now back in Washington, joined them for the weekend (LCR to Lee, 24 June 1948, Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47– 31/12/48, RP). He did not keep a diary of his trip, which he later regretted. From surviving letters and later comments it is clear that he did not enjoy the transatlantic voyage without his wartime companions, being obliged to take three meals a day with uninteresting people. He also had an inside cabin, ‘like being in the belly of a whale, a claustrophobic horror’ (Journal of a visit to the United States July-August 1949, American Journals Oct 48 1949 1950, RP). When he wrote a note of his impressions (mainly of US politics, the Democratic convention having opened the night he arrived) for friends in Whitehall, he said little about the meetings of the IBRD Advisory Council, which had not been useful. But he was encouraged by what he saw of the World Bank in operation. He thought it was fortunate the Bank was relegated to a subordinate role in postwar reconstruction and began lending only on a small scale; he also thought it was fortunate John McCloy was its president (Notes on a visit to the US, October 1948, American Journals Oct 48 1949 1950, RP). The Advisory Council laboured under the disadvantage of its membership, as he explained a year later (Journal of a visit to the United States JulyAugust 1949). ‘At Bretton Woods there was a school of thought, comprised largely of the less responsible New Dealers, which pressed very strongly for representation on the governing body of the Bank of other functional bodies, such as the Food and Agricultural Organization and the International Labour Office. To yield to this pressure was rightly thought to be very undesirable. But as a compromise it was suggested that the functional principle might find adequate expression in an advisory body whose membership should be chosen as far as possible to include representatives of Labour, Agriculture, Science, Industry, Finance, and so on. Hence the present Council.’ He could not see how such a body could formulate policy 9

Four years later Rowse wrote privately to enquire if Lionel would be willing to accept the Drummond Chair of Political Economy which carried a fellowship at All Souls (16 January 1952, Special Letters, RP).

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on economic and financial matters, meeting only once a year, even if ‘all the personalities concerned were of the most accommodating nature’. Two members of the group were particularly difficult: Michal Kalecki, whom he well remembered from the seminar in the 1930s (see Chapter 9), and the Indian physicist Sir Venkata Raman, who represented ‘science’.10 ‘Between them . . . these two completely wrecked our deliberations. They talked more than all the other members of the committee put together. They interrupted. They shouted. They obstructed. When, after great labours, [Sir Arthur] Salter [the chairman] had produced a draft report [which Lionel had helped to draft] they utterly refused even to discuss it; and since, for reasons of publicity, the Bank Authorities did not want us to present the appearance of divided counsels, we adjourned without producing anything.’ As he told Iris on 26 July 1948, The proceedings . . . ended in the most fearful fiasco. Salter had spent himself on a draft report & we expected all but one to accept it with acclamation. But the wretched Indian behaved like a prima donna & because certain words of his were in inverted commas refused to discuss the draft at all & threatened a minority report with Kalecki the Bolshevik pole. In the end we agreed simply to report the minutes of our discussion which suited me very well but was a bad slap in the face for Salter who behaved magnificently but was inwardly very disappointed.

After another weekend at Ithan Lionel returned to Washington for talks with several of his ‘good many friends and ex-pupils at different levels in the Bank’ and the Fund (Notes on a visit to the US). Washington was as hot and humid as it usually is in July: Lionel did not mind as he was not trying to do serious intellectual work. At Ithan he enjoyed reading W.H. Auden’s long wartime poem The Age of Anxiety (LCR to IER, 27 August 1948). He went to Princeton to stay with the Viners, who made him very welcome. Princeton was ‘a truly beautiful town – one of the few unspoilt university towns in the world. . . . The University is the one industry & all round are the lovely houses & gardens of teachers & wealthy alumni. Trees & greenery everywhere. . . . I can think of few spots on earth more conducive to work & meditation.’ Hence, when the Institute of Advanced Study offered an invitation to visit for a few weeks or months in 1949, he took it seriously and mentioned it to Joseph Willits of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York a few days later; Willits immediately offered financial assistance (LCR to IER, 2 and 3 August 1948). Lionel spent four days in New York, lunching 10

The other members were two Americans Edward E. Brown and Herbert Hoover representing ‘banking interests’ and ‘commerce’, a Canadian, R. Dickson Harknes, ‘industry’, Leon Jouhaux of France ‘labour’, Pedro Baltran of Peru ‘agriculture’ and S.K. Szo of China ‘other activities’; LCR was described as ‘economist’ (The Times, 17 September 1947).

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or dining with, among others, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Philip Cortney the president of the cosmetics manufacturers Coty, John Davenport of Fortune magazine (Cortney to LCR, 5 August, LCR to Davenport, 21 December 1948, Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47– 31/12/48, RP) and Fritz Machlup. From Machlup he hoped to learn whether their mutual friend Hayek was thinking of moving to the States, because Iris had heard something to that effect from Hayek’s unhappy wife. But, he told Iris on 4 September, there was ‘No word whatever of F.A.H. . . . I am inclined to think that if F. is thinking of migrating it cannot be either to Princeton or at Baltimore [ie Johns Hopkins, where Machlup was now teaching]. But the complete absence of mention of him at either of the two places (save in connection with purely scholarly or literary activities) does suggest to me a certain reserve about something’, especially because Hayek had recently visited both Machlup and Viner. After an uneventful voyage, when he found his cabin hotter than hotel rooms in Washington and New York, thanks to the Gulf Stream, but his table companions much less tedious than those on the outward voyage, Lionel arrived home to ‘unutterable confusion’ at Meadway Close. Builders had been working on the house. When his new study was completed a few days later, he spent the weekend ‘in the enthralling occupation of sorting & arranging 4 or 5 thousand books & pamphlets’ (LCR to ICR, 28 August 1948). There followed a spell of reading and commenting on manuscripts before an end of vacation holiday with Iris at Brighton. He saw Per Jacobsson on one of his frequent visits to London. Jacobsson thought the British public were ‘more rested . . . [and] more kindly’ than they had been on his last visit two years earlier and London looked less shabby – ‘more paint on the houses – clean along the streets – more goods in the shops’ – but he noticed that ‘the people really in the know are not happy’ and were worried about the problems of economic policy, such as the high taxation required for a budget surplus. Salter and Robbins both ‘repeated to me what they had said to the Americans – defending English policy – notwithstanding the Labour government – ’ (Jacobsson Diary 30 September 1948). In the Michaelmas term 1948 Paul Samuelson of MIT visited LSE to give three lectures on welfare economics. Lionel had not met him before and ‘found him much more human & companionable than I had been given to expect’; he also quite liked Samuelson’s textbook (1948), but he admitted to Frank Knight on 22 January 1949 that he hoped to understand Samuelson’s Foundations (1947) ‘in part round about 1952–3’ (Knight Papers 61–17). He also told Knight that the School was at last settling down after the war,

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although the Department was still short of junior staff and he was teaching more than he wished. He had made the term more onerous for himself by giving the address at the School’s annual Oration Day on 26 November. Since he had suggested senior faculty members give these addresses instead of outside speakers as in prewar years, he felt obliged to agree when Webster refused and Tawney asked to be excused (LCR to Carr-Saunders, 12 October 1948, Director Correspondence April 1946-Dec 1954, RP). So, he told Knight, at short notice he had to prepare a talk ‘which should be at once interesting to the young people, to their parents and to solid rows of my own colleagues all dressed up & sitting in the front rows of the [Old] Theatre for the occasion. I have seldom felt so miserable . . . ’ He chose as his topic ‘The economist in the twentieth century’, expatiating on the usefulness of trained economists in the civil service and elsewhere but reminding the students among his listeners that to participate fully in policy discussions they must be more than just economists. ‘If we are to throw helpful light on the great problems of our time, still more if, like Plato’s philosophers, we are from time to time to serve our term of public service, we must be prepared to go beyond our subject. . . . We must study political philosophy . . . public administration . . . law . . . history . . . I would say, too, that we must also study the masterpieces of imaginative literature, that priceless heritage in which the best experience and the best aspirations of the race receive imperishable expression.’ This, he claimed, was the tradition of the London School of Economics and Political Science established by men such as Cannan and Wallas (Robbins 1949b). The year ended sadly, when Iris’s mother died on Christmas Eve. Perhaps the best statement of Lionel’s view of the way his own life was going was that he gave to Harold Laski in January 1949. The draft is annotated: ‘Rough Draft of a letter which is of some importance in my personal history’ (More Recent Personal & Professional History, RP). Laski had suggested Lionel succeed Carr-Saunders as director of LSE. There is a side of my character which is very well pleased with administrative & diplomatic duties. I knew this before the war in a rough way & during the war when I had the opportunity of measuring my powers against many kinds of people who were specialists in this line I realized much more fully that I at once liked this sort of thing & could do it with relative ease. But at the same time there is another part of me which is not at all satisfied with this day to day business – a little imp which sits at the back of my head & says For you this is the line of least resistance. You know the true excellence of a life devoted to learning & speculation & it is possible that you might do something creditable in that line. Yet because you do this kind of thing with facility you are in danger of foregoing the superior opportunity.

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Now my trouble is that I am not quite sure in which direction the remaining years of my life should be passed. This may sound odd at the age of fifty when a man should know fairly well his true potentialities. But I can plead a few extenuating circumstances. I was appointed to my chair obviously unfit for the job so far as book learning or speculative achievement was concerned & being well aware of this I resolved that I would regard it as a solemn duty to give the School all that lay in me of that for which I was really appointed ability to teach & organize a department. I did not realize at the time what sacrifices that might involve if I went ahead full steam in that line. But after ten years i.e. 1939 I was fully aware of the extent to which the precious years of intellectual vigour & resiliency were slipping by with only a small amount of the harvest, whatever its quality, gathered in; if the war had not come I should have asked for a sabbatical year & for reinforcement of the teaching strength & given myself a real chance to discover what I could do in the way of heavy weight scholarship. But the war did come & for six years it was goodbye to all that, nearly every waking moment concentrated on one supreme objective, not at all connected with the literary & scientific ambitions I had cherished hitherto & there were moments when I wondered whether I ought not to liquidate all former investments & to start out anew on a new line; I don’t think it is claiming too much to say that at the end of the war I could have had my pick of a wide range of desirable jobs either in the public service or in business. But all the time the imp at the back of my head was saying – this is really all dust & ashes: you know where your true vocation lies. So, in the end, I was not disobedient to the vision & came back. Alas things never turn out exactly as one plans & since my return I have been involved in so much academic routine & administrative business that I have felt myself much as I did before the war, always desperately trying to keep up & seldom making any real progess. And if the future were to offer nothing more than this I can well see that I should be well advised to become an academic administrator proper or even perhaps leave academic life & try to make for my wife & the children I have brought into this horrible world rather more of the means of a comfortable life. Only the week before last I turned down a very gratifying offer. And yet the question always arises about the talent which is death to hide. Don’t mistake me in this respect. I know well my limitations. I know & have often said that I shall never be a first rate analytical economist in the sense let us say of Edgeworth or John Hicks – for one thing I haven’t the mathematical equipment. But there are various things which I have planned to write which perhaps I could write had I more time which I think might have some value & which it would please me to have written. And I still cling to the hope that when this appalling postwar rush has calmed down, when our teaching strength on the economics side is back to normal & when there are seniors on whom I can devolve duties which I do now – I have much hope of help from Henry Phelps Brown in this respect – I may be able to have a try.

The academic chores included a reform of the BSc(Econ) degree regulations, which Lionel took charge of as chair of the University’s Board of Studies in Economics. It was inevitably time-consuming (Robbins 1971a, 214–15): ‘to induce individual teachers to agree that their particular specialism is not essential for the proper education of all and sundry is sometimes

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a more or less whole-time job.’ Successful academics also usually wish to recreate their own undergraduate experience – Lionel was no exception. The story is interesting, however, both because it reveals his views on university education well before the Committee on Higher Education in the 1960s and because the reform was a disaster and had to be undone within a few years. The process had begun in the Board of Studies in March 1946, with a preliminary discussion mainly on the desirable length of the degree. The consensus then and later was for a three-year rather than a four-year undergraduate degree. Another preliminary discussion in May agreed the BCom should be abolished and merged into the BSc(Econ) (which would have occurred in the 1930s had not Beveridge vetoed the idea). When discussion resumed in the autumn Robbins, having offered to produce a description of the BSc(Econ) before its last major reform, in other words his own undergraduate degree, was also deputed to prepare a statement (which has not survived) of the sort of degree the economists would like to see (Keeble 1985; BSE 20 March, 8 May and 30 October 1946, AC 8/17/2/4, University of London Archives). His own degree had been a broad degree in the social sciences, with economics, political science and history required in all three years for all students. In the 1940s the first year was not very different (except languages were no longer compulsory), but in the second and third years, although some economics and history were required of all students, they had greater scope for specialization. There were thus two common complaints: one that the Intermediate examination required the study of too many different subjects in the first year, the other that there was too much specialization in the second and third years. Lionel may not have sympathized with the first complaint but he did believe students should study political science and history as well as economics in all three years, as he had. After an inconclusive discussion of his paper in December 1946 other views emerged. Carr-Saunders thought the large number (six) of separate subjects to be studied for the Intermediate examination ‘in less than nine months by absorbing lecture notes, assigned readings and so on . . . encouraged, almost forced [the student] to return to the habits’ of high school. He suggested instead: ‘At the end of the first year a test of diligence not to count for the degree; . . . At the end of the second year either Part I of the final examination or another such test. At the end of the third year either Part II or the whole examination.’ Laski similarly thought the Intermediate a bad examination, because it was taken in ‘an overwhelming rush’ by students, and wanted to see a two-year Part I and Part II at the end of the third or fourth year (BSE 11 December 1946, Carr-Saunders, Notes on the reform of the degree, 28.1.47, Laski, Note on the B.Sc.Econ.

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examination, 31 January 1947, AC 8/17/2/4). Robbins managed to get a subcommittee on degree reform appointed but it was nearly a year before he could draft an interim report because of ‘prolonged discussion’ of the Intermediate examination. There had been a ‘strong plea’ for dropping the Intermediate; against this it had been argued that a two-year Part I would leave too little time for specialization. The committee ‘sought to find a way out of this impasse’ and recommended replacing the Intermediate with a one-year Part I requiring economics, economic history and British politics and only one other subject (geography, a language, logic or mathematics) (BSE 5 February and 25 June 1947 and LCR, Report of the sub-committee on the reform of the degrees, 23 January 1948, AC8/17/1/1). The solution was too simple for the Board of Studies. In February 1948 it agreed in principle to the suggestion but asked the subcommittee to continue its deliberations. Again it was almost a year before Lionel drafted another report, attempting to put flesh on the bones of the scheme by specifying the examination subjects for both Parts I and II. The subcommittee ‘attach[ed] great importance’ to a paper in General History in Part I and one on the History of Political Ideas in Part II. It proposed that the Part I examination should be held at the beginning of the second year rather than at the end of the first to allow more time for study and revision. Again the Board of Studies could not come to agreement and adjourned its discussion until the first meeting of the Lent term 1949 (BSE 4 February 1948, LCR, Reform of the degrees B.Sc.(Econ.) and B.Com., 10 December 1948, and Minutes 13.1.48[sic], AC8/17/1/1). Lionel then made a mistake. In the Senior Common Room after the December meeting (the Board of Studies met at LSE) he was persuaded to go for a two-year Part I, as he admitted in a long note he circulated before the January meeting. He ‘put it forward . . . in the hope that, by presenting a possible alternative to the proposals which we have already had before us, it may help to focus discussion in such a way that we may eventually find some resolution of differences which have held us up for several years’. The compulsory subjects in Part I would be principles of economics, applied economics, modern political history, economic history, government, history of political ideas, elementary statistical method, and logic and scientific method. That logic and scientific method should be compulsory was his own proposal: ‘it has always seemed to me that if some statistical method is desirable for all social sciences, so also was some knowledge of scientific method in general’ and ‘I am attracted by the quadrumvirate: Economics, History, Political Science, Statistics and Scientific Method as the basis of subsequent specialization.’ His own prejudices, reflecting his undergraduate

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experience and his teaching for PPE at Oxford, are clear. He was prepared to reduce the amount of economics required to make room for the extra politics and history, and, in a later note, advocated holding the Part II examination after the summer vacation of the third year as he had done himself. If there were a later move to a four-year degree this scheme would provide an easy transition (LCR, Reform of the degrees B.Sc.(Econ.) and B.Com, Note by the Chairman, 12 January, and The problem of the organization of examinations, 4 February 1949, AC8/17/1/1). The January meeting of the Board of Studies set up another larger subcommittee to consider Robbins’s proposals. After two meetings this produced a plan which was essentially Robbins’s (except that logic and scientific method was not compulsory). The Board of Studies accepted the plan, but it took a while to settle the details. The special subjects for Part II incorporated and rationalized the special subjects of the old BCom as well as the old BSc(Econ). The syllabus for Economics Analytical and Descriptive (A & D), the option for the economics specialists in Part II, included the history of economic thought, economic theory, applied economics, public finance and an essay (Reform of the degrees B.Sc.(Econ.) and B.Com. The work of the sub-committee: Report by the Chairman, 3 February, BSE 9 February, 2 March, 4 and 25 May 1949, AC8/17/1/1). The first students to take the new degree would commence in May 1949. Lionel continued to be preoccupied with economic policy problems. Stafford Cripps’s budgets were explicitly related to the published Economic Surveys and used the national income and expenditure forecasts to estimate the inflationary gap and hence the size of the budget surplus required to prevent inflation. In his second budget in April 1949 the intention was to produce a surplus similar to that of the preceding fiscal year; there was little increase in taxation but there was at last a limit on the cost-of-living subsidies which were costing over £400m a year (Dow 1964, 38–41; Howson 1993, 216–21). In a radio broadcast on the budget (1949a) Robbins noted that the 1948/9 financial year afforded ‘an excellent example of the utility of this kind of policy’: a budget surplus of ‘formidable dimensions’ had been deliberately planned and actually realized, with the result that inflationary pressure had eased; he praised Cripps for ‘his courage and his vision’. The policy should be continued for the coming year, and he approved of the size of the planned surplus. However, he went on to argue, as he was to do for the next several years, that this should not be the end of the matter. He was worried (as were many economists in government) that the high taxation required to produce large surpluses was reducing the incentive to take on

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extra work and risktaking. That implied the government should also be cutting back the investment programme and reducing its own expenditure further, including especially that on the subsidies.11 In his concluding remarks on the air Lionel chastised the Conservatives as well as Labour for promising benefits which could only be financed by inflation or increased taxation. A few weeks later, en route to the States and answering questions put to him by Mrs Thomas Lamont (whose son had been at New College and who was travelling on the same ship), he found himself thinking more about his own attitude to the Labour government’s economic policies (Journal of a visit to the United States July-August 1949, American Journals Oct 48 1949 1950, RP). I have no hesitation anywhere in the world, despite my private affection for him, in declaring Dalton to be an evil influence and his tenure of office as Chancellor a disaster. . . . But when one comes to the Cripps period matters are really not so simple. That the policy has been inadequate in that it has failed to avert the present [renewed balance-of-payments] difficulties is all too obvious. But in comparison with financial policy elsewhere at the same time, it cannot be condemned out of hand. Indeed, I am fairly sure that it has been better in many respects than the policy of most other finance ministers. Nor can I feel absolutely sure that the majority of his critics on the right would have done any better. I can think of one who probably would have done (John Anderson). But I am not at all sure about the others. A lack of realism about economic possibilities and proposals has not been a monopoly of one party.

At the School there were some enjoyable academic tasks when Robbins’s first postwar graduate students completed their theses. V.W. Malach had defended in September 1948; David Finch and Morris Miller in early 1949; Will Baumol, Robert Solo (unsuccessfully) and Puey Ungphakorn in the summer (Miss Beven to A.J. Brown, 27 August 1948, Miss Beven to LCR, 7 January 1949, Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.49, RP; Agenda for Professorial Council 20 October 1948, 9 March and 19 October 1949). An unexpected visitor was his fellow undergraduate, C.C. Chien, whom he had not seen for twenty-five years. Chien, head of the Chinese National Resources Commission since the 1930s, was on a tour of Europe to find out about current economic policies and industrial developments; he and Robbins saw a good deal of each other in the two months Chien was in London, at the School and at Meadway Close. Lionel provided him with introductions to several continental European economists. But Chien’s 11

Richard Kahn, who otherwise agreed with most of what Lionel had said, tackled him on 18 April about the disincentive effects of proportionate income taxation, but after an interesting technical correspondence he decided on 31 May that they did not really disagree (Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47–31/12/48, RP).

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visit was cut short by the Communist revolution and he did not return to England before leaving for Hong Kong (LCR to Chien, 21 February, Chien to LCR, 3 May, LCR to Chien, 7 June 1949, Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950 RP). In the Easter vacation Lionel, Dennis Robertson, Austin Robinson and Ralph Hawtrey went as the Royal Economic Society delegation to the UNESCO conference in Paris which formally created the International Economic Association, with a mandate to argue that the association should be started in ‘a somewhat less ambitious way’ than UNESCO had proposed (Robinson 1999, 171; RES Council 27 January 1949, RES Minutebook). Lionel and Iris took the opportunity to take a short holiday in Nice. On their return he lunched with Lydia Keynes at 46 Gordon Square (LCR to Lydia Keynes, 11 April 1949, Keynes LLK/5/171/1). It was the usual practice at LSE for the supervisor to act as the internal examiner for a PhD. Robbins often treated external examiners to lunch at the Reform Club before the oral examination. Baumol’s external examiner was Marcus Fleming (LCR to Fleming, 13 June 1949, Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950, RP) and the examination provided one of Baumol’s good stories (Krueger 2001, 214): ‘I ended up with the longest and most delightful Ph.D. oral, I think, in the history of the subject. . . . I was a member of the faculty, and we had my Ph.D. oral over whiskies and sodas at the Reform Club. It lasted five hours, and then we all looked at our watches, decided our wives must be getting worried, so we all voted, including me, that the thing was over. Then I got home and my wife, Hilda, said, “Did you pass?” I said, “I have no idea.”’ Lionel’s own good story for the term, as recalled by Ralph Turvey, related to Pigou’s Stamp Memorial Lecture at Senate House on 13 May 1949, when Robbins was in the chair. Pigou initially declined the invitation. Robbins wrote to ask him to change his mind; he still refused. Lionel contacted a friend in Cambridge and asked him to find out why Pigou would not come. Pigou had said that he would speak if he could enter from the podium end of the hall, which was impossible as there was no entrance there; why was there this curious condition? The answer: Pigou had a hole in the seat of his trousers. Robbins therefore told him he could wear his gown. Whether or not the story is true, Robbins certainly went to great lengths to reassure the nervous Pigou as to the audience he should expect and the room in which he would speak (LCR to Pigou, 29 April, 10 and 12 May 1949, Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950, RP). Lionel had not yet taken up his invitation to the Institute of Advanced Study, pleading his administrative responsibilities at LSE. Viner bluntly told him on 14 April to ‘Wrap your administrative conscience – or is it an unconscious imperialism – in a neat little package and file it away until after

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your American sojourn.’ Lionel nonetheless wrote to Walter Stewart on 27 June that despite Viner’s admonitions he did not think he could come for a term, and asked if he could come for the Easter vacation and two weeks of the Summer term 1950 (Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950, RP). Lionel sailed to New York again on the Queen Elizabeth for the second meeting of the World Bank’s Advisory Council. On the boat train to Southampton on 7 July he was depressed by the prospects for the meeting. But he enjoyed the voyage: he had an outside cabin, in which he could read and write undisturbed, and he got himself assigned to a small table in the dining room, which he shared only with ‘a very decent fellow . . . who does not take too long over his meals’. On board he read draft chapters of Harrod’s life of Keynes, the second volume of Marget’s ‘indigestible’ Theory of Prices and Harold Nicolson’s biography of Benjamin Constant. He only wished the sea had been rougher. As soon as he got through customs he took the train to Ithan. In February Caroline and Joe had been in a bad car accident, in which they had both been injured, Joe very seriously, and he was very relieved to find that Caroline had completely recovered. Joe was still convalescing and had lost much of his hearing. In 100o F heat they spent three days ‘sit[ting] about reading and sleeping and exchanging family gossip’ but they also visited Clair Wilcox at Swarthmore College, Lionel having ‘kept in touch [with him] in a friendly way’ since the loan negotiations. In Washington 17–24 July he saw a good many old friends. An evening with Baumol made him ‘Very late for bed but in very good spirits’. Keith Horsefield organized a lunch of LSE people who were at the Fund or the Bank. Maurice Allen he met by chance when he went out one evening intending to return to the Statler Coffee Shop where he had spent so much time with Maynard and Lydia Keynes during the loan negotiations. At dinner with the Pasvolskys and Redvers Opie, he was plied with questions about UK economic policy and responded with ‘my standard defence of Cripps’ policy (i.e. that however much it fell short of what was necessary, it was very much better than Dalton’s and really rather surprising in a Labour Chancellor)’ (Journal of a visit to the United States July-August 1949). The Council meeting was no more productive than the previous year’s. Salter had resolved to produce a report this time but Robbins feared he would again fail. Kalecki was more cooperative, ‘quite sensible on procedure . . . although on points of substance he is as doctrinaire as usual’, but Sir Venkata Raman was not. On the very first day, ‘We had not been started a quarter of an hour before he became involved in a tremendous quarrel with the Chair about procedure . . . . The whole morning was spent in this

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trivial kind of bickering. The afternoon, if possible, was worse.’ The second day he was quieter but on the third he excelled himself, in verbosity, anger and, eventually, weeping, although this did not stop the flow of words for long. The fourth day’s proceedings occupied only the morning, so Lionel took himself off to see the Phillips Collection of Impressionist and PostImpressionist paintings. On the fifth day, the draft document written up by the secretariat ‘turned out just as I expected – a very able summary which for that very reason revealed far more than the minutes the extreme unhelpfulness of our deliberations. It did not take long to decide what do. Salter, speaking from the Chair, advised against publication. When this had been decided upon, Professor Robbins with many apologies to the secretariat (with whom he already had a firm understanding) moved that we send to the Governors only the minutes of our proceedings. This was carried nem. con., Sir Venkata and Kalecki abstaining.’ The next morning, when Raman had departed, the other members of the Council, in consultation with the new head of the IBRD, Eugene Black, ‘decided that we should commit hara-kiri’. Salter wrote to Black to say that the continuance of the Council would serve no useful purpose (Salter 1961, 336). Thus ‘although a distinguished group was appointed initially, the Council quickly fell into disuse and has never been revived, despite the clear provision in the [Bank] charter that “the Council shall meet annually and on such other occasions as the Bank may request”’ (Mason and Asher 1973, 32). Lionel was pleased with the decision, but he would regret not coming to Washington every year. With Win Riefler and his family a few days earlier he had ‘the feeling of being at home in the America I love: . . . a truly indigenous culture, friendly, wise, imaginative, informal’. He left for Ithan in melancholy mood: ‘I had spent so many happy and interesting days in Washington. I had so many good friends there. In Washington during the war I had participated in undertakings in which, more perhaps than in anything else in my life, I had had the feeling of being at the height of my powers. . . . [D]espite the futility of the [Council] sessions . . . I had enjoyed these visits’ and now ‘this Indian Summer, as it were, was over.’ The thought of Britain’s current position depressed him further: ‘I thought of the repute in which we stood when I made my first visit to Washington when we had withstood the onslaught of the enemy alone and had saved the world by our exertions. I thought of . . . the high hopes which we entertained for the future. I thought of Maynard Keynes and of the sacrifice that he made in order that these hopes might be realized.’ After seeing Caroline and Joe he spent a night at the grand mansion of Clarence Dillon of Dillon Read and Company to whom Brand had

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introduced him, on his way to the Viners. At Princeton the Viners gave a party for him, where he met many of the economists and their wives; he also talked to Ed Earle (a member of the Institute who Viner had introduced to him in 1948) about visiting for two months in 1950. He spent three days in New York before he boarded the Queen Elizabeth shortly before midnight on 4 August. The Davenports held a farewell party for him that evening. He visited the Metropolitan Museum during the day. Although half of it was closed for repair, ‘the splendour of what was on show was most impressive’: the Rembrandts, the El Grecos, which were ‘for me the sensation of the afternoon’, and ‘some interesting Cezannes’ but the Mont St Victoire was not as fine as the one in the Courtauld (Journal of a visit to the United States July-August 1949). Back in London for only three days before a holiday with Iris at Chamonix in the French Alps to enjoy cool air and walking after the humidity and lassitude of the Eastern seaboard (LCR to RRR, 26 August 1949), Lionel wrote out and sent to Harrod on 14 August his many queries and serious criticisms of Harrod’s Keynes draft (Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49August 1950, RP). When Harrod read them he was particularly concerned about Lionel’s comments on his draft chapter on the American loan. Lionel lent him his notes on the negotiations (he had already lent him his Bretton Woods diary), and they dined with Frank Lee at the Athenaeum for further discussion. Harrod did not take on board all that they had to tell him (Harrod to LCR, 18 August and subsequent correspondence, Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950, RP; see Chapter 15). When Lionel reviewed the biography for The Times (26 January 1951: Robbins 1970b, 243–7), he wrote about Keynes and, as Viner commented on 26 February (Viner 22–14), little about the book. After the holiday Lionel got down to writing an article for Lloyds Bank Review. Its background was the latest UK foreign exchange crisis which ended with the devaluation of the pound from US$4.03 to $2.80 on 18 September. Lionel was not surprised by the announcement. It was always likely that Britain would have to devalue the pound after the war, given the loss of foreign assets and the accumulation of massive external debts and the resulting need to make a permanent improvement in the trade balance (Howson 1993, 238–43). He had not been in favour of an exchange-rate change in the spring of 1948 when the balance was improving: exports had almost reached their target level in 1947 and imports drastically cut since the convertibility crisis. A year later a mild recession in the United States changed the prospects for the worse. Speculation on a sterling devaluation increased the outflows. He would not have known of the discussions taking

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place in Whitehall and in the Bank of England in the spring and early summer, nor that by the end of July the Cabinet accepted devaluation was inevitable, but he was aware from his discussions in the States with, among others, Frank Southard, who had recently moved from the US Treasury to the IMF, that the US Administration (and the IMF) were keen for the UK to devalue. He had been pessimistic about the outcome of the forthcoming talks between Cripps and Bevin and their American counterparts in Washington in September – to such an extent that (Journal of a visit to the United States July-August 1949) ‘For the first time since 1945, I felt a strong wish that for a brief period I were once more a public official. Certainly when I go back I shall do what I have studiously refrained from doing ever since I retired, that is I shall go down to Whitehall and tell people in a friendly way what I think.’ (He thought better of it when he got home.) As in his earlier analyses of the UK’s balance-of-payments problems he began his article (1949c) with the ‘false scents’: the slight US recession, external misfortune generally and the nationalization of the coal industry and public utilities. Moving on to diagnosis he rounded up his usual suspects: the export of capital, domestic inflation, the disincentive effects of high taxation. Given new estimates of the inflationary gap made by his colleagues Paish and Tress, he feared inflationary pressure was rising again and that the budget surplus might not be large enough. As for remedies, he had no doubt that the decision to devalue, and by a large amount, was the right one, ‘subject to two very important provisos’: it did not obviate the necessities to quash domestic inflationary tendencies and to reduce capital outflows. As well as continuing to use budget surpluses to close the inflationary gap and cutting government expenditure to reduce the size of the surplus needed, the authorities should consider raising long-term interest rates: ‘I am far from urging that this is the only [policy] instrument. . . . But our experience of a time when interest rates have been held at levels quite out of relation with the contemporary scarcity of capital does suggest that the substitutes for higher rates to which we have recourse are not sufficient by themselves.’ For the sterling balances, which he continued to regard as dangerous, he revived an old favourite idea: since so much of Marshall Aid to Britain was directly or indirectly passed on to sterling creditors, why not ask the US to take over some of the balances and make its own arrangements with the creditors? He received praise from the two economists whose opinion he most valued. Robertson on 30 October ‘agree[d] with every word . . . Yes, even with the section on sterling balances’ (Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950, RP). Viner wrote on 28 November (Viner 22–14): ‘It was magnificent, strongly reasoned, cogently presented, and courageous. I

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agree with it wholeheartedly, subject only to the qualification that I think the question of capital investment needs a little more analysis in order to point the issues sharply.’ At the beginning of the academic year 1949/50 Lionel could look forward to a more intellectually productive year than the previous two. Given the introduction of the new undergraduate degree, he would deliver his Principles lectures for the last time, and he had fewer graduate students (seven instead of twelve) to supervise (Agenda for Professorial Council 30 November 1949). By November his visit to the Institute of Advanced Study in the spring of 1950 was settled and he had persuaded Iris to accompany him (LCR to Carr-Saunders, 11 November, Carr-Saunders to LCR, 30 November 1949, Director Correspondence April 1946-Dec 1954, RP; LCR to ICR, 18 November 1949). There were several visits to Cambridge or Oxford, which provided welcome opportunities to dine with old friends, especially Robertson and Sraffa at Trinity College Cambridge and John Jewkes at Merton College Oxford (correspondence with Dennison, Sraffa, Robertson and Jewkes in Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950, RP). There was also a small conference organized by Austin Robinson to discuss the next five years’ work of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research. Robert Hall attended, commenting in his diary (Cairncross ed 1989, 93–4): ‘Austin Robinson presided, also present were Robbins, Robertson, Jewkes, Postan, R.G.[D.] and G.C. Allen, H. Mynors, Habbakuk, Cairncross, Geoffrey Crowther. . . . We talked mainly about a memo Crowther had written, asking for a study of the reasons why capital is put into industry. I thought it was not very inspiring as we had so many different points of view and bickered so much about minor matters. However they are all very nice.’ Robbins had also agreed to talk to the Societe d’Economie Politique de Belgique in Brussels on 13 December, admitting he would prefer to lecture in English and proposing as his subject ‘The concept of full employment as an objective of economic policy’. He was slow in getting the text ready for publication in the Society’s proceedings, partly because he thought of a better way of defining full employment and could not bring himself to part with the text until he had made the revisions (LCR to Louis Camu, 6 October, 7 and 16 December 1949, 15 March and 30 June 1950, Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950). In the lecture (1949d) he attacked the concept of full employment advocated in Beveridge (1944) – where full employment was defined as ‘always having more vacant jobs than unemployed men’ – vigorously arguing that this was intrinsically inflationary, would discourage labour mobility, create balance-of-payments problems and probably oblige resort to price and other controls in order to suppress the chronic inflation. His alternative concept, in the published

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version of the lecture, was that the objective of employment policy was better put as ‘the provision of as many jobs as applicants provided that they are willing to go to them’. This was not subject to the same defects as the Beveridgean concept and was closer to the target of the 1944 white paper on Employment Policy. However, there were still at least two problems to be avoided: wage inflation, in the sense of average wages rising faster than the growth of productivity, and imbalance in the balance of payments if, for instance, foreign demand for UK exports declined. In other words, not Robbins’s at this time, there were at least three objectives of macroeconomic policy: high employment, low inflation and external balance. Lionel accepted an invitation from Ely Devons on 11 August 1949 to give the Simon Lectures at the University of Manchester in 1949/50, agreeing on 13 October 1949 to deliver them in the Lent term (Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950, RP). He chose to lecture on the theory of economic policy of the classical economists – a subject on which he had lectured as part of a short course on Theories of Economic Policy for graduate students in the Lent term 1939. The six prewar lectures covered the social philosophy of the classical economists, Utopian and Marxian socialism, economic nationalism, corporativism and syndicalism (Robbins 1952, vii; lecture notes Economic Thought & Practice, RP). The three Simon Lectures elaborated on the first of these topics, focussing on the English and Scottish classical economists’ conception of the object of economic activity, their views on the economic functions of the state and their attitude to the problem of the condition of the people. He told Baumol on 21 February 1950 (Baumol Papers) that he was ‘writing against the clock’ to prepare the lectures: ‘I enjoy this very much – as you know history of theory was one of my first loves – but it is no joke getting all the reading done in time. So far I am not dissatisfied. But whether I would dare to show what I have written to Jake Viner I don’t know.’ The term he gave the Simon Lectures was an exceptionally difficult one for Lionel. Hayek was away: when he had applied for leave of absence in October he told Carr-Saunders that it was in order to take up an invitation from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and that Robbins had said this would not cause inconvenience to the Economics Department (Agenda for Standing Committee 18 October 1949). Robbins took over the supervision of Hayek’s ten graduate students. On 9 February he told Arthur Lewis, who had invited him to stay with him in Manchester after his Simon Lectures, that he had to return to London on the overnight train because there was so much to do in Hayek’s absence (Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950, RP). He was also suffering from particularly severe migraine headaches.

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He then received a very heavy blow. On 16 February Hayek wrote to the director resigning his chair, at the same time sending personal letters to Carr-Saunders and to Lionel. He made it clear to Carr-Saunders that he was resigning because he was leaving his wife. To Lionel, who knew the reason why his friend was unhappy in his marriage, he admitted his sudden resignation would be ‘a great shock’ but did not try to explain why he had not warned him. He asked Lionel and Iris to help his wife as they would if he had died (HAYEK CORRESPONDENCE, RP). The Standing Committee on 28 February saw no alternative to accepting his resignation and proceeded to discuss the request for sabbatical leave for the Summer term which Hayek had made in order to avoid returning to London. ‘Professor Robbins said that the circumstances were unusual. Professor Hayek’s resignation was unexpected and would be a grief to his colleagues. If he had applied for sabbatical leave at an earlier point, it would have been felt that . . . he deserved it, and he personally would like to wind up Professor Hayek’s association with the School on good terms.’ The committee refused the request but proposed instead that if he resigned from the beginning of the Summer term, the School would pay his salary up to that point even though he was away. A couple of days earlier Lionel had drafted a letter to Hayek: ‘Your letter was naturally a grief to me – grief which was not mitigated by the reflection that, having told me of your troubles, you felt it necessary to deceive me as to your intention in applying for leave. I wish that this had not happened.’ He was not going to reproach Hayek in his letter but since ‘you yourself asked me to act by Hella as I should if you had died . . . there is one matter which ought to be brought to your attention.’ He believed it would be better for Hella if she divorced Hayek but he did not know whether she would agree: ‘To grow old alone in a land which is not one’s own by birth is not a cheerful prospect’ and, furthermore, ‘she had no firm guarantee of support.’ When Hayek had admitted his marital troubles during the previous winter, he had assured Lionel that if he left his wife he would make her and their two children financially secure, but a ‘general promise’ was plainly insufficient. Hayek ought to enter into a legally binding unconditional covenant to provide support. If, and only if, he did that, Lionel would encourage Hella to divorce him. Before sending the letter he consulted his lawyer, his former New College student John Witt, who suggested some changes of wording (LCR drafts and Witt to LCR, 27 February 1950, HAYEK CORRESPONDENCE, RP). Hayek’s reply on 7 March made things worse. He claimed that his wife had two years earlier agreed to a divorce but then changed her mind and that

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that was why he was now going to try and get an immediate divorce in a state which would permit it, even if it meant he could not take up the position at the University of Chicago. In a draft reply Lionel said he ‘could scarcely believe [his] eyes’ but Hayek’s next letter on 12 March confirmed this: he was about to take up a position at the University of Arkansas (HAYEK CORRESPONDENCE, RP). From there he wrote to some of their mutual friends on 11 April, confirming the rumour that he was going to Chicago and letting them know that he was leaving his wife (Machlup 44–1). He did not mention the real reason for his desire for an uncontested divorce in this letter, but he had when he told Karl Popper, who was on leave at Harvard, of his resignation from the School on 6 March: The real explanation of this step I can for the moment tell only to you though it is bound to become known before long. . . . The simple fact is that I hope to obtain a divorce and ultimately to marry my cousin whom you know. This is a story which goes fifteen or rather thirty years back. We ought to have married then except for one of the silliest misunderstandings which first made my cousin marry somebody else and then made me marry the first person who seemed superficially at all like her. For a long time we tried to stick it out. But it is now nearly fifteen years that I first tried to persuade my wife to give me a divorce. All sorts of circumstances and finally the war delayed it.

On 13 March he wrote again to say he would spend the next quarter at Arkansas, before spending the summer in Switzerland (for the third meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society) and Austria, where he hoped to see Popper, and hoped to be able to take up the position in Chicago in October (Popper 350–14). Hayek later wrote that he would never have moved to Chicago had it not offered the possibility of divorce and remarriage (Hayek 1994, 126; see also Ebenstein 2001, 167–70, and 2003, 122–6). Lionel and Iris departed for the USA on 22 March, leaving Frank Paish to help Hella in their absence and John Witt to negotiate a settlement with Hayek’s lawyers. Lionel did not intend to write to his former friend again. By the end of the year, after Lionel had written again, in order to defend Hayek’s wife and Witt against Hayek’s accusations (LCR to Hayek, 30 October and 23 November 1950, HAYEK CORRESPONDENCE, RP), Hayek thought, he told Popper on 17 December, that ‘the breach with Robbins is now irreparable’ and blamed his ‘silly attitude to be hurt by not my having taken him into my confidence’ (Popper 305–14). While Lionel was in America he wrote to Albert Hunold on 12 May that he would not attend the Mont Pelerin Society meeting and wished to resign from the society (Mont Pelerin Society Box 2). He subsequently explained on 7 June that ‘My reasons for not wishing to see him [Hayek] any more are simply that . . . he has behaved

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in such a way which I find quite impossible to reconcile with the conception of his character and his standards which I have cherished through twenty years of friendship. . . . [S]o far as I am concerned, the man I knew is dead and I should find it almost intolerably painful to have to meet his successor’ (HAYEK CORRESPONDENCE, RP). Iris and Lionel sailed on the Queen Elizabeth, as Lionel had done five times before, but this time in cabin class, which Lionel claimed to prefer to ‘the pretentious first class saloons with their overripe inmates and the general atmosphere of pointlessness’ even though he missed access to the topmost deck. He kept a diary (Journal of a visit to the US Spring 1950, American Journals Oct 48 1949 1950, RP) in which he reported his reading, notably the autobiography of Lord Reith, and seeing several mediocre films on board. Arrival in New York was delayed by gales and then fog which kept them outside the harbour for twenty-four hours after the cabin baggage had been packed and the ship’s library closed down: ‘I had brought very few books with me and the only two not read were Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature & Hicks’ new Contribution to the Theory of the Trade Cycle, neither very suitable for casual reading. I have been making desultory attempts to get absorbed in Hume’s theory of knowledge but not with very great success.’ He had also on board ship been trying to decide what to work on at Princeton. He had been intending to start on an outline of a work on Principles. ‘But somehow or other I don’t think that this is going to happen yet awhile’ for he had thought of two additional chapters to add to his Manchester lectures. ‘In a way I wish very much that I had not thought of it. Unfortunately once these ideas are born, they tend to take control of the situation.’ On landing on 28 March a very pleasant surprise was to find Baumol with a graduate student, Djahanghir Boushehri, who had been an undergraduate at LSE 1946–9 (and from Princeton went to work for the IMF), waiting patiently to drive them to Ithan. From Baumol they learned of Laski’s death on 24 March: while Laski had been ill on and off since late 1948 (Kramnick and Sheerman 1993, 576–7), it was ‘an odd freak of circumstance which takes from the School, within six weeks, both Fritz Hayek and Harold Laski’. On 2 April Baumol and Boushehri drove Iris and Lionel to Princeton. There they settled into their quarters, which Iris described to her mother-in-law on 9 April as ‘rather like camping with many comforts’: ‘We live in an army hut which is heated by a stove managed very efficiently by Lionel, constant boiling water provided, gas cooking stove & huge refrigerator. There are many children about & washing constantly hanging out but it is all very spacious & all the residents are working at the Institute – chiefly mathematicians but very friendly & agreable. . . . We are only five minutes

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from the Institute . . . & he [Lionel] loves it.’ From that base they went by train to Raleigh, North Carolina, so that Lionel could lecture at Chapel Hill and at Duke, where they were taken to see a textile factory and a cigarette factory, and back to Washington, where ‘Lionel spent two hectic days having his brain picked’ and Iris went sightseeing. By this time Lionel had abandoned his diary but he was working on his Simon lectures and turned them into a book (Robbins 1952). At Manchester he had presented ‘a brief survey of the theory of economic policy of the English Classical Economists’, by whom he meant ‘the two great Scotch philosophers, David Hume and Adam Smith, and their followers’, namely David Ricardo, T.R. Malthus, Robert Torrens, Nassau Senior, J.R. McCulloch, James Mill and John Stuart Mill, plus Jeremy Bentham, ‘who was much more important as an economist than is often recognized’. Despite differences in their politics these men ‘shared a common interest in economic reform, which manifested itself, not so much in common support of specific measures . . . as in a commonly held belief that the application of certain methods of approach and analysis, the recently discovered science of Political Economy, offered superior hopes for what they would have called improvement’. He intended to try to dispel the widespread misconceptions and indeed ignorance of their views on the scope of economic policy. In popular writing, he claimed, ‘their place has been taken by a set of mythological figures, passing by the same names, but not infrequently invested with attitudes almost the exact reverse of those which the originals adopted. These dummies are very malignant creatures indeed. They are the tools or lacqueys of capitalist exploiters[:] . . . indefatigable opponents of social reform . . . [and] supremely indifferent to the well-being of the working classes.’ In trying to reinstate the originals he deliberately relied on extensive quotation from their writings (Robbins 1952, 2, 4, 5 and viii).12 It was not difficult to demonstrate by suitable quotations that their views on the efficacy of free markets were not manifestation of class bias nor reflection of belief in any ‘natural harmony’ of a free-market system, nor were these economists extreme individualists who allowed no role to the state beyond the control of money and credit. In quoting Adam Smith on the three functions of the state Lionel emphasized the third (after defence and law): ‘“[note the wording here] the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to 12

He preferred to let them speak in their own words not only to avoid misrepresenting their arguments but also because ‘most of them had a command of phrase or exposition greatly superior to anything I could hope to achieve by paraphase’ (viii).

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any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society”.’ McCulloch and Senior were stronger: ‘“The principle of laissez-faire may be safely trusted to in some things but in many more it is wholly inapplicable”’ (McCulloch); ‘“the only rational foundation of government . . . is expediency – the general benefit of the community. . . . The only limit to this duty is power . . . ”’ (Senior). He emphasized strongly their utilitarianism: their belief (which he shared) in ‘the conscious testing of all social institutions by the general principle of utility’ (ibid., 37, 43, 45, 56). His particular heroes, as O’Brien (1988, 46–7) pointed out, were Hume and Bentham. As an example of the misconceptions he took the remarks of Lord Lindsay of Birker, recently Master of Balliol College Oxford, in his book, Karl Marx’s Capital (1925), where Lindsay claimed classical economics defended high profits for capitalists and justified subsistence level wages for workers. Again it was easy to show by quotations that what classical economists actually said was the opposite (68–73). Lionel was criticized for his use of this Aunt Sally by several reviewers, from A.L. Macfie in the Economic Journal (1953) and S.G. Checkland in Economica (1953) to Ronald Meek in Labour Monthly (1954). Even Baumol, who read Lionel’s manuscript twice, thought ‘you might consider covering yourself a bit more’ in the attack on Lindsay (Theory of Economic Policy Reviews & Letters, RP). After describing, lucidly, the theory of population in Malthus and Ricardo, Robbins went on to describe the classical economists’ views on public health and primary education, the poor laws, factory legislation and trade unions. On the last topic he admitted their ambivalence (‘unease and uncertainty’) given that they were both against any monopoly but generally in favour of freedom of association (1952, 73–82, 89–110). The two additional chapters he began work on at Princeton became three after he returned to London. As he explained to Walter Stewart on 13 February 1951 (Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/52, RP), ‘The single chapter on [the classical economists’ varied attitudes to] Socialism which you saw has now bifurcated into two, one dealing with Adam Smith to Senior, the other exclusively devoted to the vicissitudes of John Stuart Mill. And the last chapter which, as you emphasized, had to have much less quotation and much more elucidatory argument, has involved a great deal of supplementary reading and has taken a long time to get into proper proportions.’ The analysis of Mill’s ‘to-ing and fro-ing’, acknowledging the emotional as well as the intellectual background to Mill’s attitude to socialism, struck Dennis Robertson as ‘specially good’ as he told Lionel on 29 April 1951 (C.T.E.P. Notes for First Draft, RP). Lionel had decided not to

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discuss the classical economists’ views on external economic policy or public finance, although he toyed with the idea of appendices on these topics (C.T.E.P. Notes for First Draft, RP). In the final chapter he emphasized once more the reforming instincts and the utilitarianism of his classical economists. While it was ‘in the Humean rather than the Benthamite sense that we can claim to label the entire Classical School as utilitarian in outlook’, ‘it is clear that the Classical Economists placed themselves in a position of sharp contrast with all those thinkers who base their prescriptions for policy on ethical systems assigning absolute value to certain institutions or types of conduct – systems of natural rights, natural law, theological systems. . . . On the utilitarian view no institutions, no systems of right, were sacrosanct. All were subject to the test of utility.’ But he also emphasized, to a greater extent than earlier in the book, that they were ‘individualist utilitarians’. They assumed that individuals were by and large the best judges of utility – but he reminded his readers that they allowed for public goods and for ‘the occasional necessity’ for paternalism (with respect to child labour, for instance) – and believed an individualist economic system was the most desirable (on utilitarian criteria). ‘For them, an organization of production, based, in the main, on private property and the market, was an essential complement to a system of freedom of choice as regards consumption and provision for the future. They believed that, within an appropriate framework of law, . . . it would work better than alternative practicable systems. Even John Stuart Mill who . . . was very willing to experiment with limited local collectivism, was a whole-hearted believer in competition and the competitive market. I hope I have emphasized this sufficiently.’ He rounded out the discussion by a consideration of their (not uniform) views on the form of government – representative democracy, universal suffrage etc – ending with his other hero, John Stuart Mill. When Lionel sent the manuscript to his publisher early in 1951 he had fifty copies made and sent them to friends and colleagues and to his sister, to whom he dedicated the book (LCR to Daniel Macmillan, 2 February 1951, Correspondence with Publishers 1946–30.9.55, RP; LCR to ICR, 22 February 1951). He sent it to Viner on 16 February (Viner 22–14) ‘with enormous trepidation. It deals with matters on which you are the greatest living authority & I am only a very groping amateur.’ Viner, however, thought the manuscript ‘most excellent . . . I learned much . . . and found nothing of major consequence to dispute. Given the limits as to the period, the men, and the questions you raise, your interpretation is in all essentials as mine is after reading your lectures.’ He sent Lionel many detailed comments and suggestions all but one of which Robbins followed, asking Macmillan

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to hold off printing until he had incorporated them (Viner to LCR, 26 February, LCR to Viner, 20 March 1951, C.T.E.P. Notes for First Draft; LCR to Macmillan, 1 and 14 March 1951, Correspondence with Publishers 1946– 30.9.55, RP). He also made corrections offered by Robertson and others and added, he reported to Baumol on 29 June 1952 (Baumol Papers), ‘a few more spicy quotations & one serious section, which John Hicks suggested I should insert, explaining why Ricardo’s use of language laid him open to misunderstanding & misrepresentation – I found a really wonderful episode in this connection where Say & Malthus misunderstood him much as a modern sentimentalist might do & he defended himself passionately in the Notes on Malthus.’ (The section, ‘The Ricardian paradoxes’ (Hicks’s phrase), is in the middle of chapter III.) In some reviews Robbins was criticized for lumping together eighteenthand nineteenth-century economists as all utilitarians. But he was commended (Macfie 1953) at the same time for having ‘worked marvels in two hundred pages’, in which he could ‘hardly follow more than one analytic method. In that vein he has at once done us a unique service and offered models of charm to the uninitiated.’ Henry Spiegel (1953) pointed out that those 200 pages were ‘far superior to the corresponding parts of the ordinary textbooks’. His writing and scholarship were compared with those of Cannan and Viner. His most critical reviewer was Knight, who had been going to review the book for the American Economic Review but because ‘in some ways I like it very much and in some not so well’ had found himself writing a typescript of more than fifty pages. He sent it to Lionel on 15 November 1952 (Economists Correspondence 1.4.52–30.9.53, RP), warning him that it was ‘rather critical! I think you are too apologetic for the Classical Economists, and – naturally and more so – too condemning of the critics. Of course, your position is sound, in the main and as far as I allow myself to judge, but I do find your treatment pretty heavily “slanted”.’ Lionel defended himself with twenty-four pages of detailed comments (Commentary on review article by F.H.K., 9 January 1953, Theory of Economic Policy Reviews & Letters, RP), from which I choose only two: To put my grouse [about the draft] in a nutshell: I defend the Classical Economists only against the imputation of having said things they did not say and having failed to support causes for which in fact they actually fought. On the strength of this you tend to represent me as apologizing for their whole attitude. Poor Ricardo. I can’t help feeling that if I had expressed a little less respect for him, you would have let me get by with a much lighter punishment. But on this I am quite

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unrepentant. Not holding his views on value and distribution, having many doubts about his theory of money and finance, believing his theory of economic policy to be much less well developed than that of most other classical economists, I still feel with Marshall (as against you and the youthful Cannan) that, of all the figures in our back history he most deserves sympathetic handling and interpretation. Certainly there was no one who better fulfilled your prescription regarding calm and friendly discussion.

He ended his commentary by quoting Ricardo’s last letter to Malthus: ‘“And now, my dear Malthus” (Frank), “I have done. Like other disputants after much discussion (I expect) we (shall) each retain our own opinions. These discussions, however, never influence our friendship: I should not like you more than I do if you agreed in opinion with me.”’ Lionel sent a copy of his commentary to Aaron Director on 12 January, relying on him to let him know if it offended Knight. Knight did not reply for three months. When he did on 30 April he agreed to keep friendship unaffected by differences of opinion ‘a la Ricardo!’ but he still did not like the book. He enclosed his review article as he had sent it to Ethics, where Lionel would be invited to reply. He had made use of Lionel’s commentary, which he thought ‘abundantly confirms my two-fold criticism of the book – its tone of making-a-case, and of argumentum-ad-hominem’. Lionel was horrified that his comments would be published and protested to Knight, writing at the same time to Director (26 May 1953, Economists Correspondence 1.4.52–30.9.53, RP): ‘What have I done to Frank? I have just received another version of this terrific rebuke. That did not surprise me very much. . . . But I confess I was very surprised to find that the Comment I wrote for his private eye had been used for further telling arguments against the reprehensible goings on of the author.’ Director had already tried, and failed, to persuade Knight to omit the references. But when Knight received Lionel’s letter he did get the editor to take out the references. Director also assured Lionel on 8 June that ‘this is the way Knight always reviews books. And because you are a friend he must have felt it necessary to be more extreme. This is called being “objective”. He does not like this explanation.’ Knight had, however, noted in his review (1953) that ‘Modest in scope and packed with scholarly information, Robbins’ book will be welcomed by students and teachers in the fields of history of doctrine and economic policy.’ For all Knight’s criticism of its ‘polemic character and . . . a controversial bias’, it has been the single best introduction to classical economics for generations of students (and their teachers) for over fifty years.

TWENTY

LSE in the Early 1950s

In the 1950s Lionel Robbins was in his fifties. There were family anxieties but his life at the School was easier than in the late 1940s. He shed the burden of many LSE committees but took on others outside the School. Although he left himself little time to write, it was in this decade that he published two of his lasting contributions to his discipline as well as a collection of essays, an edition of a classic in the history of economic thought and a dozen articles or published lectures. This chapter concentrates on his varied activities in the first half of the decade. On 15 February 1950 Robbins wrote Ludwig Lachmann in South Africa (Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950, RP): ‘Affairs here at the School are now very satisfactory. The staff is at least almost equal to the increased demands which are made upon us, and some of the younger recruits are of authentic vintage quality. We have had some seminars recently which were quite up to pre-war standards.’ He wrote Baumol on 21 February that the School was ‘rather dead this year’ (Baumol Papers): Not that the Seminar is bad; we miss you but Ralph [Turvey] and the younger people are very good & the adoption of special techniques have jolted the graduates into greater participation. But . . . the building contract for our new common room which was to have been completed by the autumn is not completed yet & shows no sign of approaching that stage. Hence we have no common room & very little common life except at coffee after lunch . . . This is very bad for us all & especially bad for the new arrivals of whom there are many for it is a complete toss up whether they ever meet anybody outside their own department at all.’ He had ‘reorganized’ his own life: ‘I spend Mondays & Tuesday mornings at home & refuse to come down for anyone short of the Director. In this way I have been able to do quite a respectable amount of work & I am not feeling quite so much at the fag end of life as heretofore.

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The new recruits to the Economics Department had included Terence Hutchison, David Morgan, George Thirlby and Basil Yamey in 1947/8, Alan Peacock and Ralph Turvey in 1948/9 and John Raeburn, Helen Makower, Louden Ryan, David Knox, Alan Day, Leonard Minkes and Jack Wiseman in 1949/50. Hutchison came from a temporary lectureship at Hull; he shared the teaching of the history of economic thought with Hayek and gave a course on methodology to graduate students. Morgan had been an undergraduate at LSE 1937–40 and a lecturer at Liverpool since 1942. Yamey, who had returned to South Africa in 1940 after two years as a graduate student at LSE and after military service had been a senior lecturer in commerce at Cape Town, applied for the new readership in commerce, but the LSE Appointments Committee thought he did not have enough experience and recommended his appointment at the top of the lecturer scale. He left after eighteen months for an associate professorship at McGill University. Lionel thought this ‘a great blow’ as Yamey was ‘an excellent teacher and a stimulating colleague’. But he soon wanted to return to England and Lionel now recommended him for the readership, to which he was apppointed in 1950.1 Thirlby on the other hand, who also came through the South African connection, was to prove a difficult colleague. He was at Cape Town with Yamey when Plant suggested he apply for a position at LSE. He was, according to Yamey, already known as ‘an “oddball”’ in Cape Town. Peacock, who had been a student, interrupted by wartime service in the navy, and a lecturer at St Andrews, was appointed to a lectureship after an interview which was ‘a pleasantly informal affair but the questions [from Meade, Robbins and Hayek] were difficult and searching’ (Peacock 1989, 3, and 1993, 6–9). Turvey, after a year at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, was appointed to an assistant lectureship. Raeburn was appointed to the readership in agricultural economics previously held by Peter Bauer. Lionel had made enquiries of his wartime colleague Eric Nash, and had followed up his recommendation of Raeburn, whom Robbins had known and ‘thought well of’ in the wartime Ministry of Food. (He had organized the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign.)2 Makower, who had worked at the Oxford Institute of Statistics after her LSE PhD, in several wartime government ministries and 1

2

Candidates for appointment as Lecturer or Assistant Lecturer in Economics, for interview on Tuesday, 10th June, 1947, in Room 409, Staff Questions I, RP; Agenda for Standing Committee 27 May 1947; LCR to James Henderson, 22 February 1950, Testimonials April 1946–31/8/50, RP. Agenda for Standing Committee 21 September 1948 and 21 June 1949; LCR to CarrSaunders, 12 March 1948, Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.49, RP; Raeburn obituary, The Guardian, 7 August 2006.

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as fellow and tutor of Somerville College Oxford since the war, and Ryan, who had been a student and a research lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, were appointed to lectureships; Day, who had just obtained a First in the Cambridge Tripos, Minkes, an Oxford graduate who had worked for the UN Economic Commission for Europe, and Wiseman who had just graduated at LSE, to assistant lectureships (Agenda for Standing Committee 12 July and 18 October 1949; Agenda for Professorial Council 18 May 1949). Wiseman, who entered LSE after six years in the army (mostly in the infantry but ending up in the Army Education Corps), recalled (1989, 13) that before the final examinations Robbins interviewed all the economics specialists to discuss their plans after graduation: I saw no point in dissembling; I told him I wanted an academic career, and that in preparation I would like to complete a doctorate at a suitable American university. His response surprised me; he asked my age. Told that I would be 29 on graduation, he said that I did not have the time to waste, but should look immediately for a suitable appointment. Asked how, he told me to get a good enough degree, and we would ‘see what came up in the summer’. That was not an easy summer. . . . When we met in August, Lionel had little to suggest, save that I should apply for the one-year assistant lectureship then being advertised at the School, which post, he emphasised, was neither in his special area nor in his gift. I applied, . . . [survived] a traumatic interview with ten economics professors, and was appointed . . .

After a year Makower was promoted to reader, Turvey to lecturer, and Wiseman reappointed as assistant lecturer for three years (Agenda for Standing Commitee 2 May 1950). Given the professorial appointments of 1947 it is hard to disagree with Robbins’s judgment (1971a, 218): ‘I should be inclined to contend that at that time we had as strong a professoriate in this field as anywhere in the English-speaking world. Certainly, if the non-professorial teachers who have subsequently become famous be counted in . . . this contention would be even truer of the department as a whole.’ The best thing about the Department was the encouragement of the young economists. For Wiseman (1989, 15), It was the best academic club I have ever known. There was hardly an economic problem concerning which one could not obtain both enlightenment and a reading list simply by raising the question in the Common Room at morning coffee. It was a stimulating experience; the ‘names’ were now my colleagues, and were becoming people. . . . Hayek left for the USA not long after I was appointed; Laski died. But the School was still full of interesting personalities and distinguished colleagues from whom one could learn. Many of them turned up at the . . . [Robbins] seminar, which was the week’s event. Distinguished visitors, often unexpected, were common;

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I remember Robbins’s old graduate student, Abba Lerner, sitting on the floor wearing dirty canvas shoes and talking even more than I ever did.

According to Phelps Brown, Robbins ran the department by gathering the professors together in his room once a term: they ‘did all the business in half an hour [and then] Lionel went next door to Miss Beven’s room [and] dictated something’. But he no longer worked easily with Plant as he had before 1939. Plant was, according to Yamey, the only colleague who resented Robbins’s ‘beneficent dictatorship’. He had begun to do so earlier: an outburst in a meeting in Cambridge in October 1939 to discuss teaching arrangements had led to an exchange of hurt and angry notes, initiated by Lionel, dropped through each other’s letterboxes at home in Hampstead Garden Suburb.3 After the war he was a difficult character: Yamey and Thirlby, his former students, who thought ‘we were coming home’ when they came to LSE, found ‘a grumpy old man’ who ‘couldn’t care less about us’. In the summer of 1948 when he fell seriously ill it was discovered he had been suffering from diabetes for several years (Professorial Council 6 June 1948; LCR to Coase, 27 August 1948, Economics Department Correspondence April 1946–30.9.49, RP). When Robbins wrote Baumol in February 1950 he asked him: Have you heard of THE MACHINE. This is the great event of the year at L.S.E. A young New Zealander who took sociology (and got a very bad degree in it) has devised and built a really marvellous contraption to illustrate the workings of the financial circulation. It has been shown to all the authorities & has made such an impression that we have got a special grant to build a second model. James [Meade] is very much mixed up in it . . . [but] we are all rather excited. I believe it has real pedagogic value & its utility in demonstrating the role of various mechanisms & the compatibility on suitable assumptions of apparently conflicting theories seems to me to be very considerable.

As the story goes (Barr 2000) the young New Zealander, an ex-serviceman undergraduate, had accosted Robbins by the lift in the Old Building in the early summer of 1949 brandishing blueprints of an hydraulic machine he was constructing to show the monetary circulation in an economy.4 Robbins who had encountered at least one other claim of a remarkable machine for illustrating economic relationships – when he asked for ‘a 3

4

The correspondence is in Letters from Economists 1946– [sic], RP. Plant had asked Robbins if his objection to a proposal to continue teaching in London was not due to his reluctance to teach there as well as in Cambridge. If LCR was on his way to a meeting of the Royal Economic Society when Phillips accosted him, the encounter took place on 23 June 1949, the annual meeting when Dennis Robertson gave his presidential address (RES Minute Book).

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certificate from a competent mathematical economist that it was deserving of the attention of the learned world’ before he would consider providing an audience for a lecture on it (LCR to Carr-Saunders, 19 March 1947, Director Correspondence April 1946-Dec 1954, RP) – was naturally sceptical. But on this occasion, knowing Meade’s fascination with things mechanical, he asked him to talk to the ‘wild man’ from New Zealand, A.W.H. (Bill) Phillips. Meade was impressed and ‘because he was impressed (and also to get Phillips out of his office), promised him the chance, if and when the machine was complete, to demonstrate it at Robbins’ seminar’. Phillips completed the construction and Meade kept his promise. An electrical engineer who had spent much of the war in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, Phillips had registered for the BSc(Econ) in October 1946. Faced with compulsory economics, he became seriously interested in macroeconomics and, puzzled by the apparently contradictory competing theories of interest rates, came up with the idea of resolving the puzzle by developing the hydraulic analogy presented in Boulding’s introductory textbook (Newlyn 2000, 31–6). At the seminar on 29 November 1949 (Barr 2000, 92), Both Phillips and the machine acquitted themselves well. Everyone who mattered was there. . . . They gazed in wonder at this large ‘thing’ [about 7 feet high and 5 feet wide] in the middle of the room. Phillips, chain smoking, paced back and forth explaining it . . . , in the process giving one of the best lectures on Keynes and Robertson that anyone in the audience had heard. He then switched the machine on. And it worked!

The next day Meade suggested Phillips should receive a fellowship or a grant for six months to enable him to write an account of the machine for publication and to design an improved model. Plant objected to a fellowship so Meade revised his proposal to a grant to build a new machine (Meade to Baxter, Brown, Edwards, Hayek, Paish, Plant, Robbins and Sayers, 30 November, Plant to Meade, Mr. A.W. Phillips’ mechanical contrivance, 2 December 1949, Economics Department Correspondence 1.10.49–30/9/55, RP). With Robbins’s strong support, Phillips received his grant. Phillips completed his second machine, embarked on a PhD under Meade’s supervision and published an account of his machine in Economica (1950). Robbins helped to have the first machine demonstrated to the LSE governors and to the Council of the Royal Economic Society (Meade 1951, 11; Robertson to LCR, 31 December 1949, Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950, RP). When Lerner turned up Lionel asked him to help in getting a Phillips machine to Chicago in time to be shown off at the

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American Economic Association meetings in December 1950. On reading Phillips’s article on 2 October, Lionel told him that ‘Like the machine it describes, it is a masterly piece of work’ (Economics Department Correspondence 1.1.49–30/9/55, RP). Two days later the professors of economics decided Phillips should be made an assistant lecturer immediately. CarrSaunders offered him the job on 10 October (Carr-Saunders to LCR, 10 October 1950, Staff II, RP). In 1950/1 Robbins reverted to the traditional format for the seminar and set a general subject, namely, ‘Recent work in advanced theory, with special reference to the problems of oligopoly, imperfect competition and welfare economics’ (Programme for Economics Seminar 1950/51, Seminar Papers II, RP). An American graduate student, Robert Rauner, who arrived in October vividly remembered his presentation on ‘The theory of bilateral monopoly’. On the appointed time I stood before the assembled faculty and student membership and started my exposition at the blackboard. I was underway a few minutes, when the door opened and in walked a slight energetic man. Robbins held me up, rose from his seat and said, ‘Everyone, I’d like to introduce Professor Abba Lerner, one of our most distinguished graduates’ . . . I stood dumbfounded, struggling to comprehend this nightmare of meeting in this way the author of ‘The Economics of Control’ and numerous other writings I’d studied only a short time earlier. Nonetheless, there he was. Not only that, looking around and finding no empty chair – as Robbins was trying to get one vacated for him – Lerner simply brushed off the effort and plunked himself down on the floor at the front of the room at my feet! So I went on, trying to get the right algebra, diagrams, and words properly sequenced in my exposition. At the end of the hour and half Robbins closed the proceedings, turned to me and said: ‘A valiant effort, Rauner.’5

At this time the seminar was attended by ‘at least half a dozen members of the staff and very frequently by a dozen’. Lionel told Marcus Fleming on 7 June 1951 (Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/52, RP) that he ‘tr[ied] to restrain the graduate population to a figure not much greater than this but usually with very ill success. You need a man with a gun at the door to keep people out. . . . The thing has been a great success in the past, but that I am sure is really due to the fact that there have been several 5

Rauner to Howson, October 1996. Rauner became one of LCR’s doctoral students, writing his dissertation on Samuel Bailey (Rauner 1961). Lerner was en route to the Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva; on his way back through London in February 1951, LCR persuaded him to publish a collection of his articles (Lerner 1953) including the unpublished paper on factor price equalization he had given in the seminar in 1933 (Lerner to LCR, 25 January and 13 February, LCR to Lerner, 31 January and 20 March 1951, Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/52, RP).

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members of the staff willing to co-operate and they have all been keen to get something out of it. We have never found any lack of topics.’ In 1951/2 the discussion was more macroeconomic judging from the surviving papers. The topic for 1952/3 was recent contributions to the pure theory of value, but the only known presentation is Robbins’s on Robertson’s Utility and All That (1952) which he was reviewing for Economica (Seminar (11.11.52) Robertson on Utility and All That, Miscellaneous Correspondence, RP; Robbins 1953b). In 1953/4 the programme for the Michaelmas term was a series of reports by graduate students on recent journal articles while the Lent term was devoted to public finance (programmes in Seminar Papers II, RP). But the seminar was less successful than it was in earlier (and later) years when it concentrated on recent contributions to a single large topic. As undergraduates could not attend the graduate seminar, Robbins took a class in General Economic Theory for economics specialists in Part II of the BSc(Econ), which he held on Fridays at 3 p.m. David Laidler (1997) described the class, which he attended in 1958/9, as ‘an informal Friday afternoon seminar for third year specialists, which often took the form of a dialogue between him [Robbins] and my classmate Sam Hollander’. Hollander (1995, 294), not willing to miss the seminar on winter afternoons when the Sabbath began at an early hour, resorted to walking the several miles from central London to his home in Hendon. Robbins was instrumental in Hollander’s going on to graduate school at Princeton. As Laidler points out, it was one of the few occasions at which undergraduates saw a senior professor other than at a distance in large lecture rooms. The 1949/50 academic year was the first year of the first students studying for the two-year Part I of the ‘reformed’ BSc(Econ) degree, with its heavy load of compulsory papers in economics, history and political science. Robbins wanted to take the opportunity to improve the students’ education, in particular to make them write more essays in their first and second years. He also thought each student should have an advisor who would act as a ‘moral tutor’ and that the advisor should be in the subject the student intended to specialize in for Part II. With Vera Anstey, reader in commerce, who was responsible for overseeing the advisors provided for first year students, he devised a complicated new system for advising students in their first two years and setting them essays and class work. There were also to be ‘Collections’ (the Oxford term for test papers) in at least economics and political science at the end of the Lent term of the first year, as a check on students’ progress in the absence of the Intermediate examination. The GPC approved the scheme only ‘on the understanding that it was

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experimental . . . and would be subject to modification at the end of the current session’ (Anstey, Memorandum on the Advisory System, 15 March, LCR, Notes on the organisation of teaching for Part I of the new degree, 26 May, GPC 27 April, 25 May, 1 June, 8 June and 5 October 1949). It seems surprising that the problems which arose were not predicted. Anstey summarized them in May 1950 (Memorandum attached to Agenda for GPC 31 May 1950): ‘Students feel bewildered by the wide spread of subjects studied at one time, and tend to be distracted by the difficulty of combining systematic and concentrated reading and study with the preparation and writing of particular Essays at set times. . . . It may easily happen that a student never reads the whole of any one book.’ Their tutors were often not in the field in which they hoped to specialize in Part II. The teachers found themselves with large batches of essays to mark in a very short time. And, contrary to the intention of the reform, students needed to decide on their Part II special subject as soon as they arrived. The GPC set up a special committee (not including Robbins) to consider modifications. Its recommendations generated considerable controversy, over, for instance, whether to abolish ‘Collections’. Different departments made different changes. In economics, since ‘Professor Robbins, representing one point of view, suggests that Tutors should be essentially “Moral tutors” and that they should not set written work at all’, ‘Professor Robbins wishes to withdraw Economics from the general essay system and to arrange for written work (Papers, tests, exercises, etc.) to be set through the medium of the classes’ (as they had been when he was an undergraduate) (Anstey, Report on Teaching Arrangements and Schedule of Agreed Changes in Teaching Arrangements, [June 1950]). After discussion in the Academic Board (as the Professorial Council was now called) in the autumn Collections were essentially dropped (Academic Board 18 October and 29 November 1950). The introduction of the new degree meant the end of Robbins’s Principles lectures. In 1950/1 he offered two short courses for the last third-year students specializing in economics under the old regulations: five lectures on the Classical Theory of Economic Policy and fifteen on the Development of Modern Economic Analysis which ‘attempt[ed] to provide a survey of the main developments in economic theory from 1870 to the present day’. Under the new regulations, the old Elements of Economics for the first-year students and Principles of Economic Analysis for the Final were replaced by a two-year Principles of Economics course for Part I, taught jointly by Coase and Radomysler in 1949/50 and 1950/1. For the first specialists in Economics (Analytical and Descriptive) in Part II there

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were several separate courses covering the history of economics, microeconomics and macroeconomics. In 1951/2 Robbins gave two of them: A Survey of Economic Analysis (described in the LSE Calendar as ‘an orderly conspectus of the main divisions of economic analysis and the propositions relevant thereto’) in the Michaelmas term and a short version of his 1946/7 and 1947/8 Theory of Economic Policy course in the Lent term. As with Principles about a third of the Survey course was devoted to macroeconomics. The following year Helen Makower took over the Survey and Robbins offered the Development of Economic Analysis and the Theory of Economic Policy again. His reading list for the policy course was brief and remained so, though the course grew back to twenty lectures after a couple of years: J.M. Clark (1939), Pigou (1929) and his own 1947 and 1952. In 1953/4 he took over (in place of the Development of Economic Analysis) the main History of Economic Thought course, which he was to teach for (almost) the rest of his life, in a reshuffle of teaching assignments when Louden Ryan returned to Trinity College Dublin (where he later became professor of political economy and then Governor of the Bank of Ireland). The academic year 1950/1 saw another round of university quinquennial planning. At the instigation of the economists, the School asked the University for two new professorships, one in General Theory and one in Applied Economics, and a Chair in Colonial Economics to replace the readership vacant since Arthur Lewis went to Manchester (LCR to Carr-Saunders, 20 June 1950, Staff Questions I, RP; Academic Board 29 November 1950). The University had already taken steps to fill Hayek’s Tooke chair. Two applications had been received, one from Marcus Fleming, who was also considering an offer from Columbia. Lionel arranged for some of Fleming’s longer Economic Section memoranda to be made available to the Board of Advisers for the chair, also asking them to read Coase’s publications. After reading the latter Dennis Robertson told Robbins he personally thought Donald MacDougall a stronger candidate but was prepared to defer to Robbins or to G.C. Allen, who was also on the Board. Coase was offered the chair but he refused it as he wanted to move to the USA. Lionel then tried to persuade MacDougall to leave Oxford.6 On 8 December 1950 Turvey 6

Fleming to Carr-Saunders, 23 June 1950, Staff Questions I; LCR to Carr-Saunders, 13 October 1950, Director Correspondence April 1946-Dec 1954; Robertson to LCR, 14 October and 5 November 1950, Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/52, RP; LCR to Viner, 16 February 1951, Viner 22–14; LCR to MacDougall, 25 January and 5 February 1951, Staff II, and LCR to MacDougall, 26 February 1951, Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/52, RP.

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wrote to Baumol (Baumol Papers): ‘Robbins is very busy finishing his book and begs me to ask your pardon for his not writing and to send you his greetings. . . . The Tooke Chair is not yet, as far as I know, filled. I am scared stiff lest Benham should get it’; on 30 January there was: ‘No news about the Tooke chair yet. It is bloody well time we got someone.’ In the spring it was decided to put the chair into cold storage and to appoint Turvey to a readership in general economics (LCR to Carr-Saunders, 1 May 1951, Staff II, RP). The next Tooke professor was Bill Phillips, appointed in 1958. Outside the School, indeed outside Great Britain, the Schuman plan for a European coal and steel community as a first step towards Western European economic and political integration was being hatched in the late 1940s. Named after the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman but drawn up by Jean Monnet and his colleagues in the French Planning Commissariat, it was announced on 9 May 1950 (Milward 1984, 380–97). Lionel was in the States but as soon as he returned to London he wrote two letters to the editor of The Times (tss in Articles & Letters on Public Affairs, RP) as well as a long and critical article on European economic integration for Lloyds Bank Review (1950). Before he left the US he presented a paper on ‘Western Union’ at a Harvard seminar, which he had first given to a meeting of the Carlyle Club in October 1948 (LCR to Machlup, 12 May 1950, Machlup 61–1; Western union: some doubts and queries, October 1948, Articles & Letters on Public Affairs, RP). In that paper he had begun with ‘a confession of backsliding’, a reminder to his audience that until the fall of France in 1940 he was an ardent advocate of Western European federation, but since then he had become ‘more and more uneasy’. He explained his unease: he doubted that individual European countries, including his own, would give up control over foreign affairs and defence; he doubted that the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), set up to distribute Marshall Aid, could be developed into an agency of permanent economic cooperation; and a European customs union, because it would be a mixture of free trade and protection, would not necessarily benefit all its potential members – Britain in particular could suffer from a high common external tariff. He saw more hope for a peaceful future in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which had just come into existence. In his first letter to The Times (16 June 1950) Robbins defended the UK government, which had made it clear in a white paper published on 31 May that it would not commit itself without further examination of the Schuman plan and had refused to bow to a French ultimatum on 1 June to accept the plan unconditionally or stay out of the discussions (Milward 1984, 404–5).

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He received praise from an unusual quarter: Joan Robinson wrote from Cambridge on 16 May (Miscellaneous Correspondence, RP) that ‘It did my heart good to read your letter in the Times. The first sensible remark I have seen on this subject. More power to your elbow!’ In his second letter (23 June 1950) he made the point that accepting the desirability of federation did not mean accepting all possible federations. For himself, ‘I would not be willing to see us enter a Western European Federation from which the United States and the British Commonwealth nations, other than ourselves, were absent. Before the war I used to think differently. But quite a number of things have happened since then.’ As he explained to his French friend Roger Truptil, who did not agree with his views, on 10 August (Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950, RP), he wrote his article before the letters to The Times. The article deployed some of the arguments of his ‘Western Union’ paper but focussed on the political implications. He suggested that the proposed forms of European economic integration would all lead to European political union if they were to be successful, and then argued this would be undesirable and unacceptable. He admitted his view ultimately reflected what had happened in 1940. He (mistakenly) doubted that Western European union could go ahead without Britain and still saw the only prospect of permanent peace in the North Atlantic military alliance, which ‘if developed and suitably consolidated, may yet arrest the tide of advancing barbarism and be a safeguard of peace and prosperity’. The consolidation he wished to see was primarily in foreign policy and defence. There was little economic analysis (although in a final footnote he referred to Viner, The Customs Union Issue (1950)). He said more about the economics of federation in a lecture on international economic unions to students at LSE a few months later, but even here he assumed that a full federation would only be adopted for political reasons and argued that looser arrangements – such as customs unions – would sooner or later break down without political union (Problems of Applied Economics (’51) The Economics of International Unions, Theory of Economic Policy, RP). Although it is unfair to judge on the evidence of scrappy notes, the economic arguments look, frankly, weak; but he was surely right to emphasize that sustainable customs or currency unions require strong political backing from the participating states. Truptil was not the only friend who disagreed with him. Harrod on 6 July criticized the contrast between Bretton Woods internationalism and regional cooperation as ‘precisely . . . too black and white’ (Staff Questions I, RP). He ‘quite frankly’ disagreed with Lionel’s first letter to The Times: since the Schuman plan was if nothing else an encouraging statement that the French were prepared to live and work with the Germans, ‘does not

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the old argument apply that we used to use about discussions under article 7?’ At the time Robbins doubted the analogy with Article VII, but he later saw the justice of Harrod’s argument and admitted as much (1971a, 235– 9): ‘I now think . . . that despite the attitude of some Europeans, especially in France, we should have been better advised to join the movement and, by our presence there, to help to create something with more spacious objectives than those of the protagonists of the “third force”. In this respect I believe that the vision of men like M. Jean Monnet . . . was right and that mine was wrong.’ He had changed his mind by the early 1960s, although the European common market was ‘quite definitely a second best’ compared with an Atlantic Union (LCR to Meade, 12 October 1962, Economists Correspondence October 1961-April 1964, RP). In the summer of 1950 the Robbinses took their family holiday in North Wales and he and Iris a short holiday in Brighton before he went to Monte Carlo for the first meeting of the International Economic Association to discuss organizational matters (LCR to Miss Beven, 30 August, Economics Department Correspondence 1.10.49–30/8/55, RP; A. Robinson 1962, 3, 8). He travelled alone by train overnight. As he entered the hotel near the railway station in the morning, it was clear that all was not well. [Jacques] Rueff . . . Austin [Robinson], [Gottfried] Haberler, . . . were anxiously clustered deliberating some important problem. They at once beckoned me to join them. Had I seen my room (No I hadn’t) Did I know the hotel? Was it in my judgment a fit place for a UNESCO conference? Apparently the booking had been done by correspondence with the Office of Tourism. The Hotel Excelsior up to recently had born the title the Hotel Terminus!! Members who had already stayed a night found it dirty & inconvenient. I said that I was so used to travelling in a modest way that I had no strong feelings in the matter. But this was not the frame of mind of the committee who after about an hour’s confabulation decided to move to [a] luxury hotel . . . which move accordingly occupied most of our time until late in the afternoon. . . . As we hung about waiting for the change I gradually became convinced of the wisdom of the decision. The Station was intolerably noisy & there was no proper accommodation for the delegates to sit about & discuss – which was the main business of the conference. But I am glad that I am not bearing the expense of the change; for while the Excelsior (nee Terminus) was described (wrongly) as being of the premier ordre, this is described (in the local guide) as being a Palace – and that in fact is what it is. Austin and I are sharing a suite looking out over the gardens & the bay & if there were no conference, I should find it very agreable. Incidentally I have much the better of the bargain: he, very nobly, is sleeping in the sitting room while I have the great bedroom with the double bed & immediate access to the bath.

He also told Iris on 11 September that he had to play ‘rather a negative role’ at the conference, ‘urging financial caution & due limitation of membership etc’. On the way back to London he met, quite by chance, Milton

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Friedman, who was in Paris working as a consultant to the US Marshall Plan agency on an analysis of the Schuman plan (Friedman and Friedman 1998, 176–82). Lionel hoped the Friedmans would spend some time in London before they returned to the US. Afterwards Friedman told Robbins that ‘The few days spent in London are just about the brightest spots in our recollections of the European visit; and, unquestionably for me, the intellectual peak.’ Robbins set about getting Friedman invited to lecture at the School (LCR to Friedman, 14 November 1950, Friedman to LCR, 3 April, and LCR to Friedman, 7 May 1951, Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/ 52, RP). In August 1950 Lionel agreed to serve on a Treasury committee, chaired by his former boss in Whitehall, Sir John Anderson, to consider what government policy should be in regard to the export of works of art – the Waverley Committee, as it is known since Anderson was created Lord Waverley in 1952. The official invitation had come from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Stafford Cripps. The Labour government had been returned, with a very small majority, in a general election in February. Attlee had then appointed Hugh Gaitskell as Minister of State for Economic Affairs to assist the ailing Cripps. When Cripps resigned on 20 October and Gaitskell succeeded him, Lionel immediately wrote to congratulate him, noting all University of London economists would be pleased at his appointment and that he himself ‘could not help feeling . . . a pang of regret poor Evan [Durbin, who had died in 1948] was not here to share the pleasure’. Gaitskell agreed: ‘It would be so much less lonely if he were here still.’ He hoped Lionel would give him advice when he thought it necessary (LCR to Gaitskell, 23 October, and Gaitskell to LCR, 28 October 1950, Gaitskell C44, UCL). Lionel and his former student had a different, rather sharp exchange eighteen months later when Lionel heard that Gaitskell had criticized the appointment of Waverley to a royal commission on taxation on the grounds that he was a Conservative. Ever loyal to his chief, Lionel wrote Gaitskell on 1 March 1951: ‘When we were all much younger you and Evan used to tease me about my distaste for politics. Who would have thought that one of you would have afforded me so complete a justification for that feeling? . . . When I read your objection I rubbed my eyes and asked – what do these people really want? Are only mediocrities who have no views on anything, henceforward to be in charge of our public inquiries? Is the stuffed shirt their idea of the just man made perfect?’ Gaitskell wrote a spirited response on 5 March, saying he did think the appointment was outrageous and that the chairman of such a commission should not only be impartial but be seen to be so. Lionel’s reply on 11 March, tackling Gaitskell’s claims

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on the matter of precedents, was equally vigorous, but neither man let the exchange spoil their friendship, even if Lionel had to write to Lady Waverley a few months later to assure her after she had been talking to Gaitskell that he had not come round to Gaitskell’s point of view (Letters from Ministers & Civil Servants about Offices etc, RP). With interests in common outside party politics, they continued to meet regularly at, for instance, meetings of the Friends of Atlantic Union (‘FAU meeting, House of Commons, 2nd July 1954’, Articles & Letters on Public Affairs, RP; LCR to Gaitskell, 1 November, and Gaitskell to LCR, 4 November 1954, Gaitskell F18). After reading Robbins’s article Albert Hunold invited him to lecture on European economic integration at the Institut f¨ur Auslandforschung in Zurich in the coming winter or in the summer of 1951. He agreed to lecture just before Christmas, suggesting ‘the blanket label “International Economic Co-operation”’, but in the event he postponed his visit to May 1952, when he gave one lecture on problems of monetary policy and another on problems of commercial policy. Hunold had tried to tempt him to come earlier with the bait of the Oskar Reinhart Foundation in Winterthur, which opened in January 1951.7 He also declined an invitation to lecture at the GIIS, telling Rappard on 4 December that ‘having been completely absorbed by work on a small historical book’ (1952) he had no new thoughts on any suitable topics (Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/52, RP). To the Marshall Society in Cambridge in October 1950 he had talked on ‘The Theory of the State in English Classical Economics’ (Marshall Society Minute Book, Cambridge University Archives). Early in the new year he replied positively to an invitation from Jacques Rueff to talk at the Societ´e d’Economie Politique in Paris on 13 March, but when he realized he would have to lecture in French, he told Rueff that because he would need to prepare a written text in English and have that translated for him to read from he would have to postpone it. He had also ‘become involved in the public discussion of our defence preparations, and for weeks ahead, nearly every free hour is devoted to participation in private discussion circles and informal speeches designed to produce rather more lively awareness among the educated public here of the dreadful situation in which we find ourselves’ (LCR to Rueff, 3, 11 and 15 January 1951, Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/52, RP). 7

Hunold to LCR, 17 and 24 July, LCR to Hunold, 21 July and 8 August 1950, Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950; LCR to Hunold, 23 November 1950, Mont Pelerin Society Box 3; A Review of Liberal Doctrine concerning Trade & Finance in International Sphere, Speeches & Articles on Public Affairs, RP.

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The six months since the summer had been full of anxieties. The Korean War had broken out on 25 June 1950, when North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel into US-occupied South Korea. The British government took it for granted that the UK would support the US forces under General Douglas MacArthur and immediately sent troops, but also counted mistakenly on US assistance to mitigate the effects of British rearmament on the UK balance of payments. In the autumn and winter MacArthur’s decision to advance through North Korea towards the Manchurian border, an action which brought in newly Communist China on the North Korean side, aroused widespread fears of a third world war. Attlee flew to Washington in December to encourage President Truman not to resort to nuclear weapons; the price of US agreement to consult its allies was a rapid large increase in the already expanded UK rearmament programme (Cairncross 1985, 212– 22; Morgan 1990, 86–8). During the winter Lionel was also beginning to be concerned about his ageing parents still living at Hollycroft, although they seemed ‘reasonably well’. He was seriously worried about his daughter whose boyfriend was showing signs of dangerous mental instability. When the young man’s doctor told Anne that she should not see him again, Lionel stepped in. Having been assured by Frank Lee that she would be able to get employment as a secretary in one of the UK missions in Washington, he asked his sister to send the necessary invitation to visit the States. When he saw Anne off at Euston for the boat train to Liverpool just before Christmas, ‘with the frightful threat of war which was hanging over us’, he ‘very much wondered . . . whether we should ever meet again in this world’ (LCR to ICR, 4 and 14 December 1950 and 24 January 1951). In this frame of mind Lionel wrote to the editor of The Times on New Year’s Day (published 2 January): ‘Recent events seem to suggest that within a few months, if not before, we may be in a situation of the utmost peril. Even if, as is sometimes argued, the deterrent effect of superiority in atomic weapons may be sufficient to procure a breathing space for another year or so, that time is desperately short.’ He called for three policies as a matter of urgency: faster rearmament, stockpiling of essential materials and civil defence precautions – all of which prompted his friend Oscar Hobson to question (in The Spectator on 12 January) whether he was not trying to fight the next war with the economic weapons of the last (Articles & Letters on Public Affairs, RP). Robbins also argued (in The Spectator a week later [1951a]) that the diversion of resources would require a ‘drastic financial policy’ and a partial reversion to the wartime economy, with resort to allocation of materials, direction of labour, and extension of the rationing which still remained from the war. He urged these policies on every possible

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occasion in the next three months, in talks and popular articles, telling his sister on 22 February that ‘I am up to my neck in the activities of various vigilance groups. The government’s showing in the defence debate [on 15 February] was better than I anticipated. But the position is not good.’ One group was a Royal Institute of International Affairs study group on Atlantic Union set up at the instigation of Sir Ian Jacob, James Meade and Donald McLachlan of The Economist.8 Lionel had known General Jacob, now head of the foreign service of the BBC, during the war when Jacob was military secretary of the Cabinet and ‘by far the ablest staff officer I met’ (LCR to Carr-Saunders, 5 March 1951, Director Correspondence April 1946-Dec 1954, RP). Brand chaired the group, whose other members were the Labour MP Christopher Mayhew and Charles Webster. Meade and Robbins were asked to draft an agenda on 29 March. They included both description of ‘existing organization’ (ie NATO) and its deficiencies and, under the heading of ‘Possible developments’, ‘a full discussion of proposals for more organic union’. When the group decided on 8 May that the time had come to plan the report, ‘Professor Robbins suggested that an interesting and useful book would result from discussion of NATO and its present and future problems,’ reminding the group of the agenda that he and Meade had drawn up. Reviewing the agenda, ‘Members of the Group were united in considering that federation in any form was impracticable in the near future. Professors Meade and Robbins felt strongly, however, that there was a body of well-meaning and intelligent opinion in this country which was attracted by the idea of federation and lacked proper information and guidance. The Group’s report would, they considered, do much to meet this need for guidance.’ At the next meeting, on 12 June, Robbins also told the group he thought NATO ‘a second-best solution: the best would be an understanding between the USA and the Commonwealth so close that the group could lead the world as Britain had once done’. His gloomy views were not shared by all the other members. The report by McLachlan (1952) examined how NATO worked, analysed the policies followed by the West in the Cold War since the invasion of Korea and made some modest suggestions for strengthening the defences and policymaking machinery of the Western Allies. On 25 January Lionel saw Fritz Machlup, who was passing through London on his way to lecture in Switzerland. The next day Frank Knight arrived 8

The minutes of the meetings are in 9/46a Study Group on Atlantic Union, RIIA.

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on the Libert´e, en route to lecture at Glasgow, and spent the evening of his arrival at Meadway Close. Later that night, which was a Friday, Lionel learned that his father, suffering from influenza, was dangerously ill with pneumonia (LCR to Machlup, 10 January 1951, LCR to Knight, 24 January and 9 February 1951, Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/52, RP). By the following Thursday the Pater had pulled through with the aid of antibiotics but Mother had developed flu and had collapsed the previous day. She died two days later, ‘completely extinguished as if by a medieval plague, within a period of four days’, as he told Viner on 16 February (Viner 22–14). Lionel cancelled most of his work at LSE and he and Iris stayed with his father at Hollycroft until after the funeral, when they took him back to Meadway Close (LCR to ICR, 1, 4 and 6 February 1951). The days at Hollycroft had been ‘Hell’, with Lionel suffering from a severe migraine which lasted three days (information from Iris Robbins). At Meadway Close it was only slightly easier: ‘On Saturday & Sunday he [RRR] wrote about seventy letters – it is true according to rough formulae with which I, perceiving that nothing would stop him writing, had devised. This kept him fully occupied! But yesterday & today he has been over at Hollycroft during the day. There was no stopping him & indeed I do believe him when he says that without something to do he will go mad.’ He soon resumed his work as a magistrate and spent other weekdays at Hollycroft, returning to Meadway Close at night and fretting about the petrol consumed by the daily journeys. Sundays were a problem too: ‘It is not that he disapproves of our ways – since he came indeed there has been nothing positive to disapprove of, since no one has been here on Sundays save on one occasion the innocent Wendy Dobbs [a friend of Richard’s]. But the Free Church is half a mile off & he hates us getting the car out. Yet he is uneasy unless he is able to go twice in the day’ (LCR to ICR, 16 and 22 February and 11 March 1951). Like father like son. Lionel found his work at LSE ‘a great comfort’, also telling Viner that he thought he had at last removed the pressure on him to become an administrator by heading a move to get Carr-Saunders’s term as director extended. By the time the Lent term ended Iris had also had the flu. So had Knight, but they had recovered sufficiently for them and Lionel to spend another evening together (LCR to Knight, 8 and 14 March, Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/52, RP). Lionel had tried and failed to persuade his father to visit Caroline and Joe at Bryn Mawr. He also despaired of his younger sister Nancy’s taking time from her work in India to visit her father: as he told Caroline on 4 March he had ‘written off that possibility’ when she sent a consolatory telegram consisting only of

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‘“2 Thessalonians 2, 16 & 17”9 – much love’, which he thought expressed eloquently the difference between her views and his and Caroline’s. A week later Lionel’s father’s sisters found him a suitably pious housekeeper so that he could move back to Hollycroft. The Waverley Committee on the Export of Works of Art etc began meeting regularly in March 1951. It had held one meeting on 11 October 1950 when it defined its terms of reference, to encompass a wide range of objects of special national, historical or artistic interest (hence the ‘etc’) and decided on a long list of organizations and individuals from whom to take evidence.10 British concern with the export of works of art from its shores, especially to the USA, was longstanding, prompting the creation in 1903 of the National Art Collections Fund (now known as the Art Fund) – a voluntary organization whose purpose is to provide grants for national and provincial collections to purchase works which they cannot afford and which otherwise would be sold abroad – and two subcommittees of the trustees of the National Gallery in 1911 and 1919, which considered (but rejected) the idea of an export duty. When the National Gallery did ask for an export duty in 1922, which the Chancellor of the Exchequer refused, the outcome was instead a ‘paramount’ list of a very few outstanding pictures whose purchase the Treasury undertook to recommend to Parliament, but there had been no control of exports of works of art until the Second World War, under the Import, Export and Customs Powers (Defence) Act of 1939 which was still in force. Since the war applications for licences to export works of art had risen rapidly, especially after the 1949 devaluation of sterling, and a significant number had been refused. Facing criticism that its advisers were interested parties, the government set up a reviewing committee to consider cases when a licence was refused and the exporter appealed; this too was criticized as both arbitrary and ineffective – hence the appointment of the Waverley Committee (Treasury 1952; Conlin 2006, 361–2). Robbins’s fellow members were Anthony Blunt and Lord Crawford, whom he knew from the Committee of Management of the Courtauld Institute, V.H. Galbraith Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, Mrs Hugh Dalton and the architectural historian Christopher Hussey. Crawford, the twenty-eighth Earl of Crawford and the eleventh Earl of Balcarres, was ‘a keen supporter 9

10

‘Now our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God, even our Father, which hath loved us, and hath given us everlasting consolation and good hope through grace, Comfort your hearts, and stablish you in every good word and work.’ The committee’s minutes, agenda and other papers are in three files in the Robbins Papers and in T227/315–320, TNA.

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of public patronage of art institutions’ (Verdi 2003, 56): as well as following in his father’s footsteps as chairman of the NACF, he was a trustee of the National Gallery, the British Museum and the National Galleries of Scotland. The secretary, A.E.L. (Sandy) Parnis, then a Treasury civil servant, had been in the consular service before the war and at the British Embassy in Paris where ‘he enjoyed his contacts with the world of art and music’.11 When they met on 9 March 1951 they had received some fifty submissions from government departments, gallery and museum directors, art dealers, wealthy individuals and others. Lionel had done his homework: his copies of the papers carry annotations such as ‘Most unhelpful’, ‘Trivial’, ‘Silly’, even in one case, ‘Top marks for absurdity’. He marked his copy of a letter from Kenneth Clark, the former director of the National Gallery, as ‘Important’, noting marginally the following views: ‘From the public point of view . . . there are relatively few works of art for which the galleries have an over-riding claim’; ‘The State should not be able to prohibit the sale of a work of art abroad unless it is prepared to purchase that work for an equivalent sum’; ‘Many curators would, of course, employ the ban on export in a reasonable manner, but experience shows that some of them, with exaggerated zeal, will try to stop almost anything which could be of interest to their gallery. If in each case this carries with it the obligation to purchase they will be limited by their grant’; and the practical objections to compiling a list of non-exportable works. A large exclamation mark represented his reaction to the opinion of the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum that it was more important to keep in Britain the suite of furniture designed by Chippendale for Lord Harewood than Harewood’s Titian (on which see Chapter 27). At the meeting, in a discussion of the submission from the Standing Committee on Museums and Galleries, the following points emerged . . . It could be argued that there was no logical grounds for stopping anything from going overseas save when it formed part of the nation’s history. If this view were adopted few works of supreme importance would qualify for retention; nevertheless Lord Crawford and Professor Blunt urged that they should be retained and that, in this field it was probably unwise to try and be too logical. But Sir Kenneth Clark was probably right in suggesting that the list should be quite small. ... The problems might be greatly eased if the national and provincial museums could be liberally endowed with funds with which to buy. But Sir Kenneth Clark had drawn attention to the acquisitiveness of keepers and curators; and there was the problem 11

King’s College Cambridge, Annual Report 1995, 29–30.

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of finding the money. . . . Professor Robbins thought that an export tax was only justified on a wasting asset (which this possibly was); its incidence, in this market, would probably be almost wholly on the owner. This would be most inequitable.

Lionel kept his own notes of the third meeting on 6 April which took oral evidence from Huntington Cairns, secretary of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Vincent Massey, who had been chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery while he was Canadian High Commissioner in London in the 1940s (Bissell 1986, 166–71), and Edward Playfair of the Treasury, who chaired the present reviewing committee. Cairns told the committee that ‘the American institutions did not question the desire of the British Government to retain at home works of national importance. They had, however, had some unfortunate experiences over the application of this principle. Export licences had been refused for objects which no British museum had taken any steps to acquire and which no-one had previously suggested were of national importance.’ Lionel noted Cairns’s proposals that ‘national importance’ should be clearly defined, a list of objects of national importance promulgated and administrative rulings codified. He also noted Cairns’s suggestion that the US tax arrangements which provided for advance administrative rulings might be copied. He thought Cairns’s proviso, that an export licence should not be refused if UK galleries were not prepared to buy, was of ‘great importance’ and shared his preference for a lay committee to review applications. In the discussions after Cairns left, ‘Members of the Committee thought that the absence of an offer could hardly be a decisive criterion unless there was an assurance of ample cash for purchase here; and that it would be necessary to define some objects which should be kept even though not bought, such as those forming a fundamental part of British history. Professor Robbins thought it was all the more important that the decision should be in the hands of an independent body; he profoundly mistrusted committees of experts.’ With respect to Massey’s evidence, Robbins noted he ‘Agree[d] that money is at centre of problem’ and that the Canadian National Gallery had about $50,000 a year at its disposal (ms notes ‘Huntingdon Cairns’ and ‘Vincent Massey’, Committee on the Export of Works of Art etc I, RP). When Clark appeared before the committee on 1 May, in discussion of the idea of a paramount list Robbins ‘suggested that if the number were so small, instead of keeping in being the cumbrous apparatus of control, there might be a case for raising the money and buying the pictures once and for all’. Clark preferred keeping the present reviewing committee in existence and adding an adjudicating committee, not including museum directors, to advise the Treasury whether money should be made available for a particular purchase.

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As in the war Lionel was impressed by Anderson’s chairmanship (Wheeler-Bennett 1962, 372; Robbins 1971a, 248). It is . . . probable that the history of art and the problems relating to the sale and exhibition of its various manifestations had hitherto enjoyed a low minimum of his attention. . . . Within a meeting or so of our assembling, he had so mastered what was essential to our discussions that he was cross-examining, on equal terms as it were, anxious owners, irate Bond Street dealers, fanatical connoisseurs, avaricious curators and distinguished international historians, all as if he had moved in their worlds all his life. Only once in eighteen months’ sittings did my anxious, protective ear detect a slight fault in this massive deployment: I noticed that Nicholas Poussin had been promoted in date from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Even this may have been a slip of the tongue.

In the interviewing of the ‘anxious owners’ etc Robbins’s own views began to crystallize. In a discussion of the problems of provincial galleries after an interview with the director of the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery on 12 June, ‘Professor Robbins thought that too much time was being spent on organisation when what was needed primarily was more money; it was, however, pointed out that if more money was made available, some machinery would be needed to ensure that it was rightly allocated.’ Again, at the next meeting on 15 June, when the position in France, Austria and Italy was being considered, he ‘said that the experience both of France and of Austria, was that what was needed was money to buy the objects which it was sought to safeguard. The problem would probably never have been so acute if it had not been for the inflation and the economic difficulties which had followed the first world war. He wondered if a very tight control did not indicate the twilight of national culture. It was when a State ceased to be confident of its capacity to go forward that it began to impose restrictions. He agreed however that some restraints might be desirable pending economic recovery.’ On 27 July he asked Philip Hendy, director of the National Gallery since 1946, how much it would cost to purchase the 100 pictures in private hands in Britain which the Gallery regarded as essential to preserve; the answer was £10–15 m. The ‘distinguished international historians’ interviewed included Lionel’s sister’s friends Conyers Read and Wallace Notestein, who came to talk about the export of historical manuscripts on 13 July. In the committee there was disagreement between Galbraith and Robbins on this issue. Galbraith first claimed (on 12 June) that because ‘the fundamental question was whether they would be properly looked after no historian would be dismayed at documents going to the Huntington Library’ in California; in response to this claim Robbins ‘pointed out that circumstances had changed, and that the absence of important papers might prevent the development of an

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important school of history in this country’. But then they changed sides: when Galbraith complained on 13 July that microfilmed records were not an adequate substitute for original documents, Robbins ‘said that his sister, who used microfilms extensively in the University of Brynmawr [sic], found them quite satisfactory and indeed easier to use than 17th century originals’. At later meetings Robbins continued to defend this position (except for major state papers). Hendy always suspected Robbins had been the ‘live wire’ on the Waverley Committee (‘Lord Robbins and the National Gallery’, Tributes etc, RP). When the committee began to discuss the digests of evidence prepared by Parnis, Robbins made his own views very clear and very effectively. According to the minutes of the ninth meeting on 28 August: The first question was whether some control over works of art, etc. should remain, even if it were no longer needed for exchange control purposes. Professor Robbins felt that there was a case for some control in some categories, and Professor Galbraith drew attention to the importance of control, not only for safeguarding national treasures, but also for keeping track of where articles went. . . . The next question was whether control should be associated with the provision of a reasonably adequate sum for purchase. Professor Robbins felt very strongly that it should. In his view, unless that were done, the system was grossly inequitable. . . . In his view control could be reduced to a minimum if the grants for purchase were increased by a quite insignificant sum. The National Gallery, it is true, reckoned that it needed £10,000,000, but that would be spread over a very long time; moreover what was involved were capital assets. If a reasonable offer to purchase had been made and refused, then control could justifiably be applied. After discussion the Committee reached the provisional conclusion that the continuance of the present control could not be justified unless reasonable funds were provided for the acquisition of the object it was sought to control. If this were laid down as a rule, then there might be a case for imposing temporary delay, pending money becoming available.

The next day, Lionel argued that the control should be applied ‘with a very light rein. In the field of paintings efforts should be made to retain the masterpieces, but elsewhere the administration should be very liberal. . . . There were good reasons for retaining a flourishing trade in works of art; many discoveries were due to the great London dealers, and the existence in London of large markets was important.’ When it came to the question of how ‘national interest’ could be defined and whether any distinction should be drawn between British and foreign works, Lionel again argued strongly (on 26 October): The right course was to adopt historic and aesthetic importance as the general criteria; then British pictures would be stopped if they satisfied these criteria, otherwise not. The question of rarity also entered in. Both tests should not be applied to the

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same picture, and they should not necessarily apply in fields other than pictures [and sculpture]. . . . In discussion the Committee reached the provisional conclusion that the test to be applied to pictures and sculpture should be that of historical and aesthetic importance, and rarity.

Robbins and Hussey both raised the possibility of an export tax but decided on hearing the evidence that it was impracticable. Anderson, a past Chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue, was strongly against; the committee agreed on 5 November to recommend accordingly. The committee also agreed (13 November) to recommend that the government should provide more money for purchases of works of art. ‘Now that private patronage was drying up, Professor Robbins felt that it was inevitable and right that the State should provide rather more for the encouragement of the arts. At the same time the additional money should not be provided by way of subventions to existing organisations, such as the National Art-Collections Fund, since this inevitably tended to dry up private subscriptions and also would be bound to lead to an increased measure of public control. What was needed was a separate fund giving conditional subventions.’ In December the committee began considering drafts of parts of the report written by Parnis. When it was still doing so in April 1952 the committee agreed to meet intensively in early June, but Lionel missed these meetings as he was in Paris. The committee held its final meeting on 8 July. The report (Treasury 1952) recommended a standing reviewing committee under an independent chairman. This committee would not only set the principles under which export licences could be refused but could also delay the granting of a licence until the national or provincial gallery or museum desiring to purchase it had time to raise the necessary funds. The report also recommended an increase in the annual grants-in-aid from the Treasury to the national collections for purchases of pictures and sculpture. The committee was unanimous except that Galbraith added a note on the point on which he disagreed with Robbins, arguing for the need to retain power to prohibit export of manuscripts and historical records. The Korean War ended in military stalemate in the summer of 1951. The unfortunate consequences of rearmament, and of the world commodity price inflation which accompanied the war, for the British balance of payments continued. The defence programme affected both sides of the current account, increasing imports of raw materials and equipment and diverting manufacturing industry from exports to military goods. The severe

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deterioration in the terms of trade increased the impact. At first the commodity price boom benefitted the rest of the sterling area, which enjoyed sizeable current account surpluses in the second half of 1950 and the first half of 1951, but the cessation of US stockpiling and the weakening of inflationary fears then reduced the exports of the overseas sterling area at a time when their imports had increased. A £200m overall sterling area surplus in the first half of 1951 turned into a £800m deficit in the second. UK official international reserves began to decline rapidly. Gaitskell’s only budget, in April 1951, tried to mitigate the effect of rearmament on the UK economy by increasing a wide range of taxes and attempting to restrain spending on the National Health Service by introducing charges for dentures and spectacles – at the cost for the Labour government of three young ministers, Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson and John Freeman, who resigned a fortnight after the budget. The old members of the government staggered on, now without Bevin (who died in April 1951) or Cripps, until Attlee called an election for 25 October. Although Labour increased its vote, the Conservatives under Winston Churchill were returned with a comfortable majority: 321 seats compared to 295 for Labour. Against this background Lionel Robbins delivered the Stamp Memorial Lecture for 1951 at Senate House on 20 November (Robbins 1951b). This was ‘one of the few [University lectures] which are relatively well paid (approx. £50)’ and attracted ‘a most distinguished audience of senior civil servants and the top men from the City [of London]’ as well as many students (LCR to Viner, 15 May 1953, Viner 22–14). His topic was the balance of payments. There was ‘no danger that I shall treat it from a political standpoint’ for he found the policies of all parties, as disclosed in their election manifestoes, ‘almost unequally unrealistic and almost equally distasteful’. He first explained the nature of balance-of-payments disequilibria, pointing out that whatever its original cause the persistence of external imbalance necessarily implied an inappropriate domestic financial policy (inappropriate for maintaining external balance, that is; it might be appropriate for other objectives). He did not fail to point out that sterling’s postwar difficulties had been aggravated by capital exports due to the unsatisfactory treatment of the old sterling balances. But he emphasized that the persistent weakness of sterling must on theoretical grounds be the consequence of inflationary domestic financial policies. ‘I do not say that internal affairs have been managed [since the war] with no regard to the external balance. . . . But it is at least clear that there has been more than one objective and that, where considerations of external equilibrium have clashed with domestic policy, they have usually had to go by the board.’ He continued: ‘It is clear too

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that the traditional mechanism for securing harmony between internal and external conditions has been completely out of action. In so far as attempts have been made to adapt internal expenditure to the requirements of external balance, it has been via the budget and the direct control of investment, rather than through operation on the volume of means of payments available.’ The recommendation of his lecture was that monetary policy should now be brought into use again as an instrument for maintaining external balance with a fixed exchange rate. Although Lionel approved of exchange-rate changes in circumstances such as 1949 and 1931 he generally preferred fixed exchange rates. In his Stamp Lecture he gave two arguments against floating rates. The first was that a floating exchange rate did not avoid the necessity for disinflationary domestic policy because a depreciation would otherwise be inflationary; the second was that the floating of a major currency would create too much uncertainty to be good for international trade. He was ‘quite definitely’ against another devaluation or floating the pound in 1951. On reading this ‘magnificent’ lecture, Milton Friedman wrote to Robbins on 21 January 1952 (Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/52, RP): ‘But I come not to honour but to quibble. . . . I found your argument for a rigid exchange rate the least persuasive part of the lecture. And, reading between the lines, I rather infer that you do too.’ He pointed out that as far as trade was concerned it was the stability of an exchange rate that mattered and used his now well-known argument that private speculation would tend to be stabilizing (Friedman 1953). In his reply on 6 February (Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/52, RP) Robbins admitted that he was ‘considerably less confiden[t] about my analysis here than elsewhere’ but he was ‘not yet dislodged from my position’. He emphasized he was not in favour of a fixed exchange rate at all costs and had ‘no prejudice against occasional adjustment’. But he did not think that a liberal economic policy required, on ideological grounds as it were, freely floating exchange rates. His objection was not fear that private speculation would be destabilizing: ‘I think that in practice speculation is only de-stabilizing if governments respond in a certain way.’ ‘My trouble’, he continued, ‘is that I think this kind of response is extremely probable.’ His fear was that a government would allow domestic inflation to follow depreciation of a floating exchange rate, whereas ‘Having regard to the present state of economic enlightenment in this particular community, I have more hope of positive monetary policy when there is a fixed exchange rate to fight for.’ The correspondence continued for a further round; it might have gone on for several more had Friedman not come to lecture at LSE in May 1952.

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On the ideological point Robbins raised, Friedman said that he, and Aaron Director, agreed with Robbins: ‘If we have given the impression that a free exchange rate is, and a fixed exchange rate is not, a liberal solution, it must have been in the heat of argument, and it is not a position that either of us would now want to defend.’ Hence there were still two points at issue, the monetary discipline argument for fixed exchange rates, which did not fully persuade Friedman or Director, and the immediate practical conseqences of a floating pound on the sterling area, on which Friedman was less sure of his position (Friedman to LCR, 22 February 1952, Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/52, RP). On rereading the correspondence Friedman (1988, 188–9) was impressed by two things: although their analyses were close their prescriptions were miles apart; and there had been no new arguments introduced into the debate since 1952. Viner’s reaction to the lecture had been rather different (21 January 1952, Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/52, RP): ‘It was fine, and I agree with every word of it.’ Viner shared the view of many economists on both sides of the Atlantic: it was high time postwar governments utilized the instruments of monetary policy again. By the time of the fall of the Labour government several other countries, including the US and Canada, had raised their central bank discount rates. In Britain the case for monetary policy was being made in the financial press and in academic journals; in describing the climate of ideas in 1951 Dow (1964, 67–9) singled out Robbins’s Stamp Lecture as ‘particularly forceful and influential’. The new Conservative government soon took steps to reintroduce monetary policy. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, R.A. Butler, recalled (1971, 156–7) that he started his Treasury life by lunching with Sir Edward Bridges and William Armstrong (the Chancellor’s private secretary) at the Athenaeum: ‘Their story was of blood draining from the system and a collapse greater than had been foretold in 1931’ – a reprise of the ominous phrase Robbins always attributed to Keynes. The next day Butler saw the Governor of the Bank of England, C.F. Cobbold. On 7 November he announced a rise in Bank Rate to 21/2 per cent (from the 2 per cent in effect since October 1939) in a package of emergency measures consisting mainly of cuts in imports which were still subject to controls. In the Economic Section Robert Hall (Cairncross ed 1989, 176) thought there was ‘not much . . . (except Bank Rate) any different from what Labour has done and would have to do’ – a view Lionel probably shared. In his Stamp Lecture he welcomed the steps taken but did not think they went far enough. Three weeks later he was more optimistic (LCR to E.S. Kirby, 13 December 1951, Economists Correspondence 1.1.50–31/3/52, RP): ‘The perennial

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crisis continues, but . . . it has changed its form significantly, since for the first time in twenty years monetary measures are being adopted to supplement fiscal measures in dealing with the situation. . . . I am more sanguine than I was that perhaps sufficient will be done to bring about some improvement.’ On Christmas Eve Lionel wrote to his sister Caroline with family news. Anne was home from the States; he and Anne had been to see his father at Hollycroft, where the lugubrious Miss Stock was still keeping house for him; there were worries about his brother-in-law Clive’s health. As for himself he had just finished correcting the galley proofs of his new book (1952), which had been held up first by the printers and then by his preparation of his Stamp Lecture. In the first days of the new year he was taking part in the discussions of a confidential RIIA Study Group, chaired by Lord Brand, in order to prepare a report on sterling area policy requested by Sir Arthur Salter, Minister of State for Economic Affairs in the new government. The group was regarded as so secret that the RIIA destroyed all its documents except for the report (F.M. Littlehales to Registry, 28.4.55, File 9/47a Sterling Area Policy Secret Report, RIIA). Robbins (1971a, 229) objected strongly to allegations that after he left government service he remained ‘a sort of eminence grise behind the scenes, advising the Treasury and influencing ministers, especially Conservative ministers, concerning the principles of policy’. Apart from two occasions when he had been consulted in the 1950s, he had ‘from the day I said goodbye to my official position, . . . scrupulously avoided any attempt to obtrude my opinions on my late colleagues or on ministers’ – even though he had been sorely tempted to in 1947 and 1949. In the 1950s he received many more requests for advice and assistance from the Conservative government than he had from the Labour government. This was partly because he was good friends with some moderate Tory MPs as well as with several senior officials; it was also because of the nature of the problems facing the Treasury once monetary policy was ‘revived’ in November 1951. But he declined most of the requests and those he accepted were not related to economic policy – except for those he alluded to in his autobiography. The first of these came soon after the election of the new government. The November 1951 Bank Rate increase had little impact: Butler announced further import cuts on 29 January 1952 and again in his early first budget on 11 March, along with another rise in Bank Rate. It has been known for many years now that Robbins was consulted before the budget in regard to ‘Robot’, the controversial plan to make ‘overseas’ sterling (mainly current sterling earnings of nonresidents) convertible at a floating exchange

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rate while blocking the bulk of the old sterling balances, whose proponents wanted announced in the budget. The report to Salter had been prepared in anticipation of a Commonwealth finance ministers’ meeting on 15–21 January 1952 (Sterling Area Policy, 4 January 1952, File 9/47a, RIIA). It focussed on measures to stem the current drain of sterling and to prevent a breakup of the sterling area which would be a blow to the political solidarity of the Commonwealth. The necessary measures were matters of domestic policy: ‘the major failure of UK economic policy is that it has not adjusted domestic expenditure to the needs of rearmament and the worsening of the terms of trade’; the adjustment required an anti-inflationary monetary policy and a drastic reduction of government expenditure. Higher interest rates should also help to reduce the export of capital from Britain to the rest of the sterling area, which the report also urged. The report ended, however, by suggesting the Treasury draw up a contingency plan, involving possibly the blocking of sterling balances or the floating of the pound, in case the recommended policies failed to end the exchange crisis. According to the historian of the Bank of England (Fforde 1992, 426–7), this last recommendation was noted in the Bank. Robot was hatched by Leslie Rowan and Otto Clarke in the Treasury and George Bolton in the Bank in the last week of January and the first two weeks of February (ibid., 427–34). When Robert Hall saw a paper from the Governor of the Bank ‘advocating a drastic operation on the sterling balances, to be followed by “limited convertibility” whatever that means, at a range round a rate’, on Friday 15 February, he did not take it seriously: ‘It sounds wonderful but I suspect he needs to use budgetary and monetary policy i.e. variations in employment, to keep within his band. No Government would accept this at present.’ But when he realized the following Wednesday that it was proposed to carry out the operation on 4 March, he was alarmed, especially at the attempt to bounce ministers into the policy. He alerted Donald MacDougall, who had returned to government to work again for Lord Cherwell (Paymaster General); protested to Bridges against this ‘very precipitate action’; and asked that Edwin Plowden (head of the Central Economic Planning Staff) be summoned back immediately from a NATO Council meeting in Lisbon (Cairncross ed 1989, 203–6). When Plowden returned he learned that ‘those against the plan were beginning to mobilise their forces’: Hall and his Economic Section colleagues had drafted a strongly critical memorandum on Robot, Cherwell was writing one with the assistance of MacDougall and Hall had been granted permission (by

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Bridges) to consult Robbins (Plowden 1989, 143–9). MacDougall (1987, 94–9) recorded that the next five days (25–29 February) ‘were days of battle, with the fortunes swaying backwards and forwards. . . . No holds were barred. A lot was at stake. A handful of officials in the Treasury and the Bank had tried to spring a fast one in a most uncivilservicelike manner, and the resentment of other officials was often quite violent.’ When he heard from Hall that Robbins was ‘very strongly against it’, he suggested to Plowden that Lionel talk to Peter Thorneycroft (President of the Board of Trade), as he knew they were friends. Although Plowden contacted Frank Lee, now Permanent Secretary at the Board of Trade, to try and arrange a meeting, it is not clear that one took place. (MacDougall had already made sure Lee was on side.) Butler told Cobbold that he had consulted Anderson, Hopkins and Robbins; the Governor recorded (Overseas sterling plans, 18 March 1952, G1/122, BOE) that Robbins ‘thought it would probably prove necessary later on but did not think the timing was correct’. Robbins saw Bridges and Hall on Wednesday 27 February. According to Bridges’ notes (T236/3241, TNA), ‘Professor Robbins said that the proposals alarmed him, both on the grounds of their precipitancy and on their dangers.’ The first danger was inflation since in present circumstances a floating pound would fall. ‘This led Professor Robbins to ask why we had not already taken more vigorous action to put up the Bank rate. . . . He emphasised the double function of the Bank rate, (a) internally in the credit field, and (b) externally from the point of view of attracting money to this country.’ On Robot he ‘thought we were acting very early, before we had had time to let our anti-inflationary policy work, and that if action were taken on the lines proposed in about 10 days time it would be felt that we had acted with undue haste, before we had really put our own house in order, and while we still had several shots in the locker’. He also thought it might mean the end of the sterling area, as well as ‘flying in the face’ of the IMF. Bridges asked him what he would do. He said he would put up the Bank Rate immediately (ie the next day) to 4 per cent and put it up further if necessary. He would then advise the Chancellor to have a ‘really stiff’ budget with a big reduction in food subsidies, a big increase in the petrol tax and increases in any other indirect taxes which could stand increases. As to the sterling balances they could be funded so as to be released gradually, rather than blocked. Bridges noted that ‘the real essential of his point of view was TO STOP INFLATION and from the economists’ point of view this could be done without the slightest difficulty, providing that Ministers were prepared to take resolute action’. The government might have to resort to Robot in

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two or three months’ time, but ‘if we did so, after we had made a resolute attempt to cure our troubles by determined action at home, we should be able to act without the risk of offending all our friends throughout the world, inside and outside the Commonwealth.’ Robbins also sent Bridges a long note of his views (ms Notes on Robot, Articles & Letters on Public Affairs, RP; Notes on a certain plan and suggestions for alternative action, T236/3241, TNA). He looked separately at the three features of Robot: (1) the floating rate, (2) blocking sterling balances and (3) convertibility. On (1) he emphasized the possibility of a vicious inflationary spiral if the pound fell. On (2) he was ‘amazed’ that whereas when he and others urged blocking of wartime balances at the end of the war they were told it was ‘unthinkably dishonourable, etc., etc.,’ now it was being proposed for balances accumulated since the war. ‘The one would have been a desirable reconstruction operation; the other, not to put too fine a point on it, is an act of national bankruptcy.’ As for (3), allowing convertibility of sterling to nonsterling countries with dollar deficits would provide them with a strong temptation to restrict their UK imports in order to increase their dollar reserves. There were also the political repercussions with respect to the sterling area and the IMF. Moreover, there was an alternative strategy comprising borrowing from the IMF, tighter domestic monetary and fiscal policy, funding some of the sterling balances and, after the US Presidential election, trying to negotiate a move to full convertibility: ‘Given a friendly President – with a little luck – given Eisenhower – there is at least a possibility that we should pull off this time the great settlement which . . . we botched so badly after the war.’ The economists won the day. At a Cabinet meeting late on the Thursday evening ministers were sufficiently divided – Cherwell having found support from others – that they had to adjourn until the next morning when the Prime Minister eventually concluded that the Chancellor could not go ahead with Robot at the present time (MacDougall 1987, 98–9; Plowden 1989, 149–52; Burnham 2003, 81–6). But the scheme was not dead; Lionel was consulted again in June, when he still ‘distrusted a floating rate until we were stronger’ and was ‘very disturbed’ at the idea of blocking newly earned sterling. When Plowden later asked if he was correct in remembering Lionel’s opposition to Robot, Lionel replied (draft in RP; Plowden 1989, 149): ‘You are quite right . . . I was opposed to Robot. This for two reasons, one controversially theoretical one practical and in my judgment not controversial.’ The theoretical reason was that ‘I have never really believed in floating. . . . I have always held this view: but I am aware that many whose views I respect think the contrary.’ The practical reason was it involved bad

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faith. ‘I should have had no objection to blocking the “abnormal” balances accumulated during the war. Indeed I think we did wrong not to do so.’ ‘But the position at the time of Robot was different. The balances which it was proposed to block were new balances accumulated in the belief that no blocking was contemplated. This shocked me very much.’ Lionel told Bridges in June he wanted to emphasize two things (Rowan to Bridges, 30 June, Rowan, Note for Record, 30 June, and LCR, Supplementary Notes, 1 July 1952, T236/3244). One was the danger of wage inflation, which would be exacerbated by the effect of a falling pound on import prices. The other was his fear of the damage to Britain’s international reputation and to international agreements. ‘In the end, I believe what worries me most about all this is the question of honour. Ever since I was first shown the original papers, the thing that keeps me awake in the middle of the night if it comes into my head, is the conviction that what is proposed . . . is not in fact strictly honourable.’ It could not be defended by the excuse of inevitability. ‘I don’t think that having, in a modest way, played cassandra for the last seven years, I am prone to underestimate the pickle we are in. [But] I must add that I think recent warnings of a renewed pressure on the exchanges are very naive indeed if they do not take into account the effect on the exchange markets of all the loose talk about a probable change of policy. . . . The dreadful thing is that we are in danger of just being talked off sterling at its present rate, without the excuse to the outside world of circumstances which it was beyond our power to resist.’ He protested against the assumption that Robot was the only conceivable policy; the ‘ingenuity and zeal’ devoted to it would have been better employed in developing alternatives. In 1952 Lionel embarked on a new research project. He had long been interested in Robert Torrens (1780–1864), the Anglo-Irish political economist and founding member of the Political Economy Club, who may have anticipated Ricardo in stating the theory of comparative advantage and became leader of the Currency School of monetary reformers after Ricardo’s death. One of Lionel’s first postwar graduate students, Said Ahmad Meenai, had written an MSc(Econ) thesis on Torrens, for which he had gathered much biographical information: Robbins encouraged him to publish this in Economica (1956).12 Lionel’s own interest in Torrens was kindled when the LSE library acquired a rare copy of The Budget (1844), which is famous for 12

Meenai wrote his doctoral dissertation (on the economics of Lord Lauderdale) under Hayek; when Hayek left LSE LCR took over and acted as internal examiner, asking Sraffa to be the external (LCR to Sraffa, 13 and 23 June 1950, Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950, RP).

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Torrens’s departure from the classical free-trade position, from Moritz Bonn. The School’s Publications Committee decided to include it in their reprint series and Lionel volunteered to write an introduction. On 18 March 1952 he told Frank Knight (Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/52, RP) that he had been ‘toiling at my introduction to Robert Torrens’ Budget, which is now blossoming forth into something like a long monograph, which may or may not get bound in as an introduction. It will all be on quite a small scale when it is finished, but it involves an incredible amount of reading and looking up references. I am now perhaps halfway through, but hope to be able to get on faster during the [Easter] vacation.’ The vacation was, however, one of varied activities. He attended a weekend conference hosted by Jewkes at Merton College for British members of the Mont Pelerin Society and a few outsiders, after reminding his friend he now fell in the latter category since his resignation from the society (LCR to Jewkes, 7 February and 17 March 1952, Correspondence with Economists 1.9.50–31/3/52, RP). He lectured at the NATO Defence College, which was to provide him with the opportunity of a couple of trips to Paris each year for the next few years. On the first occasion he talked on the economic factor in war potential; six months later he provided a world economic survey for 1945–52 (LCR to Truptil, 19 March 1952, Correspondence with Economists 1.9.50–31/3/52; lecture notes in Speeches & Articles on Public Affairs Postwar, RP). When the Summer term began Friedman arrived to give two lectures at the School and stayed with the hospitable Robbinses at Meadway Close. There he ‘witnessed a stage performance that exceeded any I have seen on the professional stage . . . the discussion between Lionel and his son, Richard, over morning coffee’: he was ‘astounded’ and delighted by ‘The repartee, the sophistication, [and] the breadth of knowledge there displayed’ (Friedman 1988, 187). Turvey told Baumol (undated, Baumol Papers) that Friedman’s ‘lectures [on ‘The classical counter-revolution in monetary theory and policy’] were disappointing, but he is great fun to talk with – discussions last for hours’. One of Sir Wilfrid Eady’s last acts before retirement from the Treasury was to ask Lionel in May 1952 to represent the UK on a committee of economists set up by the OEEC to investigate the internal financial situation in its member countries. Lionel agreed on condition that he would be an independent person not a representative of the UK government. Perhaps partly for this reason he was asked to take the chair, which the Treasury had not expected (LCR to Carr-Saunders, 8 May 1952, Director Correspondence April 1946-Dec 1954; Butler to LCR, 13 May, and Plowden to LCR, 25 June 1952, Letters from Ministers & Civil Servants about offices etc, RP). The

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group held a preliminary meeting in Paris on 13–15 May, when they agreed to hold their main meeting in the first three weeks of June. In the meantime Lionel planned to return to Paris briefly on the way to give his two lectures on international economic policy in Zurich on 27 and 29 May; Iris would join him and they would have a long weekend together at Grindelwald in the Swiss Alps before Lionel returned to Paris (LCR to Hunold, 20 May 1952, Economists Correspondence 1.4.52–30.9.53; LCR to Miss Beven, 30.5.52, Economics Department Correspondence 1.10.49–30/9/55, RP). Lionel went on ahead of Iris to Paris, which, he told her on 5 June, he found ‘completely Paradisical – if it were not for this wretched committee which absorbs so much of my time, I should be having one of the best holidays of my life’. He had spent a long and enjoyable evening with a former student, John Licence, on his first night. On the second night, having ‘fallen in love’ with Paris, he was happy to dine alone.13 He did not tell Iris that he had asked Miss Beven to send some of his anti-migraine pills; when he wrote to thank Miss Beven he told her that ‘The job of being chairman of this committee is arduous & there is no time for anything else (even looking at pictures). . . . Apart from storms at night the weather is heavenly & Paris Paradisical. But . . . it might be Hellish for all I get to see of it except in the evenings. This weekend I have to write a report [of] 10 000 words.’ When Iris arrived he sat up half the night writing the report in their bathroom as their bedroom in the Hotel Astor had only one rather bright light (LCR to Miss Beven, 7 and 9 June 1952, Economics Department Correspondence 1.10.49–30/9/55, RP). Nonetheless, as he told Baumol on 29 June (Baumol Papers), he found the work ‘very interesting & enjoyable & strongly reminiscent of the best days of the old Economic Section’. Robert Hall led the UK delegation to the OEEC committee on Wednesday 4 June (Cairncross ed 1989, 229–30): Lionel Robbins in the Chair, who is an ideal man for this job but who is temperamentally anti-Keynes [sic] and for the strong use of money. The others were Bresciani-Turroni [Italy] who was very sweet but backing up and holding the simplest quantity theory: Rueff [France] who is nice but muddled and essentially a 13

Licence was one of two students taking the BSc(Econ) in 1948 whom Lionel wanted to appoint to assistant lectureships if they did well in their Final examinations. He particularly wanted Licence, who was in his thirties after six years in the navy, ‘unless his performance . . . [was] embarrassingly poor’, which it was (Lower Second Class Honours). Lionel tried to persuade his colleagues to appoint Licence nonetheless: they were not persuaded. Licence had joined the Economic Section and was seconded to NATO (LCR to Carr-Saunders, 23 June and 6 October 1948, Staff Questions I; LCR to Hall, 18 October, Hall to LCR, 21 October 1948, Letters to and from Economists 1.11.47–31/12/48, RP; Cairncross ed 1989, 43, 165, 190).

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money man: a Belgian called Masoin who clearly had instructions to support his country’s rigid lines: Lindahl [Sweden], who seemed old and unenergetic: Schneider [Germany] who said very little: and Marget of the FRB [Federal Reserve Board] who was very able and on the whole nice though strongly in favour of a tight money policy. They were all charmed that we had [Leslie] O’Brien and Maurice Allen from the Bank and charmed that we were in fact adopting a tighter monetary policy. O’Brien gave an account of how the Bank controlled the volume of money which sounded just like a text-book but delighted them all. On the basis of this conversion to right views, as they felt, we got by fairly easily though they were all very much anti-planning, anti-full-employment and anti-direct controls.

Before he went to Switzerland Lionel had attended a meeting in the Treasury at which he reported on the preliminary meeting and indicated what he expected of the main meeting. As there was too little time to study all the member countries, the OEEC committee would consider in detail only the situation in the UK, France and Belgium, and more briefly the USA. According to Maurice Allen, Robbins told the meeting that his committee wanted its witnesses to provide information on their countries’ use of the budget and, especially, monetary policy and on their balance-of-payments position (note of meeting on 20 May and Allen, “Internal financial stability” exercise, 21 May 1952, OV46/57, BOE). The report completed on 18 June (OEEC, 1952) focussed on the effects of internal financial policies on the external positions since the 1949 devaluations and under the impact of the Korean War, argued that with the possible exception of Belgium the internal policies had not been cautious enough during this period and commended the recent moves towards greater reliance on interest rates in the UK and the USA since 1951. It drew several ‘inferences for general policy’, notably and predictably the greater flexibility of monetary policy compared with budgetary policy and the need for its use in inflationary times. The conclusion also ‘affirm[ed] our conviction that the fulfilment of the objectives of monetary policy would be facilitated by the re-establishment of convertibility in the sense of the statutes of the International Monetary Fund, though . . . recognis[ing] that many conditions must be fulfilled before this can take place’. Robbins did not intend his report to be published. The Treasury agreed: ‘No one had any particular quarrel with the economics of the Report (Hall saying that “it was very fair, given the attitude of the Working Party”),’ but there was some concern about its criticism of Gaitskell’s budget (for reducing taxes at the same time as reducing subsidies) (Allen, O.E.E.C.: Robbins’ Report, 24 June 1952, OV46/57, BOE). But it was leaked to the press in Paris and Le Monde published large extracts. Also, Robot had

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resurfaced. Robbins learned in Paris that Marget and Rueff had both been told of it by the Governor of the Bank of Belgium, who had obviously got his information from the Bank of England (Cairncross ed 1989, 231). Cobbold was again putting pressure on Butler; Hall and MacDougall were again against, as was Robbins when he was summoned to see Bridges and Rowan on 30 June. It did not fly for long: as in February Butler hoped to obtain ministerial agreement to proceed with the operation (in this case on 21 July) and once more he was thwarted at a late evening meeting (this time on 30 June prior to a meeting of the full Cabinet on 3 July): the doubters, led by Cherwell, convinced Churchill that the scheme could not go ahead (Burnham 2003, 100–5). There remained the matter of Robbins’s report. On this, Hall predicted, there was ‘going to be quite a stir’, because Rueff and Marget and the US Ambassador to the OEEC, W.H. Draper, wanted to use it as an argument for early sterling convertibility. When Butler told Robbins’s friend Geoffrey Crowther, editor of The Economist, about the revival (and demise) of Robot and then Crowther talked to Lionel, Hall ‘got a long urgent Top Secret letter from L.R. relating the conversation between himself and G. Lionel is the most correct individual possible, one cannot help liking and admiring him and after all, even if his theoretical writings or his abstractions on current events are a bit too laissez-faire, he really does see the political and humanitarian side of things. He has been extraordinarily nice and co-operative both about all this and about his Report.’ When Draper arrived in London with Rueff and Marget to see Butler and Salter on 11 July, Lionel joined the discussions. ‘As we had been told, Rueff wanted us to make a splash for convertibility and had got Draper’s ear. Draper . . . said he wanted to do whatever would help us.’ After a luncheon at No 11 Downing Street, everyone agreed convertibility was desirable but not until the conditions in the OEEC report were satisfied (Cairncross ed 1989, 229–30). A week later the OEEC Council of Ministers decided to publish the report. When Lionel sent a copy to Jacques Kahane at the FAO on 18 September, he hoped Jacques would realize it was now somewhat out of date: he thought it should have been even stronger in its warning of the inflationary dangers of UK budgetary policy (Economists Correspondence 1.4.52–30.9.53, RP). As for convertibility, another Commonwealth conference in November–December 1952, and further conferences in 1953, 1954 and 1956, accepted the idea of a ‘collective approach’ to sterling convertibility as an ultimate but not immediate aim. It was not achieved until 1958, and then only for nonresident holders (Dow 1964, 83–90). The summer of 1952 was otherwise dominated by family matters. Caroline and Joe came over to visit her father and to travel around Britain.

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Iris and Lionel went with them to Scotland and then had a holiday with Anne in Switzerland in August (LCR to RRR, 24 August 1952). Richard and Wendy Dobbs were married at the beginning of September; after their honeymoon they stayed at Meadway Close for six weeks before moving into their own home (LCR to ICR, 30 October 1952). At Sipson Lionel’s father had put Hollycroft on the market the previous summer, but it was a difficult house to sell: it was large, expensive to maintain, and ‘there was the ever present menace of an expansion of the airport’ – Heathrow, which had opened in 1946 (LCR to ICR, 15 July 1951). In the autumn Nancy came back from India to look after her father but he was still miserable. Earlier Lionel had told Caroline (16 March) that he had been finding him ‘more obstinate & difficult than I recollect for thirty or forty years. Weekend after weekend Iris & I go over & rehearse with him all kinds of alternative plans. But the answer is always a flat negative. . . . I come to look on these visits . . . almost with dread.’ According to Nancy, ‘Lionel was wonderful. Father just wasn’t himself, very depressed, sometimes wouldn’t speak to me for days. Although Lionel was very busy, he never missed coming down to see me at weekends – every weekend – that was very characteristic of him. . . . It was perfectly obvious to every one that father could not go living in that house, a family house, like a mausoleum. The airport was built [and the] noise of planes was terrible. But at first my father couldn’t think of moving.’ When a buyer eventually appeared, however, he decided to move to a hotel in Eastbourne. Lionel was dubious, especially because it would mean he would see his father less often, but he did not try to dissuade him. He and Iris helped to clear the big house: as he told Caroline (22 February 1953), ‘The break up of Hollycroft [was] like the death of a person: as we sat there yesterday going through old boxes of photographs & deciding on the destination of this & that treasure I could very easily have wept.’ Two days after the final meeting of the Waverley Committee Lionel received a letter from the Prime Minister’s Office. There was a vacancy on the board of trustees of the National Gallery; would Robbins be prepared to serve? Lionel promptly replied that he would be delighted. So was CarrSaunders: ‘There could be no better news.’ He was appointed, in place of Lord Crawford (who rejoined the board a year later), on 20 July (D.W. Staithes Hunt to LCR, 9 July, LCR to Staithes Hunt, undated, Carr-Saunders to LCR, 10 July, M.G. Russell to LCR, 21 July 1952, NG26/88, NGA). It had been Crawford’s suggestion to invite Robbins: Crawford had quarrelled with the director and, knowing Robbins’s diplomatic skills, thought he might be able to cope (information from Richard Robbins). Lionel himself

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disapproved of Hendy’s recent rehanging at the Gallery, but he soon changed his mind about Hendy, who became one of his closest friends. The Chancellor of the Exchequer received the Waverley Report on the Export of Works of Art etc in September 1952. Playfair advised him to accept the recommendations of this ‘remarkably useful bit of work’ in toto: ‘it is right in principle and perfectly practical’ (Playfair to Armstrong, 15 September 1952, T227/358, TNA). Eight weeks later Lionel was ‘summoned to an emergency meeting at the Treasury’ (LCR to Maurice Kendall, 10 November 1952, MISCELLANEOUS (LSE Staff, Departments etc) October 1951-September 1957, RP), where he learned that the government was going to accept the report and that the Chancellor wanted him to chair the new Reviewing Committee. Playfair had in fact recommended either Anthony Blunt or Lionel Robbins, with his own preference for Blunt. Butler consulted Waverley, who preferred Robbins (Playfair to Armstrong, 8 September, and note by Armstrong, 11 September 1952, T227/161, TNA). Hence, when Louis Rasminsky enquired in January 1953 whether Lionel would be interested in heading the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto, he replied on 5 February 1953 (Economists Correspondence 1.4.52–30.9.53, RP): ‘my roots here [in London] are now very deep. I am not thinking so much of my work at the School, where perhaps I have already made what contribution I have to make by way of organizing the Department; I am thinking rather of various outside commitments which I should be reluctant to relinquish at this stage.’ Lionel returned to his own work during the Michaelmas term, as he told Caroline on 2 December 1952. I am beginning to think that perhaps after all I may make a little progress with my work. At any rate the School is now so well organized that I shall have myself to blame if I don’t. . . . I have now three works in contemplation, a short book on the postwar International Economic Problem, a longish Essay on the Theory of Policy (up to date & positive as compared with the recent historical excursion) & what I am coming to call (after Cannan) a Review of Economic Theory – something less exhaustive than a Principles but covering roughly speaking the same universe of discourse – oh & then there is the Introduction to Robert Torrens now almost a book in itself. The first I shall do this Spring to give as lectures at Geneva & in Brazil if we go. The others will gradually get done given health & opportunity. I should like to come to Princeton again to get one of them properly drafted.

Rappard had invited him to lecture at the GIIS in the first half of 1953. Eugenio Gudin, who had been a Brazilian delegate at Bretton Woods and was now president of the Institute of Economics in Brazil, had invited

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him to visit Rio de Janeiro for any two months between 1 June and 30 September 1952 to deliver six lectures and take part in a weekly seminar. Haberler and Viner had accepted similar invitations for 1947 and 1950. Lionel declined for 1952 but accepted for 1953, on condition that he come after the middle of July and travel, with Iris, by sea. He had also been invited to visit Princeton again. He responded that he could not come in 1953, partly because his father was on his own, but mainly because he did not want to miss the review of the reformed BSc(Econ), for which he bore ‘perhaps the lion’s share of responsibility’. If he was asked why he could not leave the discussions to the seven other economics professors, ‘the fact is that the degree regulations at the School are so much my particular baby’ that he was the only one who knew ‘the hinterland of all the compromises and arrangements’ behind the reform.14 Of the three ‘works in contemplation’ Lionel only wrote the first, and that mainly as short pieces, beginning with an article (1953a). Here he put together his views on the current international economy: the dollar shortage was not inevitable but due to unduly expansionary financial policies in non-dollar countries; there was no future in any proposals for a sterling bloc; convertibility of the pound was still a good thing to aim for but should be achieved gradually and not completed before UK reserves were larger; and failing some form of Atlantic (political and economic) union building on NATO the best hopes for the international economy lay in GATT and the IMF, especially if the latter’s governance and funding could be improved. The Economist commented on 10 January that ‘it would be hard to imagine a more intelligent and forceful statement of balanced optimism, in matters of international economic policy’. Lionel expanded on these arguments in his lectures in Geneva in March and at the University of Strasbourg immediately afterwards (LCR to Machlup, 17 March 1953, Machlup 61–1). He spoke on the dollar shortage at King’s College, Newcastle upon Tyne in January (Robbins 1954b, chapter III). He also managed to arrange to lecture at Madrid during the Easter vacation so he could visit the Prado, with its incomparable collection of masterpieces of European painting from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries accumulated by the Spanish sovereigns (LCR to Miss Beven, 14 April 1953, Economics Department Correspondence 1.10.49–30/9/55, RP). He then developed the arguments of his Geneva lectures, the material for his lectures in Zurich the previous May, and his arguments against flexible 14

Rappard to LCR, 2 and 13 October, Gudin to LCR, 7 April and 9 May, LCR to Gudin, 23 April and 21 May, Ed Earle to LCR, 7 April, LCR to Earle, 21 May 1952, Economists Correspondence 1.4.52–30.9.53, RP.

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exchange rates in his exchanges with Friedman, into his six lectures in Brazil. In preparation, as he told Viner on 13 March, he reread Viner’s Studies in the Theory of International Trade along with his Brazilian lectures (1952), which he found a hard act to follow (Economists Correspondence 1.4.52– 30.9.53, RP). Lionel and Iris left for Rio de Janeiro on 11 July and did not return until the beginning of October. For once he did not ask Miss Beven to forward mail from the School. As he told Viner on 24 June, ‘The one feature about this expedition which in my present frame in mind I unreservedly welcome is the opportunity of being shut up in a ship for 17 days in either direction.’ He took with him ‘an immense box of books’, intending to work on Torrens as well as finish his Brazil lectures (Economists Correspondence 1.4.52– 30.9.53, RP). The lectures took up most of his time on board ship, but he took advantage of taking his copies of Torrens’s works with him to have them rebound in Rio. After he had given his lectures he told Viner on 1 September (Viner 22–14) that he was ‘dead right’ to have urged him to do so. ‘It has been an unforgettable experience. Everything from the colour of the sand to the tempo of the economy is so completely unlike anything else I have ever seen. Indeed after six weeks I still find it hard to be quite convinced that it is all real – the dramatic mise-en-scene the mountains & the bay, the skyscrapers & the curd pale waves, the ruthless merciless traffic & the infinitely romantic faces on the shady sidewalks. It all has the quality of an intensely vivid dream – but when you pinch yourself you don’t wake up. The Gudins have been absolutely wonderful, laying themselves out at every moment to minister to our enjoyment & comfort’, and he was glad to have got to know them. His lecture audience had been good listeners: ‘I don’t know when I remember getting a comparable kick out of lecturing. And how patient: My stuff usually ran to very much more than the hour – and so far as I could see no fidgeting or departure to speak of.’ As he described the experience to his sister on 9 October: Brazil was ‘strenous but thoroughly worth while – an unforgetable bundle of contradictions & contrasts, beauty & ugliness, good & evil, progress & corruption. It is certainly unlike anything I have ever seen before in either hemisphere. Even the colours are different – the sea is paler green, the sand is lighter yellow, the mountains are more deeply purple than anything anywhere else. The climate treacherous & uncomfortable. The landscape enchanting. Rio bay something which you might well come from the ends of the earth to see. And the hospitality wonderful. We were treated so royally that we have hardly yet got used again to the habits & scale of ordinary life.’

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From Rio Lionel and Iris went to Sao Paolo for a week, entertained there by friends of Gudin who were railway directors: they inspected the Santos railway and a new pipeline as well as a coffee estate and a eucalyptus research station. On 15 September they sailed for home, calling at Bahia and Recife. They could not go ashore at Recife owing to a dock strike but Bahia was fascinating, as he told Boulding (7 January 1954, Economists Correspondence 1.10.53-Dec 1954, RP): ‘There are no less than 365 churches there and some, at least, of indescribable splendour of stone and gold, infinitely superior to anything we saw elsewhere. The combination of the strong African infusion, much stronger than in Rio, with this multiplication of monasteries and places of worship, gives Bahia a quite unique atmosphere, much more exotic than anything in Rio or the other places we visited.’ The remainder of the voyage was restful: as he told Gudin on 19 October (Economists Correspondence 1.10.53-Dec 1954, RP), ‘I slept inordinately and hardly did a stroke of work all the way. Up to then I had more or less fulfilled all my industrious intentions for the vacation. But the amenities of the “Alcantara” were too much for me, and I idled for the entire fortnight.’ Before leaving for Brazil Lionel told Daniel Macmillan on 9 July that he expected to send him a collection of essays in the autumn. The contents he had in mind comprised nine papers: ‘The economist in the twentieth century’ (his 1948 Oration at LSE),‘Economic policy in wartime’ (the paper he had written for Bridges in 1946), ‘Full employment as an objective of economic policy’ (his talk to the Belgian Economic Society in December 1949), ‘The balance of payments’ (Stamp Memorial Lecture), ‘The dollar shortage’ (the talk at Newcastle), ‘The international economic problem’ (LBR, January 1953), nineteenth-century commercial policy in the light of twentieth-century experience and alternative monetary systems (based on his Zurich lectures in May 1952), and ‘Towards the Atlantic community’ (LBR, July 1950). When he submitted the manuscript on 26 November (Correspondence with Publishers 1946–30.9.55, RP), the collection ‘prove[d] to be much more of a new book’ than he had anticipated. He included the first three and the last items (the second as an appendix), but the other six chapters covered the intended topics in the form he had presented them in his Brazilian lectures (which were also published in Portuguese) (Robbins 1954a, b). The Torrens project, however, had made little progress, thanks to another change in Robbins’s teaching duties. There had been several losses of personnel since 1950, including Coase, Tress and Dorrance in 1951 as well as Ryan in 1953. Another loss was Asik Radomysler, whom Lionel had once

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regarded as one of his most brilliant undergraduates (see Chapter 10). After his release from internment in 1941, he had borne a very heavy teaching burden in Cambridge for the rest of the war (Agenda for Court of Governors 4 July 1940 and 3 July 1941; LCR to Carr-Saunders, 18 June 1946, Director Correspondence April 1946-Dec 1954, RP). He was an excellent undergraduate teacher but he had not thrived in the research-oriented atmosphere of the postwar Economics Department. In 1946 Lionel induced him to write a review article of Lerner’s Economics of Control (Radomysler 1946) but he published nothing else. With the intention of encouraging him to write and publish, Lionel supported an application for sabbatical leave for 1952/3 and made enquiries of the Rockefeller Foundation on Radomysler’s behalf. Before Radomysler could take his sabbatical he suffered a nervous breakdown. In the spring of 1952 he seemed to be recovering; by the autumn he had had another breakdown. He committed suicide on 1 November 1952.15 Lionel took over the History of Economic Thought course from Hutchison, who moved to teaching Economic Principles for the new Part I. As he told Viner on 20 November 1953 (Economists Correspondence 1.10.53-Dec 1954, RP), he found it ‘in many ways extremely congenial, [but it] takes up an awful lot of spare time re-reading, at any rate the first year of delivery’. He made extensive use of his notes for the Schools of Economic Theory lectures he had given in 1929/30 and 1930/1, as well as those for the courses he had given once each since the war: Classical theory of economic policy (1950/1), Development of modern economic analysis (1950/1), Survey of economic analysis (1951/2) and Torrens (1952/3) (History Economic Thought, RP). For the first two years the course ran, as Hutchison’s had, from ‘about 1700’ to ‘about 1930’, with Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Ricardo’s Principles, Marshall’s Principles and Wicksell’s Interest and Prices as set books. Two years later he changed the coverage to Plato to Marshall. His recommended reading included Schumpeter (1954), Cannan (1929), Stigler (1946), Viner (1937), his own (1952) and Hutchison (1953). In the first year he wrote the lectures ‘week by week, as the session proceeds’: while he loved the subject, ‘there are so many special references to look up that the pace bids fair to be somewhat breathless, at any rate until I get to my beloved English classical 15

E.V. Evans to LCR, 11 March 1952, MISCELLANEOUS (LSE Staff, Departments etc) October 1951-September 1957; LCR to W.M. Allen, 17 March 1952, Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/52; LCR to Radomysler, 14 August, Radomysler to LCR, 28 September 1952, Economics Department Correspondence 1.10.49–30/9/55, RP; Agenda for Standing Committee 22 January 1952; Standing Committee 7 October and Agenda for Standing Committee 16 December 1952.

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writers on whom I can expatiate at almost any length without any special effort’ (LCR to Gudin, 19 October 1953, Economists Correspondence 1.10.53-Dec 1954, RP). Lionel had been drawn very quickly into the work of the trustees of the National Gallery. At his first meeting of the trustees on 9 October 1952 he and Sir Alan Barlow, the now retired high Treasury official with whom he had worked during the war, were, according to the minutes, ‘invited . . . to consider the whole question of investments’, that is the investment of the trust funds which provided some of the gallery’s income. On 9 July 1953 he agreed to become the National Gallery’s liaison trustee on the board of the Tate Gallery.16 Until 1964 the National Gallery, established in 1824, was financed, except for trust funds, by the Treasury. In most of the years 1865–89 its annual grant-in-aid for purchases of paintings and sculpture was £10,000, but in 1952 the grant was only £7000, the same figure as before the war (Treasury 1952, para 133). The National Gallery was also responsible, until 1955, for the collections of the Tate Gallery, which had been created in 1897 as a sort of annexe to the National Gallery. The younger gallery, although bearing the name of Henry Tate who had offered the government his own collection on condition that a gallery of British art be built, initially contained only modern British art, the older institution having decided to keep paintings by British artists born before 1790 for itself. As the Tate building was enlarged, however, the National Gallery transferred the paintings in the Turner Bequest as well as modern foreign paintings. The Tate was officially recognized as the national gallery for British art of all periods and for modern foreign art in 1917, when it acquired its own board of trustees (Hendy 1964, 68–71; Spalding 1998, 23–35). Its collection of modern French pictures was enriched by the generosity of Samuel Courtauld in creating the Courtauld Fund in 1923 (through which the Tate acquired, for instance, its first C´ezannes). But it was still subordinate to the National Gallery and did not receive an annual purchase grant of its own until 1946 (£2000). It was only after the National Gallery and Tate Gallery bill passed in November 1954 that the Tate acquired ownership of its holdings and independence from the older gallery. Meetings of the National Gallery board usually began, as they did at Robbins’s first, with the trustees’ examination of pictures newly cleaned or 16

Besides the minutes of the board meetings the National Gallery Archives are particularly rich for LCR’s first term as a trustee since he deposited his (or rather Miss Beven’s) National Gallery files there.

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about to be cleaned by the Conservation Department and of pictures being considered for purchase. Other regular tasks were to decide whether or not to accept pictures given or bequeathed to the nation and to consider requests for loans of paintings to exhibitions. On 9 October 1952, after the minutes and business arising, the first item of business was the quarterly statement of trust funds, which prompted the request to Barlow and Robbins. The second was the director’s report on the misappropriation of receipts by an employee of the Publications Department. The department was financed not by the Treasury but by one of the trust funds; Barlow and Robbins argued it should have a proper audit. The board decided not to accept the Publications Manager’s proferred resignation and to engage a commercial firm of auditors immediately. On 8 January 1953 Barlow and Robbins also recommended the employment of a private firm of stockbrokers to advise on investment of the trust funds; the board agreed. Robbins reported on 12 March that the stockbrokers Pember & Boyle had proposed two schemes for reinvestment, one of which would increase income by over £1000 a year. The latter was adopted, although the trustees held their hand temporarily since Robbins had also noticed that the report of a government committee was proposing some relaxation of the Trustee Acts (which restricted trustees’ investments to a limited range of fixedinterest securities). Before the government acted on the report, however, Robbins learned in a conversation with Playfair that it might be legally possible to place the National Gallery’s investments outside the range of the Trustee Acts. After consulting the Treasury Solicitor, Barlow and Robbins recommended the trustees take the necessary legal steps to widen their choice of securities in which to invest.17 The board agreed on 14 January 1954, Pember & Boyle having reported that a switch of non-realizable capital into reasonably safe industrial investment could increase income by up to £3500 a year. As for the Publications Department, Robbins was soon chairing a small subcommittee of the trustees that oversaw the operations of the (highly profitable) department. As the audited accounts had to be published his committee decided these should be incorporated in a National Gallery Annual Report (1955). The profits also helped to finance the scholarly catalogues produced by the art historians (Martin Davies, Cecil Gould and Michael Levey) on the Gallery’s staff (Trustees Publications Subcommittee 4 December 1953 and 30 April 1954, NG26/97; Hendy 1964, 76–7). 17

LCR to Barlow, 23 February, LCR to Gibson, 23 February and 23 April 1953, NG26/96; Playfair to Druitt, 12 and 16 June, Druitt to Playfair, 16 June, Playfair to LCR, 16 June 1953, T227/365, TNA; LCR to Barlow, 18 June, LCR to Gibson, 12 October and 1 December 1953, NG26/96; Barlow and LCR, Committee on Trust Funds, 8 December 1953, NG26/97.

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The cleaning of pictures to remove old dirt and old varnish is a contentious matter. In the 1950s the National Gallery was at the centre of contention since Hendy had mounted an exhibition of cleaned pictures in 1947 and it continued to be so for most of Robbins’s time as a trustee (Burlington Magazine 1947; Gombrich 1960, 48; Robbins 1971a, 257–60).18 When he first joined the board, ‘my chief contacts in this connection had been with a circle of art historians [at the Courtauld Institute] who were almost unanimously highly critical of the National Gallery and my mind was certainly loaded with all sorts of the direst suspicions. I therefore conceived it to be my duty as a Trustee to pay very special attention to this problem’ (LCR to Count Antoine Seilern, 3 June 1966, Day Book April 66-Aug 66, RP). By October 1953, however, when he was asked to chair a subcommittee on the future of the Conservation Department, the appointment of whose much criticized consultant restorer, Helmut Ruhemann, was about to end, he had begun to change his mind.19 On 11 March 1954, when the trustees were examining Renoir’s Les parapluies, on which cleaning tests had been carried out, ‘Professor Robbins said that he remembered the picture when it was first exhibited with the rest of the Lane Bequest. It was now much dimmer than it had been then.’ In his interim report of the subcommittee on conservation he started from the assumption that the general policy of restoration had the board’s support. Robbins tackled the personnel problem first. His first report recommended a new post of chief restorer, which meant Ruhemann’s post would automatically disappear, that A.W. Lucas be promoted to the new post, and the appointment of two additional trainees. Ruhemann could then be employed from time to time to work on particular pictures and to help to train the junior restorers (Sub-Committee on the Conservation Department Interim Report, 4 November 1953, NG26/88). His second report, which required him to prepare three drafts and to interview all the members of the Department’s staff, addressed the administrative issues. It reaffirmed the authority of the director, recommending the chief restorer should have full responsibility for the day-to-day running of his department and the director should recommend pictures for cleaning to the board on the basis of advice 18

19

The critics’ arguments ranged from the obvious – risk of damage, removal of details, surreptious repainting etc – to the abstruse – that the Old Masters expected their canvases to darken over time or that since the practice of varnishing was known in antiquity it was likely that it was used by Renaissance painters and not just a Victorian fashion (Gombrich 1962 and Plesters 1962). Ruhemann’s critics included several trustees, notably Lord Crawford: Wellington to LCR, 17 September and 25 October 1953, NG26/88.

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from both the appropriate art historian and the chief restorer (LCR’s drafts in NG26/88 and The National Gallery Sub-Committee on the Conservation Department Final Report, 4 February 1954, NG29/97). When another round of the cleaning controversy broke out in the 1960s, beginning with an article by Andrew Forge in the New Statesman criticizing the appearance of certain cleaned pictures, Lionel was indignant: ‘He particularly deplored the attack on members of the Gallery staff who could not reply; he said that the article contained a misrepresentation of the Gallery’s attitude on taste, that the writer had apparently made no enquiries at the Gallery before writing and that the pictures criticised had been on view for several years in their present state’ (NG Board 6 July 1961). More serious criticism came in the February 1962 issue of the Burlington Magazine which included articles by Ernst Gombrich and Otto Kurz of the Warburg Institute and Stephen Rees Jones of the Courtauld. At Lionel’s instigation the gallery staff responded: Joyce Plesters tackled the criticisms of Gombrich and Kurz (as did Denis Mahon), and G. Thomson that of Rees Jones in the November Burlington Magazine. He hoped that this, along with the latest National Gallery report, would ‘put paid to some of that trouble’ claiming, to his sister on 13 October, that ‘Gombrich & some of the Courtauld people come out very badly indeed.’ Gombrich and the others responded vigorously in the March 1963 Burlington Magazine. He himself became still more convinced of the virtues of cleaning, delighting in the fresh and vivid appearance of the Uccello Battle of San Romano and the ‘Rokeby Venus’ (Velazquez’s The Toilet of Venus) and the ‘triumphant cleaning’ of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (LCR to ICR, 26 July 1965 and 30 March 1966; Robbins 1971a, 260). In its first year of operation the new Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art under Robbins’s chairmanship heard five appeals, recommending retention in the UK in four cases and a special grant from the Treasury in one of these. In the fifth case, which concerned a book and a picture by William Blake, the committee allowed the book to be exported but not the picture. The owner later presented the picture to the Victoria and Albert Museum (Treasury 1963, Appendix I). Another indication of the way the system worked is the purchase of Gainsborough’s The Morning Walk. Lord Rothschild offered this to the National Gallery in 1953 but the trustees thought the price (£30,000) too high. When Rothschild informed them through Anthony Blunt and Lord Crawford that he could sell it overseas for £100,000 and receive £36,000 after payment of death duties, they decided to ask the Treasury for a special grant. Robbins helped the director to draft the letter to Sir Alexander Johnston of the Treasury. With contributions from

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the Treasury and the NACF the trustees agreed to offer £30,000 and the gallery acquired the painting in 1954 (NG Board 12 February, 12 November and 8 December 1953, 14 January 1954; Gibson to LCR, 8 January 1954, NG26/88). Lionel Robbins was one of several British economists offered honorary degrees to be awarded at the bicentennial celebrations of Columbia University on 1 June 1954. It was a welcome opportunity to return to the USA after a four-year gap. When Willits of the Rockefeller Foundation offered to finance a trip of two months, Lionel applied for leave on 24 June 1953 (Director Correspondence April 1946-Dec 1954, RP): ‘If I were to do what seems to me at the moment to be a possible course of action, namely, leave in April after the meeting of the National Gallery Trustees, I think I should go for a fortnight to Princeton to have conversations with various friends there and in New York, and then . . . try to go further west to visit some of the universities I have not seen so far.’ He sought Viner’s advice, which was on 26 October (Viner 22–14) ‘to ignore the East except for New York, Brookings for the money, and visits to us, and that you should go to Chicago, to Michigan (Ann Arbor) to see a good middle-west state university, and to the places you name in California. If you want a Canadian trip, Toronto, Ottawa, Queens, and McGill are all indicated.’ A month later Lionel had booked passages for himself and Iris for 23 March and back 7 June and the proposed itinerary was ‘New York – Los Angeles – Stanford – Berkeley – Portland – Seattle – Toronto – Kingston – Ottawa – Montreal – Washington – New York’ with a stay with the Viners between Washington and New York. He also hoped to visit Chicago. He had previously declined an invitation from Aaron Director because he did not want to meet Hayek, but he thought ‘somehow or other a short visit . . . should be slipped in . . . I want to see the pictures [in the Art Institute] and the lake’ as well as Knight and Director (LCR to Viner, 20 November 1953, Economists Correspondence 1.10.53-December 1954, RP). The Brookings Institution in Washington DC had recently inaugurated a series of lectures in the social sciences. Robbins was one of six economists invited in the first year ‘to discuss various aspects of policy as a concern of economics’; Viner was another. The President of Brookings suggested topics: to Viner the relevance of the classical theory of international trade, to Robbins ‘freedom and order’ (Smithies et al 1955, v, 100–1, 131). Robbins also accepted invitations to speak at Princeton, where he hoped to report on his recent work on Torrens, and at Michigan (LCR to Richard Lester, 5 and 27 January, Boulding to LCR, 11 February 1954, Economists Correspondence 1.10.53-Dec 1954, RP).

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These ambitious plans came to nought. On 15 February he wrote to Willits, Viner and Baumol (Economists Correspondence 1.10.53-Dec 1954, RP): The Tate Gallery, whose Board of Trustees I joined about six months ago, is in a position of grave difficulty. A few weeks ago it was discovered that in the past, when neither I nor the majority of my fellow trustees were on the board, certain trust funds had been used in ways which were not altogether in accordance with the terms of the trusts. . . . the administration of the Gallery has enemies in certain quarters of the press and elsewhere; and the present Board of Trustees has been exposed to a broadside of criticism and insinuations of more sinister lapses, as unfair as they are inaccurate, which is not at all good for the repute of the Gallery or for the future of art collections in this country; and I am afraid that the end is not yet. Now although I have no responsibility for what happened in the distant past . . . I cannot bear the thought of leaving my chairman and my colleagues to ride out this storm without being present to lend whatever small aid I can.

He hoped to give his Brookings Lecture and to attend the Columbia celebrations but he would not go west or to Canada. He also told Viner: ‘You can imagine my mortification and disgust at the position in which I find myself. But both Iris and I are sure that I am doing the right thing. . . . the very fact that because of my recent accession to the trusteeship I am entirely above the battle makes it all the more incumbent on me to stay and take some of the fire.’ (Viner commented on 22 February [Viner 22–14]: ‘Neither Frances nor I venture to question your judgment; your conscience is a matter for admiration and not for appraisal.’) To Baumol he added: ‘One day I will tell you the whole story. At the moment I will content myself with saying that the moral is that if you enter a position in a world populated chiefly by artists and connoisseurs you should watch out for discontinuities of conduct and loves and hates more tremendous than anything remotely conceivable even in the academic world.’ (For the story see Chapter 21.) Iris and Lionel sailed from Southampton on the Libert´e on 7 May, with the gift of Andr´e Malraux’s recently translated Les Voix du silence from Philip Hendy for the journey. As he told Hendy on 31 May (NG26/86), it was ‘ideal reading for a voyage: it is certainly a remarkable book. . . . Whether you agree with him or not, when he writes about a work of art you feel that he has been moved by it & not just by his idea of it.’ On arrival in New York on 13 May the Robbinses went straight to the Viners. On 18 May Lionel gave his Brookings Lecture and spent time at the IBRD while he was in Washington (LCR to Machlup, 21 April and 5 May, Machlup to LCR, 12 May 1954, Machlup 61–1; Edward Symonds to LCR, 4 June 1954, Economists Correspondence

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1.10.53-Dec 1954, RP). They visited the Machlups, who took them to see the Cone Collection recently given to the Baltimore Museum of Art: Lionel told Hendy that ‘the great fauve Matisse reclining nude [The Blue Nude] & that wonderful Mont St Victoire done from the quarry [Mont Ste Victoire seen from Bibemus]’ made him ‘very envious’ (for the National Gallery). Back in New York before sailing they went twice to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to its mediaeval collection at The Cloisters, which Lionel had not seen before. Lionel told a fellow trustee of the National Gallery, the painter William Coldstream, on 14 June 1954 (NG26/89) that the visit to the Metropolitan was ‘very salutary . . . They carry the things that we have been accused of – over-spacing and over-cleaning – to an extreme. . . . All this makes our own arrangements look very prudent; half-way between the ultra-conservatism of the Louvre and this bleak radicalism seems to me to be quite a satisfactory position to have attained.’ Two days before leaving he wrote to Miss Beven (Economics Department Correspondence 1.10.49–30/9/55, RP), All the time we have been at parties or meetings or staying with kind friends who have so put themselves out that it seemed caddish to tear oneself away for anything but sleep or preparation of lectures or off the cuff speeches. . . . My Washington lecture about which I felt so bad went exceedingly well for me & was praised by people whose praise I like. . . . The conference here (N.Y.) is now over & after fabulous banqueting tonight & tomorrow when President Eisenhower addresses us & honorary degrees are distributed, we sail on Wednesday [2 June]. I long for that hour as a traveller lost in the Sahara longs for water. We have enjoyed it all very much but there comes a point at which sleep seems the most important thing in the world.’ He also told Miss Beven the news she had passed on that in his absence he had been unanimously elected chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery was ‘One of the few things in the last ten years that have made me feel pleased!

TWENTY-ONE

Chairman of the National Gallery

Lionel Robbins’s first seven-year term as a trustee of the National Gallery ended in July 1959. On relinquishing the chair he told his sister on 12 July that it was ‘in a way the end of an epoch for me – not the most important but perhaps the most rewarding & happiest office of my life.’ It had brought new friendships, notably with Philip Hendy and the sculptor Henry Moore. Hendy recalled (1968a, 658) that Robbins ‘had a rather unique relationship with the Civil Service and with governments throughout. It is due more to him than anyone else that the National Gallery Grant was enlarged. I don’t think there’s anything better than a good board of trustees and a reasonably good director . . . working together. But this hasn’t very often happened.’ This chapter discusses Robbins’s initiatives as chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery in 1954–9, and his service as a trustee of the Tate Gallery, before returning to his activities at LSE in the same period. In these years he continued to be asked to serve on government committees and was drawn once more into economic policymaking in 1957. The Torrens project came to fruition in 1956–8. The ‘Tate Affair’, which cut short the Robbinses’ visit to the United States in 1954, began before Lionel joined the Tate board in October 1953. It had also started before Dennis Proctor, Lionel’s friend from Whitehall days, who had left the Treasury in 1950, succeeded Lord Jowitt as chairman of the Tate trustees in the summer of 1953. It was unfortunate Proctor had not become chairman earlier: Jowitt attempted a patched-up peace between the director John Rothenstein and LeRoux Smith LeRoux, one of the two deputy keepers and manager of the Publications Department, allowing continuation of his probationary appointment after his conduct had been severely criticized by a Treasury-commissioned report. Lionel later told Proctor that he had been warned by Eddie Playfair in the Treasury that ‘there was a man there [the 760

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Tate] – not named – who could be relied upon to create a major explosion within a few months’ (8 July 1968, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 M-R, RP). He came to believe (1971a, 263) that the man in question was ‘one of the most evil men I have ever encountered’. LeRoux, a South African, had been director of the Pretoria Art Centre when Rothenstein met him in 1948; after the election of the Nationalists Rothenstein’s recommendation had obtained LeRoux a temporary deputy keepership at the Tate; LeRoux represented himself ‘as a person of integrity who had fought apartheid and had lost his job because of his liberal stand’. But he was soon using his administrative skills, and his charm, to take over Rothenstein’s office and to spread rumours of Rothenstein’s incompetence – a claim he made to the trustees in October and November 1952 (when Proctor was abroad) leading to the Treasury’s enquiry into the ‘staff troubles’. Jowitt then offered LeRoux, Rothenstein’s ‘Iago’, a further probationary period of one year (Rothenstein 1966, 232–81; Spalding 1998, 105–11).1 Lionel’s involvement in the second, more public phase of the affair followed the second reading of the National Art Collections bill (as the National Gallery and Tate Gallery bill was first known) on 24 November 1953. On 8 December Lord Kinnaird, an elderly Scottish peer, raised the question of the future under the bill of the Knapping Bequest, whose income the National Gallery had made available to the Tate in 1939. Using a list of purchases out of the fund provided by LeRoux, he claimed the purchases infringed the terms of Miss Knapping’s will, which required the income to be applied ‘in the purchase for public exhibition’ of paintings and sculpture by artists living at or within twenty-five years before the time of purchase. The list was only partly inaccurate: there had been at least five purchases by the Tate of paintings by older artists plus a Constable bought by the National Gallery before 1939 out of the fund. LeRoux also discovered that a Leger and two Giacomettis had been bought out of the Courtauld Fund, which was intended only for modern French paintings. On 17 December the Tate trustees reviewed these irregularities and agreed to repay the sums spent to the two funds out of the gallery’s grant (Proctor, Purchases from Trust Funds Sequence of Disclosures and Action taken by Board, 13 January 1954, Tate Gallery The Crisis 54, RP). According to Rothenstein (1966, 305), ‘the Board was commonsensical and quite unruffled.’ 1

Spalding also suggests when Jowitt (correctly) concluded that Rothenstein and LeRoux could not work together, the Treasury wanted them both to stay. Although this was the outcome of the enquiry, Playfair thought LeRoux ‘should go at once’, as did Padmore (Playfair to Winnifrith, ‘Mr Le Roux’, 22 October, and Padmore, ‘Notes’, 24 November 1952, T273/15, TNA).

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The board was not unruffled when The Times on 21 December published a letter from Douglas Cooper claiming the Tate had surreptiously sold a Renoir bought from the Courtauld Fund; Proctor learned the same day, from the other deputy keeper, Norman Reid, that two Degas bronzes (not paintings or drawings as Courtauld had specified) had been acquired. Proctor called a special meeting of the trustees on 5 January, when they learned of further misuses of the Knapping Fund, and a second meeting on 22 January, after Cooper had made further criticisms of the use of the Courtauld Fund. The trustees decided to ask Rothenstein to comment on Proctor’s summary of the disclosures and to warn him that they took ‘a grave view of the matter’. They also approved a public statement of errors, published 26 January 1954, which did not silence the critics (Spalding 1998, 114–16; Minutes of Special Meetings of the Trustees of the Tate Gallery January-February 1954, 20 February 1954, Tate Gallery The Crisis 54, RP). Cooper was a longstanding vociferous critic of Rothenstein. He had a passion for Cubism and contempt for the English art Rothenstein was keen to promote; he had also ‘inherited wealth, a scholarly mind and discerning eye, immense ruthlessness, and an irresponsibility made possible by his freedom, for much of his life, from paid employment’. In case any of the Tate trustees were unaware of his attitude, he asked Rothenstein to circulate a letter he had written a few months earlier in which he stated his intention to ‘hound [him] out of Millbank’ (Spalding 1998, 90 and 113). Rothenstein had other critics too, including the art collector Denis Mahon and the artist Graham Sutherland, who was a member of the board. Mahon suggested Sutherland resign from the board, thus adding to the bad publicity, and Sutherland composed his resignation letters at Cooper’s chateau in the south of France, to the press as well as to Proctor (Berthoud 1982, 174–7; Spalding 1998, 116–17). A third special meeting of the remaining trustees decided to prepare a report to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which Proctor and Robbins then drafted (Minutes of Special Meetings of the Trustees of the Tate Gallery, January-February 1954, Proctor to Butler, 10 February 1954, Tate Gallery The Crisis 54, RP; Treasury 1954). When the trustees received Rothenstein’s statement of his version of events, they had to decide whether he should be fired. Spalding (1998, 118) reports: ‘A meeting was held late at night on 8 February 1954 in the PreRaphaelite room at Admiral’s House, Hampstead, the home of Sir Colin Anderson [vice-chairman of the trustees]. It was a dramatic moment in the Tate’s history. . . . All the Trustees agreed that LeRoux should leave the Gallery, but on Rothenstein they were divided. Four of the Trustees felt it

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would be giving in to a disgraceful campaign to ask for his resignation. Yet all four agreed that he was a poor leader, an inadequate organiser and administrator, and maladroit at staff relations. When one Trustee [John Fremantle] said it was unthinkable that Rothenstein should be dismissed by a divided Board, the others concurred.’2 One of the four was William Coldstream, who had previously been critical of Rothenstein (Laughton 2004, 179–80). Lionel was another: in the notes he made to clear his own mind he considered separately ‘the irregularities considered intrinsically’ and the ‘public aspects of the question’ and concluded that neither justified Rothenstein’s dismissal. Three days later Coldstream took Lionel aside after a National Gallery board meeting and told him ‘There is something wrong at the Tate: we must sort it out.’ The trustees had agreed at their late night meeting to interview all the staff on Saturday (13 February); Lionel later told his son that one of the junior members of staff, a temporary assistant keeper, ‘spilled the beans’ about LeRoux (information from Richard Robbins). As Spalding reported (1998, 106), ‘On her first day at the Tate, LeRoux told her she must never go near Rothenstein as he was a difficult man. She . . . in time discovered for herself that Rothenstein was not at all the ogre that LeRoux had suggested’ and Norman Reid not ‘incapable of delegating anything’ as LeRoux had also insinuated. At that point Lionel decided not to go to Princeton. After the interviews, the trustees unanimously agreed on 18 February not to ask Rothenstein for his resignation but that he should be ‘severely admonished, and warned that, should they have cause for further dissatisfaction in the future, his handling of the matters dealt with in the recent inquiry would be taken into account’. Robbins and Fremantle were asked to supervise the preparation of an annual report and to make recommendations to improve the gallery’s administration. The trustees also agreed unanimously that LeRoux should go. He should not be replaced by another deputy keeper, and Norman Reid should be promoted to keeper. Unsurprisingly, when LeRoux was handed his termination letter on 5 March he drummed up support from some junior staff and from former trustees including Jowitt and Sutherland. As a result he was allowed to resign. Rothenstein received his admonitory letter on 6 March but made no formal reply until 29 March. In the interval Robbins and Fremantle began their deliberations on the annual 2

Fremantle, an engineer, a crack shot and a keen oarsman, succeeded his father as the fourth Baron Cottesloe in 1956. He became chairman of the Arts Council 1960–5 and it was ‘largely due to Cottesloe’s persistence’ that the National Theatre was built on the South Bank: its Cottesloe Theatre is named after him (ODNB).

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report, the first since 1937, and on a reorganization of the administration of the Tate; Robbins drafted their staff proposals early in April.3 One evening in March (the 25th according to Rothenstein), about 9 p.m., the phone rang at 10 Meadway Close and Rothenstein asked Robbins if he could come and see him immediately. Lionel’s account of the conversation sent to Proctor the next morning (ms draft in Tate Gallery The Crisis 54, RP) is rather different from Rothenstein’s recollection (1966, 333) that he ‘told me that I must not dream of retiring’. Lionel was ‘very tired & my wife was on her way to bed but as he seemed in great distress of mind, I told him the way’. Rothenstein turned up three quarters of an hour later accompanied by his wife. ‘He . . . said that he had just had a serious shock & that it would be an inestimable boon if he could discuss it in confidence with me’ – at which Lionel made it clear he did not want to hear anything he could not tell Proctor. Somewhat ‘taken back’, Rothenstein nonetheless went on to say that Proctor had told him that he thought he would do well to resign. ‘There then developed a conversation lasting until nearly midnight . . . ’ Lionel admitted that, while he deplored the public attacks on Rothenstein, he was also concerned at ‘the general sense of unhappiness & malaise’ at the gallery and could understand Proctor’s attitude. Rothenstein’s, and his wife’s, response was to blame ‘evil influences’. Lionel replied that ‘I could easily believe this to be true but that nevertheless it must be felt to be a reflection on his position in the gallery that there existed so few antidotes to those influences. . . . He was perhaps not responsible for the coming of evil; but its persistence surely showed that something had been lacking at least in the way of leadership. He did not contest this view.’ However, ‘The new feature for me in this very painful talk was the presence & the part played by Lady Rothenstein.’ She convinced Robbins of ‘one thing I had not realized before which is enormously germane to the present situation.That fact is this: that . . . the ultimate resistance [to resignation] at this stage comes not from him but from her. . . . She is convinced that most of their troubles are the result of a deliberate attempt to hound John from the gallery – deliberate manipulation of public opinion, deliberate deception of the junior staff; and she feels that to resign would be to compromize with pure evil.’ Although Lionel told her the trustees could take no cognizance of these suspicions and had taken their recent decisions on other grounds, he told Proctor the next day that he was impressed with her argument about 3

LCR, Principles of Reorganization, The Tate Gallery Annual Report and Administration Sub-Committee Third Visit to the Gallery, 2nd April 1954, 5 April, Notes on the Principles of the Proposed re-organization, 6 April, and Financial Notes on the Proposed Administrative Re-organization, 6 April 1954, Tate Gallery The Crisis 54, RP.

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(non)resignation. He also wondered whether he should suggest Rothenstein tell the trustees he did not wish to resign now but would be prepared to do so in say a year’s time. Rothenstein remained director for another ten years. Writing a reference for him for the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Oxford in 1955, Lionel noted that the Tate had become one of the most popular galleries in London and that ‘a just judgment on what has been done . . . in the last fifteen years would conclude that a policy of enlightened eclecticism has been pursued with great success and that a substantial share of the credit’ must go to Rothenstein (LCR to Sir Douglas Veale, 22 September 1955, Testimonials April 1953–31/10/55, RP). When Lionel read Proctor’s account of the Tate Affair he commented: ‘Clearly LeRoux is the central villain in this sorry story; and the outside organizers from Cooper downwards who set themselves to destroy a man’s life, are hardly less culpable, though one at least of them I suspect, Denis Mahon, was misled by false information fed to him by others. But in my judgment, damning responsibility rests with Jowitt’ for allowing LeRoux to stay on in 1952 (8 July 1968, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 M-R, RP). In June 1953 the seventh Duke of Wellington had taken over from Thomas Boase as chairman of the National Gallery trustees. Robbins and Wellington worked closely together – although they did not see eye to eye on all gallery matters. In particular, the Duke thought no Impressionist pictures should hang in the National Gallery and dissented from the decisions to purchase paintings by Renoir, Courbet and Seurat in 1951 and 1952 and C´ezanne’s La Vieille au Chapelet in 1953. Lionel made two counterarguments. One was that the national collection of Impressionists was small: ‘The impression of adequacy is based upon the splendour of the Courtauld loans [to the Tate] which, of course, make one of the best collections in the world’, but they would soon be housed in the Courtauld Institute’s new gallery. The other was that the price paid for the C´ezanne (£33,500 out of one of the trust funds) was not high given postwar inflation, ‘a general movement all over the world [which] I see no prospect whatever of being reversed’: ‘if the general level of prices does not fall greatly, why should we expect the level of prices in art markets to fall?’, especially if people were buying art as an inflation-proof investment. Wellington admitted on Robbins’s first point that he represented ‘an insignificant minority’ on the board and on his second: ‘I quite see your point about the fall in the value of money. At the same time, the cardinal fact remains that the Board has spent what is, I believe, the largest sum that they have ever found out of their own

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resources on a picture which was painted in the lifetime of the majority of the members of the Board.’4 The division of ‘modern foreign painting’ between the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery had been contentious for years. When Kenneth Clark was director of the National Gallery (1934–45) he wanted to increase its representation of nineteenth-century French art and temporarily solved the problem by persuading the Home House Trustees to lend some of Samuel Courtauld’s private collection. In the longer run the paintings in the Tate bought out of the Courtauld Fund would eventually come to the National Gallery under the terms of the fund. Under the National Gallery and Tate Gallery Act 1954 the National Gallery, as ‘a collection of pictures of established worth or significance’, retained the right to demand the transfer of major paintings, British or foreign, from the Tate. Earlier in the year the two galleries had reached an amicable agreement, which Robbins signed as the new National Gallery chairman, over the transfer of British pictures (Tate board 14 April, 20 May and 17 June 1954, TAM 72/25, Tate Archive; Gibson to LCR, Exchange of British pictures between the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, 29 June 1954, NG26/89). The two directors, backed by their boards, continued to disagree over foreign paintings, especially the French Impressionists. ‘Now, and in years to come, fairly persistent negotiations regarding transfers went on in various places, over dinner parties or at the Athenaeum, and at least one agreement was reached in the back of a taxi’ (Spalding 1998, 123). Robbins, whose desire to see Seurat and C´ezanne and their contemporaries at the National Gallery was as passionate as Clark’s or Hendy’s, tried to find a better way to conduct the negotiations. This initiative did not succeed. He and Proctor first tried to come to an agreement similar to that over British paintings but this could not be done under the new Act. When John Witt joined the National Gallery board in 1955, Lionel asked him to draw up a reasoned case for the representation of nineteenth-century French paintings at the National Gallery and hence the transfer of paintings such as Seurat’s Bathers at Asni`eres which Clark had vainly tried to obtain from the Tate before the war. The school of late nineteenth-century French painting was now part of the mainstream of European painting and it was no longer ‘modern’ – both in the general sense and in the terms of the new Act. Citing Courtauld’s desire ‘to see the French Impressionists and their immediate followers as the true heirs of the Old Masters and to break down the artificial 4

Wellington, Memorandum for circulation to the Trustees and the Director of the National Gallery, October 1953, T227/359, TNA; LCR to Wellington, 2 November, Wellington to LCR, 6 November 1953, NG26/88.

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barrier between old and modern’, Witt concluded that the National Gallery could ask for thirty-one pictures (including two Seurat, four C´ezanne, four Van Gogh, three Degas, etc).5 Henry Moore, the Tate’s liaison trustee on the National Gallery board, predicted correctly ‘that what Mr Witt proposed must be done sooner or later, but . . . some of the trustees of the Tate Gallery had strong feelings in the matter. He did not think there was any hope of their agreeing to part with, for example, the “Baignade” [Bathers at Asni`eres] by Seurat for a considerable time to come.’ The board decided on 13 October 1955 that Robbins should suggest to Proctor a meeting of representatives of the two boards. Lionel wrote a personal letter to Rothenstein on 3 November assuring him that the initiative was his, not Hendy’s, and that he realized Rothenstein would be opposed to the transfers which ‘would be [my attitude] if I were in your position’ (NG26/91). When the discussions took place Lionel presented the National Gallery’s case. After reiterating that it was his own initiative, he tried to argue that the National Gallery’s needs for the transfers would only arise in stages over the next ten years, as new or refurbished galleries were opened and as it lost the pictures loaned by Courtauld and those of Chester Beatty (a Canadian mining millionaire who had recently moved to Dublin) which had been lent until 1957. What the National Gallery would like in the near future was to achieve Clark’s ambition of having a whole room devoted to the Impressionists, including the coveted Seurat Bathers (LCR, NG Tate Conference 14.12.55, NG26/91). As Spalding noted, nothing was resolved until the 1960s. In 1955, because the National Gallery had the Chester Beatty loan for another two years, discussions with the Tate were provisionally suspended. In 1957 Robbins tried again, this time at least to reach an understanding on the division of responsibility for the purchase of foreign paintings. On 18 July he suggested to the Tate board that its annual report should give a figure of £100,000 for the sum it would need to make up deficiencies in its collection and he agreed with John Fremantle (now Lord Cottesloe) that £40,000 (rather than the current £7500) would be the desirable annual purchase grant ‘provided the Tate had no further responsibility for filling gaps in the Impressionist School’. The board agreed but found it difficult to fix a date at which the purchasing responsibility of the two galleries might be divided: works painted after 1906 (C´ezanne’s death), works painted after 1900 or works by artists born after 1850 or 1860 (which would exclude Seurat). In November a subcommittee of Proctor, Robbins and the artists Lawrence Gowing and 5

Tate Board 17 March, 15 May, 16 June and 21 July 1955, TAM 72/28; Druitt to Proctor, 21 July, Proctor to LCR, 25 July, Witt to LCR, 5 October 1955, NG26/98.

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John Piper did not come to a conclusion: as Lionel reported to the board on 21 November: ‘They believed that there would always exist a rather vague borderland between the Galleries. . . . That borderland at the moment embraced the Post-Impressionists, Seurat, etc. . . . The Committee therefore proposed . . . [to tell the Treasury] the [Tate] Trustees were thinking of new acquisitions broadly in the field in the 20th century.’ As Robbins commented to Hendy on 19 December (NG26/93), ‘it leaves the borderline very indeterminate. But having listened to the discussion . . . I doubt if we shall get very much further yet awhile. The fact is . . . that until we are in a position to offer to take over lock, stock and barrel all the nineteenth century figures and exhibit them, there is bound to be some degree of ambiguity . . . ’ Moreover, ‘I just do not see the day coming when the Tate Gallery will ever have enough money to acquire an important nineteenth century French picture.’ Robbins’s first major initiative as chairman of the National Gallery was the postwar restoration of its building. The gallery had remained open during the war (its pictures stored in Wales – from 1941 underground in a slate quarry) in spite of extensive bomb damage and the closure of the west side (Clark 1977, 5–9, 27–9, 54). Clark persuaded the Ministry of Works to repair the east side so that pictures could be brought back from Wales, but in 1954 there were still no plans to restore and reopen the bomb-damaged west side. (The Tate, virtually derelict in 1945, had been restored and reopened completely in 1949.) Lionel told Wellington (4 May 1954, NG26/88) he thought the time had come to discuss reconstruction and extension with the Minister of Works and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Art-loving senior civil servants could only do so much; when ministerial instructions were to restrict public expenditure that was not politically urgent, ‘it is perhaps difficult for them, however friendly their private feelings, to make special representations on our behalf ’. He suggested the trustees should send a deputation to the two ministers, and that they put forward a building scheme ‘outlining all that we want rather than only as much as we think they are likely to give us’, including improved storage and reference facilities as well as one new gallery. He also thought the trustees should request the government to reserve the adjacent Hampton site – occupied by Hampton’s Furniture Store before the war and since November 1940 a bomb site – for national purposes, in order to permit future extension of the gallery. Robbins and Wellington agreed to put Hendy’s statement of the building needs on the agenda for the 8 July 1954 meeting. Also on the agenda was the latest report of the Publications Committee, which recommended that an illustrated annual report on the lines of that of the Friends of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge ‘would be appropriate to the dignity of the Gallery

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and the purpose of the revival of the Annual Report’. After this had been agreed, Hendy outlined his ‘maximum [building] programme’ including an annexe for the Conservation Department and reference section. Coldstream argued strongly for an ambitious programme to enable more of the collection to be displayed than before the war; others were cautious. When Robbins concluded the discussion, he said that when the gallery’s needs were unanimously agreed the trustees could approach ministers. But the meeting also agreed that he could in the meantime approach the Minister of Works, Sir David Eccles, ‘with a view to obtaining imaginative architectural help. This would pave the way to further contacts between the Director and Keeper and high officials at the Ministry of Works with a view to presenting the Board with a detached view of the technical possibilities.’ Lionel wrote to Eccles, his former student at New College who had been a Conservative MP since 1943, the next day (NG26/89). When they met for a ‘very off the record talk’, he explained his concerns (Note for Sir David Eccles on the present problems of the National Gallery, 26 July 1954, NG26/85). Even when the current refurbishment of the eastern rooms was complete, there would still be two fewer exhibition rooms than before the war (the destroyed western gallery and another occupied by the Conservation Department); even when pictures were moved from the ground floor to the renovated galleries the Reference Section would be overcrowded; and the collection was still increasing, with 125 pieces added since 1939. ‘It is highly desirable that this [increase] should continue – both to save national treasures which otherwise might be exported and to fill gaps in the representation of different painters and schools, especially as regards more recent work.’ Hence there was a need for further building behind the gallery and modifications of the existing structure as well as for rebuilding the west side. He hoped for support for ‘a thorough architectural survey with all these needs in mind’ in preparation for a later formal approach to ministers. ‘Looking further ahead,’ Robbins continued, ‘I am personally prompted to ask whether the Ministry of Works is satisfied with a situation in which an appreciable area of the block on which the National Gallery stands – one of the finest sites in the world – will be occupied by a reconstructed department store, for ever in the way of extension of the Gallery. I understand that before the war our precedessors said that they were not interested in the acquisition of this plot [the Hampton site]. If we were asked the same question today I have little doubt that our answer would be different.’ Robbins reported to the 14 October board meeting that Eccles had been ‘most sympathetic’ and that he had also talked to the Deputy Secretary of the Ministry, Edward Muir; the Ministry’s architects were now

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investigating the possibilities of reconstruction but it was apparently too late to prevent Hampton’s rebuilding. By the new year the Ministry of Works architect, William Kendall, had prepared sketch plans for the reconstruction of the National Gallery, which would cost approximately £300,000 and take five years to complete. The next step was to persuade ministers to provide the money. Robbins and Wellington were authorized on 13 January to approach the Chancellor of the Exchequer but had to content themselves with an interview with the Financial Secretary, Henry Brooke, on 3 March. They used the arguments Robbins had put to Eccles six months earlier. Their ‘sympathetic reception’ left Robbins hopeful that ‘something fairly definite will result’ (LCR, Note for the Financial Secretary on the representations to be made by the Delegation from the National Gallery, 2 March 1955, and LCR to Crawford, 3 March 1955, NG26/90). He and Hendy also treated Brooke to an illuminating ‘behind the scenes’ tour of the gallery (Brooke to LCR, 4 April 1955, NG26/85). On 13 October 1955 Lionel reported to the board that Brooke had written that he hoped the reconstruction work could start in 1958 and that when he (Robbins) had checked with Sir Alexander Johnston at the Treasury whether this meant actual reconstruction in bricks and mortar, he was assured it did. In the 1960s the Gallery had one more room than it had before the war and the remodelled ground floor included an enlarged reference section (Hendy 1964, 73–4). After this successful approach Lionel and his fellow trustees turned their attention to persuading the Treasury to provide more finance for the contents of the rooms. The Chancellor had readily agreed to the ‘Waverley’ increase of 25 per cent for all the directly funded galleries and museums, which raised the National Gallery’s grant for 1952/3 by £1750 (from £7000). He had also agreed a year later to his officials’ suggestion – which came from Robbins as chair of the Reviewing Committee – to a further 25 per cent increase (from the pre-Waverley figure), which raised the National Gallery’s grant to £10,500. But this was still small in relation to the price of paintings, perhaps a fifth of the price of a masterpiece such as Titian’s Death of Actaeon.6 In Lionel’s first months as chairman the trustees considered trying to acquire a sixteenth-century French portrait, then known as Diane de Poitiers au Bain, by Franc¸ois Clouet (Blunt 1980, 118–19), which was about to be sold to a New York dealer. Although several trustees objected strongly to the painting or its price (at least £75,000), they agreed on 15 October 1954 6

Playfair to Padmore and Armstrong, Report of the Committee on the Export of Works of Art etc, 15 September 1952, LCR to R.W.B. Clarke, 1 December 1953, T227/358, TNA.

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to refer the case to the Reviewing Committee – from which Lionel thought he had better now resign: John Fremantle took his place. The committee recommended retention of the painting in Britain, but the trustees decided on 10 March 1955 not to try to buy the picture (partly because Crawford’s strong dislike of the painting ruled out seeking assistance from the NACF) and the picture was exported. On the other hand, when the trustees could obtain assistance from the NACF for El Greco, The Dream of Philip II, the Treasury provided a £30,000 grant towards the £42,500 purchase price; the Treasury also offered half the £50,000 purchase price of Velazquez, St John on the Island of Patmos (Treasury 1963, Appendix I). Robbins told the board on 14 April 1955 that he thought the ‘main moral of the episode [the loss of the Clouet], was the paramount need for more money at the Trustees’ own disposal’, and he wrote a foreword to the first of the new annual reports setting out this need and emphasizing the derisory size of the current annual grant-in-aid (National Gallery 1955). On 8 June 1955 Lionel gave a well-publicized address to the NACF. Not all the publicity was welcome: the Evening Standard attacked him as an ‘art dictator’ who wanted to nationalize important works of art in private hands, obliging him to circulate the text of his remarks to his friends and to take legal advice. John Witt advised him not to press libel charges but succeeded in getting the newspaper to issue an apology.7 In his address Lionel called for ‘a very radical change in present allocations [of government money] to museums and galleries. . . . [For] unless such a change takes place we are in grave danger of losing to overseas buyers a disquietingly high proportion of that part of our heritage of important works of art which still remain in private hands.’ This was not a new problem but there were two new factors: the Waverley regulations for the export of works of art and the postwar rise in prices of works of art. The Reviewing Committee could delay the granting of an export licence but could not ultimately refuse one if no offer from a domestic buyer for the work of art at its current market price was forthcoming. The rise in art prices resulted from the reduced stock of works in private hands, the increased resources of foreign buyers, inflation and the expectation of further inflation: the first could not be reversed; the other three were unlikely to be. The only solution was more money, and probably public money because of the magnitude of the problem. To illustrate the magnitude he suggested that nationalization – ‘which I do not advocate at 7

Address to the National Art Collections Fund, June 1955, Miscellaneous Articles & Lectures; Witt to LCR, 10 June, Witt to the editor of the Evening Standard, 10 and 13 June 1955, Personal Attacks, RP.

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all’ – of old masters and other works of art still in private hands would cost £15 m in compensation. What was needed was not nationalization but ‘first, an increase in the funds placed at the disposal of national collections to enable them to buy, without continual appeal for special grants, the lower priced masterpieces which continually appear on the market, and, secondly, a complete willingness of the part of the state to step into the breach with special assistance when the few very high-priced works are in danger of export’. Special grants alone were not enough because they could be made only for noncontentious works. As he asked, with the (unmentioned) Clouet in mind, ‘What responsible Treasury official is going to recommend the Chancellor of the Exchequer to ask for a supplementary vote if there is any suggestion that the experts are divided?’ He also asked why adequate annual grants had not been granted. It was not the fault of economists: he was proud that Lords Overstone and Keynes, ‘two of the greatest exponents of the pure theory of money’, had been trustees of the National Gallery. It could not be public opinion, given the crowds who thronged exhibitions at the Tate or the Royal Academy and the constant stream of visitors to the National Gallery; it could not be officials who were the servants of their masters; it was perhaps not even ministers who were subject to Parliament. ‘Hence in the last analysis, I am disposed to place responsibility for the present lamentable state of affairs, in large measure and without distinction of parties, on the average Member of Parliament’, who was both uninterested in art and ‘apt to support those parrot cries for indiscriminate “economy” which are the substitute for thought where matters of more intangible yield are concerned’. But ministers and MPs could be persuaded that increased expenditure on the arts would be politically popular: it was ‘our special duty’ to try to persuade them. Kenneth Clark ‘agreed with every word’ and sent his ‘grateful congratulations’ the next day (Miscellaneous Correspondence, RP). On 20 November Lionel told his sister Caroline: The great excitement of recent weeks has been the publication of the National Gallery Report for the last 17 years. This has taken no end of labour & emotional energy. The Director wrote the Report which is quite a sizeable monograph & I wrote the Foreword which is a passionate plea for more building and more money. Last Friday [18 November] was the publication day. We gave a press conference on Wednesday & waited with bated breath for the outcome. So far it has surpassed our best expectations – a first leader in the Times – a middle page article in the Sunday Times – extensive notices in nearly every other paper – and all sympathetic. I don’t know what will come of it all. But I can’t help thinking we shall get something of what we are asking.

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Lionel was still an active member of the finance committee of the trustees. As he reported to the board on 10 October 1955, the committee thought they should use their power to invest some of the trust funds in equities. This took longer than Lionel expected, owing to what he called ‘the mulish obstinacy and bad temper of the Chief Charity Commissioner’ in objecting to the use of a commercial broker rather than the government broker Mullen & Co. Lionel’s friends at the Treasury intervened to sort this out as ‘tempers were high’, but it was not until April 1956 that the switches could be made (LCR to Bracken, 3 November 1955, and subsequent correspondence in NG26/96; RWBC/2180, 12 October 1955, and subsequent correspondence on T227/365, TNA). As the new investment policy would take time to bear fruit – as would efforts at persuasion to increase the Treasury grant – Robbins raised other possibilities for increasing resources in a memorandum to the trustees on 2 November 1955 (NG26/85): the formation of a Friends of the National Gallery (which he thought would be ruled out by the existence of the NACF), the launching of a public appeal, private appeals to possible large benefactors, widening of the current very limited powers of the Inland Revenue to accept works of art in payment of death duties, allowing donors to deduct gifts to charitable institutions from their taxable income as in the USA, obtaining grants from foundations such as the Pilgrim Trust which Robbins and Hendy had approached unsuccessfully over the Clouet, and, finally, the reimposition of entrance fees which had been imposed on two ‘paying days’ a week before the war. Admission charges would, however, only benefit the gallery if the Treasury increased its grant because the proceeds would automatically accrue to the Treasury. As Lionel had told Coldstream on 8 July, he found it ‘awfully difficult to make up [his own] mind among the very many rather complicated pros and cons’ of entrance fees, and he asked Michael Levey on 15 August for a report on prewar experience (NG26/98). At the board meeting on 10 November his fellow trustees’ views were mixed. At the beginning of 1956 the Inland Revenue could accept in satisfaction of estate duty only those works of art and other objects which the Treasury thought ought to remain in buildings accepted in lieu of estate duty or given to the National Trust. There was also since 1946 a National Land Fund which could reimburse the Inland Revenue when the government chose to transfer land offered in payment of death duties to a non-profit making body such as the National Trust. John Witt drew up a memorandum arguing that these powers should be widened to include works of art, books and manuscripts, scientific collections etc to be sold, given or bequeathed to national galleries and museums; that the Inland Revenue should be able to accept gifts in cash as well as in kind to national museums and galleries when these were

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offered in lieu of estate duty; and, with respect to income tax, that gifts to institutions such as the National Gallery should be deductible from income before assessment for income tax (Memorandum on Suggested Estate Duty and Tax Reliefs on Gifts of Objects or Money to Museums, NG26/98). At the suggestion of Sir Alexander Johnston the trustees put only the first of Witt’s proposals to the Treasury before the 1956 budget. Within the Treasury Bridges, about to retire as Permanent Secretary, was strongly in favour of setting aside some of the National Land Fund as a special fund to purchase pictures, which was also being recommended by the Reviewing Committee in its second report, but his colleagues were less enthusiastic. On 25 April 1956 he was able to tell Robbins and Fremantle that the Treasury would take only a small step in the desired direction in the Finance bill by allowing the National Land Fund to be used for works of art offered in payment of death duties that would go into national collections. Bridges continued to press for the larger scheme, had further lengthy discussions with Robbins and Fremantle and put the proposal up to the Financial Secretary just before he left the Treasury in December.8 But Johnston, who was coming to think it had been a mistake to appoint Robbins and Fremantle as gallery trustees to chair the Reviewing Committee, and others continued to argue that the Waverley Committee had recommended against a special fund – a point on which Lionel had changed his mind – and Bridges’ successor (Roger Makins) took their advice (Johnston to Brittain, 7 December 1956, note by Makins, 8 January 1957, T227/496). Lionel used the rest of Witt’s memorandum to draft a letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer (now Harold Macmillan) advocating the remission of estate duty for gifts of money as well as for gifts of objects to national museums and galleries and some income tax relief to donors to such institutions. On income tax the letter did not ask just for restoration of the situation prevailing before 1946, when donors making payments to a charity under a deed of covenant could claim relief from surtax, but rather that the American system be introduced (LCR, Representations to the Chancellor on Sundry Financial Questions, June 1956, NG26/86). On receiving the letter, signed by all the trustees, Macmillan agreed to receive a deputation. The deputation (Robbins, Crawford, Brinsley Ford and Witt) on 28 November ‘received the impression that there was some slight possibility of their suggestions about estate duty bearing fruit but the expectations of anything 8

Bridges to Painter, National Land Fund, 6 January 1956, T227/417; Johnston, Note for Record, 25 April, Bridges to Brittain and Johnston, 10 May, LCR to Bridges, 14 May, Bridges to Financial Secretary, Proposal that part of the National Land Fund should be set aside for the purchase of pictures, etc, of special value, 3 December 1956, T227/496.

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being done as regards income tax was less certain’ (NG board 13 December 1956). Behind this lay the objections summarized by the Inland Revenue on 2 July (T227/519): in reverse order, the new income tax relief was rejected for ‘practical and administrative reasons’; the surtax relief had been abolished because it was expensive in lost revenue; the estate duty exemption would unfairly favour only museums and galleries unless extended to all charitable institutions, in which case it too would be expensive. The conclusion was that the ‘main solution’ of the trustees’ difficulties would be an increase in their grant. The trustees were not successful in getting the desired tax reliefs. In 1954, 1955 and 1956 Lionel and Iris took their summer holidays in Italy. The first time, having just replaced their prewar Ford Prefect with a new car, they drove rapidly through France and Switzerland and slowly, via Bologna, Ravenna, Urbino, Arezzo and Perugia, to Rome. A week in Rome gave them plenty of time with Jacques and Anne Kahane as well as with the works of Michelangelo (LCR to Kahane, 3 September 1954, General Correspondence 1.1.54–31/1/55, RP). The following summer they took Richard and Wendy with them for ‘a tour of the leading centres in Northern and Central Italy’, including Venice, Florence and Rome, where their visit coincided with a visit by Caroline and Joe (LCR to Kahane, 27 May 1955, Economists Correspondence January 1955-July 1956, RP). In 1956 they were away for a month, driving first through Lorraine and Alsace to pick up the Viners in Zurich. With the Viners they travelled through Austria to Venice and Florence for a week each, and to Rome for the first full Congress of the International Economic Association. The Viners returned to England with them and Jack Viner spent part of the Michaelmas term at LSE, sharing Lionel’s room (LCR to Eugenio Gudin, 9 August, LCR to Baumol, 23 October 1956, Economists Correspondence August 1956-April 1958, RP). The National Gallery was not Lionel’s only ‘outside’ responsibility at this time. In June 1954 he was elected president of the Royal Economic Society. Austin Robinson (1990, 173–4) ‘always regarded [this] as the turning point in the Society’s history’ from an organization which had been dominated by Keynes to one which had ‘grown up and had become democratic’ with a greatly expanded younger membership. Robinson explained: During Robbins’s Presidency we made no great changes in policy and introduced no major new activities. . . . [But] as Secretary I worked more closely with him than I had with his immediate predecessors [Hawtrey, Robertson, Henderson and Brand]. And rather than report what had been done, we began to involve the now young and active Council [which met at LSE] in discussing what should be done.

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Even after he had been succeeded by Carr-Saunders in 1956 and by Robert Hall in 1959, I continued to consult Robbins as well as my current President when some major decision had to be made at short notice before the next meeting of the Council. I did not always agree with him politically. But I knew that I would always get good and wise advice.

When Robbins gave his presidential address (1955d) he chose to speak on ‘The teaching of economics in schools and universities’ in order to air his views on reforming undergraduate education (see Chapter 22). On 24 August 1954 he was asked to chair another committee for the Treasury, this time on the proposal to build a new concert hall on the site of the old Queen’s Hall. The Queen’s Hall, the original home of the Henry Wood Promenade concerts, had been destroyed by bombing in March 1941; a postwar plan for a new larger hall on the site, announced by Gaitskell as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1951, had not been implemented; and the current Chancellor (Butler) wanted the matter reexamined. The Financial Secretary (Brooke) admitted the Treasury had originally approached Kenneth Clark, who had agreed but had then been appointed head of the Independent Television Authority. Brooke thought the work would take only two or three months and hoped the committee would report by Christmas. Lionel accepted with a proviso: that he would not be committed to report by Christmas (Letters from Ministers & Civil Servants about Offices etc, RP). At the beginning of the new year Lionel had to admit to his sister Caroline, ‘The autumn has been a very busy one. . . . The work at the School is nothing exceptional – nothing at all to grumble at these days – and most of the anxieties at the Gallery have subsided. But the Queen’s Hall Committee takes up about as much [time] as this releases & the total effect is a little breathless. During the earlier part of the term I still managed to do a certain amount of private work, but for the last six weeks it has been quite impossible to do anything of that sort & now that the vacation is here, the Xmas celebrations have made it almost as hard as before. Hence feelings of frustration and gloom.’ The private work included some attention to Torrens as well as completing a ‘really magnificent’ review article of Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis for the Quarterly Journal of Economics (E.H. Chamberlin to LCR, 25 October 1954, Economists Correspondence 1.10.53-Dec 1954, RP; Robbins 1955b). He also found time to write a piece for the Daily Telegraph, ‘How firm is prosperity?’ (1954c). The year had been ‘one of unprecedented success’ with production and working class incomes at high levels. His answer was succinct. The strongly favourable balance of payments was the natural but delayed (by the Korean War and rearmament) reaction

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to the 1949 devaluation of the pound. This fortunate state of affairs could be threatened by slower productivity growth in the UK than in other countries or by renewed inflation, but the latter could be prevented, especially since monetary weapons had been brought into play again. ‘The firmness of our prosperity is [therefore], in part at least, a function of the firmness of our policy.’ A few months later he described London to Eugenio Gudin (25 May 1955, Economists Correspondence January 1955-July 1956, RP): ‘The tired look which you, in common with most visitors from abroad, must have noticed about the people in the streets has disappeared, the shops and houses have had new coats of paint, the streets are full of new cars, the phenomena of extreme poverty are hardly to be observed. In short, one gets an impression of some approach to habits and prosperity in the United States.’ The first meeting of the Queen’s Hall Committee was held at the Treasury on Thursday 28 October 1954.9 The members included a musician, the conductor Sir Adrian Boult; an accountant, Sir Russell Kettle of Deloitte Plender Griffiths & Co; a theatre manager, Norman Tucker of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre; and William Emrys Williams of the Arts Council, with Armide Opp´e of the Treasury as secretary. Lionel opened the proceedings by warning them they might not finish by Christmas: ‘The Committee had before it an invidious task and whatever recommendations it made would be subject to severe criticism. It was essential, therefore, that it should give full consideration to informed opinion on all aspects of the question and to the views of all potential trouble-makers.’ After they had decided on the witnesses they would ask to give evidence and to meet on Thursday mornings, Otto Clarke of the Treasury explained what the Treasury wanted them to find out. After the war there had been only one large concert hall in London, the Royal Albert Hall with a capacity of 7500, where the Proms were now held. In 1947 and 1948 extensive discussions had resulted in two projects: one for the South Bank of the river Thames including the Royal Festival Hall, which had been built in time for the Festival of Britain in 1951; the other a new Queen’s Hall, comprising a concert hall seating 3500 plus 1000 standing for the Promenade Concerts and a small recital hall, on the site of the old Queen’s Hall (which had seated only 2200) in Langham Place, to be built by Chappells which had leased and run the Queen’s Hall before the war. Chappells had not been able to raise the money and in 1951 the government had decided that it could be built with public funds once 9

The committee’s minutes are in Queen’s Hall Committee Agenda and Minutes, its papers in Queen’s Hall Committee Correspondence I and II, RP.

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economic circumstances permitted. Although the economic situation had improved, financial stringency continued. With many competing demands for public funds it was not clear what the priorities should be. Hence the Treasury sought answers to two questions: (1) What was the case on musical and artistic grounds for a new Queen’s Hall given present concert hall facilities and possible developments (television, wireless, etc) over the next ten years. . . . (2) What would be the economic prospects of the Hall? Could it be run without a subsidy? Would it be possible to estimate the scale of subsidy needed? Would it in fact be a new Covent Garden [that is, expensive to maintain]?

The latter also included the likely repercussions on the Festival and Albert Halls. Robbins’s questioning of the numerous witnesses over a dozen meetings was very much that of an economist. At the second meeting he enquired, for instance, of the Crown Lands Commissioners’ representatives ‘what considerations had led H.M.G. to the decision that a larger hall was so very much the better proposition. . . . It would be valuable to know whether H.M.G. had favoured the larger hall for financial reasons, or whether, on the contrary, financial considerations pointed to a small hall but had been overcome by other considerations.’ He asked Sir Arthur Bliss, representating the Incorporated Society of Musicians, at the sixth meeting if he ‘could . . . say that the new hall would be booked 300 nights a year; and was it true, as some witnesses had informed the Committee, that no higher rent than that now paid for the Festival Hall could possibly be paid by promoters[?]’ He rarely received economist’s answers. The Crown Lands Commissioners had ‘not themselves weighed up these factors’. Bliss stated that running a concert hall could not be regarded as a commercial proposition, to which Robbins responded that ‘it was [already] pretty clear to the Committee that they must accept that the concert hall could not make a profit, or indeed pay for itself. Granted however that some subsidy would be necessary it was vital to establish its order of magnitude. If the Committee saw reason to expect the hall to run with a subsidy of a few hundred pounds a year it would be justified in recommending rebuilding. . . . If it appeared that the hall would need a subsidy of £1m. a year however . . . to build it would mean giving up other equally important cultural amenities. There were innumerable competitors in the field of culture.’ During their third meeting the committee visited the site and looked at the plans, which they ‘felt were perhaps too unambitious and that more might be made of the site’ by providing space for a restaurant or shops. ‘It seemed clear that the present plan was not economic.’

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Robbins also asked for statistics. At the outset he requested (LCR to Opp´e, 1 November 1954): (a) the number of large concert halls, say those capable of accommodating over 300 people, and their approximate cubic capacity in relation to the populations of Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Stockholm, New York and Chicago; (b) the absolute amount and the amount per head of population given by way of subsidy to the upkeep of concert halls or for the purpose of music other than opera in the cities above-mentioned; (c) the same information for London.

He thought data for (a) and (b) could be obtained from the cultural attach´es of the embassies, which they could, but on (b) only for Vienna. He enquired whether the CSO or BBC could provide data on concert going in London; they could not (2nd-5th meetings). However, Ibbs and Tillett provided the numbers of concerts at various London halls they had promoted in 1935–7 (101) and 1952–4 (233), and the statement from the Royal Festival Hall, which came with several appendices of data on ticket sales, was ‘exactly what the Committee had asked for’ (5th meeting). When some witnesses claimed the demand for concerts had declined since the war, Robbins said (at the fourth meeting) ‘that as an economist he believed that there had never been so much money to spend as there was now. It was true that the higher income groups had been hit by taxation and that money might be said to be scarce for such purposes as the purchase of big works of art. He wondered however whether this was equally true of money for concert going.’ He noted the ‘contradiction in logic . . . [in a] statement which referred to unsatisfied demand and . . . said that the prices of concert tickets could not be increased; and he asked whether this had in fact been put to the test’. It ‘would be difficult in advising the Chancellor on the economic prospects of a new hall to assure him of great and increasing demand and at the same time to inform him categorically that not a penny of additional finance could be drawn from the public who needed and would use the hall’. The general manager of the Royal Festival Hall, however, agreed with him at the fifth meeting that ‘it was a curious phenomenon that whereas everything, including theatre tickets, had risen, the price of concert tickets had remained the same . . . and he thought it possible that if all promoters were to agree to increase their prices the public might not seriously fall off.’ Robbins wrote the committee’s report himself, circulating first an outline and then a complete draft in February 1955. The secretary’s perceptive

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comments and the committee’s discussion led to expansions and corrections of factual information, especially after further consultation with Otto Clarke and the general manager of the Festival Hall, and other embellishments; but Robbins’s argument, and much of the wording, was unchanged (Queen’s Hall Committee Draft Report, February 1955; 12th, 14th and 15th meetings). Lionel approached the issue by examining the pros and cons of the existing plan for a new Queen’s Hall. The case for the new hall was the inadequacy of the two existing halls, in terms of their number, their acoustics and their location away from the centre of London, especially if there was a larger potential audience than before the war. Examining the case, ‘we should [first] wish to state quite definitely that we accept the position that from a general point of view it is desirable that in time to come there should be more concerts in London and more concert halls. We cannot believe that the present proportion of seating accommodation to the population of London compares well with arrangements in some other parts of the world or with what the cultural life of a great metropolis should involve.’ It was also desirable to have another hall with good acoustics. But the quantitative information the committee had obtained from Mass Observation did not support the claim that South Bank audiences came only from the south side of London; similarly the actual figures on bookings at the Royal Festival Hall showed an excess of demand over supply much smaller than alleged. Moreover, few orchestral and choral concerts required a hall larger than the Festival Hall. Hence, ‘while the evidence available suggests that there does exist some unsatisfied demand, . . . it would not seem to be of such dimensions as to render the economic prospects of a new Queen’s Hall unequivocably favourable.’ The costs, on the other hand, could be estimated, including amortized building costs and running expenses, at £140,000– 160,000 a year. Prospective receipts were harder to estimate, partly because of the uncertainty about demand, but also because of the ‘even more perplexing circumstance’ that the witnesses who claimed an increasing demand for concerts also claimed it was impossible to raise ticket prices. Having regard to the fact that, while prices in general have risen since the war to perhaps three times what they were in 1938, the prices of concert tickets have advanced very little, we find this very difficult to accept. It seems to us very difficult to believe that with the money national income at three times its pre-war height, the volume of demand for concert tickets, measured in money terms, should be not perceptibly greater than pre-war. We find it equally difficult to believe that whereas the prices of books and even opera tickets have been advanced substantially with no detriment to receipts, the demand for concerts should remain so insecurely

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poised that the slightest readjustment to take account of rises in costs would cause a diminution in aggregate takings. But try as we may, we have had no help from our witnesses in this matter: and we have been compelled to base our estimates upon the information which they have given us.10

Using Royal Festival Hall figures, the annual receipts would be £72,000, which implied a deficit (and hence a subsidy) of £68,000–88,000. (In the published report the receipts were more favourably estimated at £91,500, reducing the deficit to £53,000–68,000.) If it could be assumed that seat prices could be raised without choking off demand, the estimated deficit could be lower, ‘but on the evidence we have received we are not in a position to entertain more sanguine expectations’. The committee had considered the possibility of a larger building with some garages and commercial accommodation, but the advice of the Ministry of Works and an independent architect had not been encouraging. The likely repercussions on the receipts of the Royal Albert and Royal Festival Halls, and hence on the subsidy of the latter, were not encouraging either. We cannot believe that this consideration is irrelevant. If it were a question of permitting the competition of a new concert hall, which would pay for itself on a commercial basis, we should be inclined to hold that there would be no basis in public policy for considering the repercussions on an already subsidised undertaking. But we cannot resist the impression that matters are entirely changed when it is a question of initiating an enterprise, which on all reasonable calculations will need a substantial subsidy, to compete with an existing organization which has not yet succeeded in getting free of the necessity for a subsidy.

The financial estimates did not dispose of the general case that an additional large concert hall in London would be desirable but they did suggest there was no strong ground for giving it a high priority ‘in the long list of desirable objects of immediate government expenditure’. There were also other possibilities, since there appeared to be a need for a small hall, for rehearsals and for small orchestral concerts. For one thing, it was possible that a private firm or group of firms might be willing, as Chappells had been immediately after the war, to rebuild the old Queen’s Hall without a subsidy. For others, there was the possibility of constructing only a small hall on the Queen’s Hall site; there was the London Society’s scheme for a music centre on the edge of Regent’s Park; and there was the small hall the London County Council intended to complement the Festival Hall on the South Bank site. Robbins favoured the last of these for the near future and 10

As Dennis Robertson commented when he read the published report, LCR ‘must have enjoyed intellectually writing [these] paragraphs while deploring the necessity to do so’ (13 June 1955, Personal Attacks, RP).

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later on the development of the London Society’s proposed music centre. (The Queen Elizabeth Hall was built on the South Bank site in the 1960s; the Promenade Concerts have remained at the Royal Albert Hall.) The Queen’s Hall Committee held its final meeting on 24 March, after which Lionel treated the committee to a lunch. Bill Williams and Adrian Boult both told him afterwards how much they had enjoyed the meetings, with their ‘atmosphere of good fellowship’; Boult was particularly struck by Lionel’s ‘grasp of every side of it [the issue] in such a way that we can be very proud indeed of your report . . . for [its] very apt balance & proportion’ (Miscellaneous Correspondence, RP). After printing delays it was signed and sent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer on 29 April. Robbins was duly thanked for ‘an extremely interesting’ and ‘helpful’ document. The senior Treasury official concerned noted that it was ‘thorough and carefully reasoned’ and its recommendations ‘at first sight welcome’ to the Treasury because they would put an end to the embarrassing uncertainty about the use of the site; he recommended immediate publication (Brooke to LCR, 2 May, Butler to LCR, 5 May, Thorley to Johnston and Armstrong, 5 May 1955, T227/307). It appeared on 27 May. The press reaction was uniformly favourable, even from those who were disappointed in the outcome. As the editor of the Musical Times noted (clipping in Queen’s Hall Committee Correspondence II, RP), ‘No one reading this report can question the thoroughness or the fairness with which the Committee has done its work, and there will be few who will feel justified, on any but purely emotional grounds, in quarrelling with its conclusions.’ In November 1954 Lionel estimated that his book on Torrens was ‘about two-thirds through’ (LCR to L. Kashnor, 15 November 1954, General Correspondence 1.1.54–31/12/55, RP). He intended to include an extensive annotated bibliography of Torrens’s works and having located most of the books and pamphlets hoped to finish by the summer of 1955. In the Christmas vacation he tried to write the chapter on Torrens’s views on money and banking but was frustrated by ‘social obligations of one kind or another’, as he told Frank Fetter on 19 January (Economists Correspondence January 1955-July 1956, RP). Working on Torrens again in the Easter vacation, he came across a letter from Ricardo to Wilmot Horton which was not in Sraffa’s edition of Ricardo’s works; when Sraffa confirmed he did not know of it, Robbins urged him to publish it as a note but Sraffa persuaded Lionel to publish it himself (Sraffa to LCR, Torrens Notes, RP; Robbins 1956a). On 20 November 1955 Lionel wrote to his sister Caroline: ‘I have finished my

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book – all but about five synopses for the Bibliographical appendix which will have to wait for Xmas vac to get done – and so much has been happening since that I have almost forgotten its contents . . . ’ But from the beginning of the year Lionel was dogged by illness, including lumbago or sciatica, two bouts of flu, bronchitis and a bladder infection. In January 1956 he declined a longstanding invitation to address the Societ´e d’Economie Politique in Paris. He tentatively accepted an invitation to lecture at UCLA but then declined when he was ‘so far behind with my general plan of work’ thanks to ill health.11 There were the usual author’s problems too, as he told his former student Meenai on 12 March: ‘Just as I thought I had got the currency and banking stuff into final shape, I discovered unmistakable evidence of Torrens’ authorship of a long unsigned article on Overstone, published in 1858,’ which compelled him to rewrite some of his conclusions. When he finally delivered the manuscript to Macmillan he told Knight on 27 July, ‘I know that I could go on working for another couple of years and still be finding new material now and then. But all things have their term and if I am to get on with work which I have long planned to do this had to be brought to a full stop sooner or later’ (Economists Correspondence January 1955-July 1956, RP). One of the first things he did was to read the latest collection of Knight’s essays which he had agreed to review for the American Economic Review. His review (1957a) was critical as well as complimentary. Robbins’s major work in the history of economics, Robert Torrens and the Evolution of Classical Economics (1958a), was the longest of his books and ‘the one by which I should most wish to be judged as a scholar’ (1971a, 228). It had been a challenge to write a major book about a minor character in the history of economics: ‘250 pages seems a lot to devote to an obscure classical economist.’ He rose to the challenge by, ‘without puffing Torrens into the position of an economist of the first rank, . . . attempt[ing] to make the story of the evolution of his economics a sort of mirror image of the parallel development of the classical system as a whole’ (LCR to Gudin, 25 May 1955, Economists Correspondence January 1955-July 1956). He did not dwell on Torrens’s interesting life, as an officer of marines on active service during the Napoleonic Wars and as a member of Parliament, as a newspaper publisher and as an active member of the New Zealand Company and the South Australian Association, partly because he had encouraged Meenai to 11

LCR to Gaston Leduc, 12 January, LCR to R.B. Allen, 23 February and 25 June 1956, General Correspondence January–July 1956, RP.

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publish his biographical findings (Meenai 1956). He later (Torrens 1958, vi–vii) succinctly summarized Torrens’s contributions to the development of economics. In the first period, as the contemporary of Malthus and Ricardo, he is chiefly to be remembered for having formulated clearly the famous theory of comparative costs in international trade – this independently of Ricardo, and before him in time. But he also played some part in the discussion of the central theories of value and distribution . . . [influencing the second edition of Ricardo’s Principles of Economics]. In the second period, as a senior contemporary of J.S. Mill, McCulloch and Senior, he made important contributions in no less than three distinct fields. In the field of money and banking, together with Overstone, he was the leading protagonist of the theories of the so-called Currency School, according to whose doctrines the fundamental desideratum of credit control was to produce movements of the total circulation of a mixed system similar to what would have taken place had that circulation consisted wholly of metallic money. In the field of colonization, together with [Edward] Gibbon Wakefield, he was an active exponent of the so-called system of Self-supporting Colonization, according to which an orderly and self-financing development of virgin territories was to be secured by charging a price for holdings sufficient at once to finance emigration and to prevent dispersion of the emigrants through unrestricted appropriation of free, or very cheap, lands. In the field of commercial policy, having abandoned the cause of unilateral free trade, he became the chief intellectual advocate of the alternative system of reciprocity and a colonial Zollverein [customs union] – an advocacy which involved the development of a theory of the role of demand in international exchange with special reference to the effects of tariffs on the terms of trade.

In his book he assigned a chapter to each of these five contributions (two on money and banking) before providing an overall assessment of Torrens’s place in the history of economic thought. When the book might still have been an introduction to The Budget, his plan had been to provide a brief account of his life (which appears in the introduction to Robert Torrens) before sections on Torrens’s major writings; ‘early pure classical theory’; monetary and banking theory; colonization; commercial policy and the terms of trade; and The Budget (ms outline in Torrens Notes, RP). But in the course of his investigations he realized that Torrens had first made his challenge to the unilateral free-trade position in 1832 when he was MP for Bolton and had published in it a series of letters to the Bolton Chronicle collected as Letters on Commercial Policy (1833) (LCR to Viner, 15 February 1954, Torrens Letters & Reviews, RP). These had attracted much less attention from Torrens’s contemporaries than the later letters to Lord John Russell and Sir Robert Peel published in The Budget (1841). He and

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the School’s Publications Committee therefore decided to reprint the earlier collection (Torrens 1958). Robbins followed Viner (1937, 442–3) in allowing Torrens’s own claim that he stated the theory of comparative costs in his Essay on the External Corn Trade (1815) before (but without influencing) Ricardo in his Principles. Also, just as Viner had emphasized that it was ‘unquestionable . . . that Ricardo is entitled to the credit for first giving due emphasis to the doctrine, for first placing it in its appropriate setting, and for obtaining general acceptance of it by economists’, Robbins noted that Torrens’s first statement ‘as pure analysis . . . lack[ed] the final emphasis on the comparison of ratios which is the ultimate essence of this principle’, a lack he remedied in a later edition of his Essay. But he did not agree with Viner when ‘he seem[ed] to suggest that Torrens’ grasp of the principle was in some sense incomplete and wavering. . . . [From the evidence quoted (by Robbins)] it is difficult to think of any Classical writer save Ricardo himself who has shown a firmer grasp of the meaning of the theory of Comparative Costs or a broader vision of its implications’ (Robbins 1958a, 21–4 and 31–3). Their position on Torrens’s claim has recently been challenged (Ruffin 2005), although without reference to Robbins’s work (and only an oblique one to Viner’s). The chapters on Torrens’s role in the development of nineteenth-century monetary theory are ‘one of the great discussions of the Currency and Banking Debate in the entire literature’ (O’Brien 1988, 48), although they have been criticized as well as commended for partiality to the Currency School (H.M. Robertson 1960, 378). In the prolonged debate before the UK return to the gold standard after the Napoleonic Wars in 1821 Torrens had been on the opposite side from Ricardo and the other authors of the Bullion Report, objecting to the deflation a return to gold would bring. ‘No modern diatribe against deflation could be more emphatic than Torrens’ in his Essay on Money and Paper Currency (1812). But in Parliamentary debates in the 1830s he ‘[took] a position in most respects exactly the reverse of that which he had adopted in his earlier writings’. Thereafter he played a leading role in the ten-year campaign which produced the Bank Act of 1844 which separated the issue and banking departments of the Bank of England: ‘If we except Overstone there is no one else on the side of the Currency Theory who played a part of comparable eminence either in volume of publication or in resourcefulness of argument.’ Hence, although Lionel could not find information to account fully for Torrens’s change of mind, he could, as Torrens had, clearly and perceptively describe both sides of the controversy and the exchanges between Torrens and his Banking School critics (1958a, 76, 87, 94). F.W. Fetter, who also found this discussion

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‘the most perceptive . . . I have read of that historic controversy’, spotted one mistake which Robbins acknowledged and intended to correct in a second edition (Fetter 1958; LCR to Sraffa, 3 December 1958, Sraffa I35, Trinity College Cambridge). Robbins is equally lucid on Wakefield and Torrens on colonization and especially on the connexion between Torrens’s views on colonization and his heterodox views on commercial policy (1958a, 226–8). Torrens had strongly advocated the abolition of the Corn Laws, but when he had discovered the possible favourable effects of a tariff on the terms of trade and, ‘having perceived that a favourable effect . . . was possible . . . proceeded to persuade himself that it was likely’, he came to criticize the UK government for lowering tariffs on imports from countries which were not prepared to reciprocate. ‘Torrens was not concerned with any proposal that, starting from a free trade position, we should endeavour by widespread resort to import duties to turn the terms of trade in our favour. He was interested rather in the way in which we endeavoured to get a free trade position . . . and, rightly or wrongly, he thought that the path of unilateral tariff reduction was the wrong way to go,’ because it had turned the terms of trade against the UK. ‘Colonization was, therefore, to be pursued, not only for . . . the relief of population pressure and the provision of outlets for investment, but also for the reason that it created markets where the terms of trade could not be turned against us by the manipulations of alien governments.’ Robbins relished Torrens’s skills as a controversialist: ‘One can almost hear the old Colonel of Marines snort with pleasure as he perused its contents, perceived its weaknesses, reached for that formidable pen, and began Letter X of The Budget, the famous Letter to Nassau Senior’ (ibid., 219). As in his Theory of Economic Policy (1952), Robbins frequently allowed Torrens to speak in his own words by means of extensive quotation. Relatively little was known of Torrens’s life at the time Robbins wrote. More has been discovered since, on his military career (Fetter to LCR, 23 October 1958, Economists Correspondence May 1958-December 1959; Fetter 1962) and on his role in the development of South Australia (of which his son became the first premier) – partly as a result of Robbins’s work, which ‘stirred the local dovecotes [in South Australia] by an incomplete account that condones, if it does not reflect, the patronising disregard shown by Torrens a century ago for mere colonials’ (Douglas Pike to LCR, 9 July 1959, Economists Correspondence May 1958-December 1959, RP). He continued actively to encourage the research of other scholars, especially that of Peter Moore, for the rest of his life (Moore 1980 and correspondence with Moore 1979–82, Torrens Material, RP).

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The book was published in February 1958, the Letters on Commercial Policy six months later. Many reviewers, including Fetter 1958 and Spengler 1959, judged the 100-page bibliographical appendix a very valuable contribution in itself. Lionel was very relieved that Sraffa and Viner, who had taken an active interest in the project from the beginning, approved of the result. A letter from Sraffa was, he told Sraffa on 2 June 1958, ‘much the nicest thing that has happened to me academically for very many years’ (Sraffa I/35). According to Sraffa’s draft of the letter (8 March 1958, Sraffa C263), he was ‘full of admiration’: ‘The book is a masterpiece which will live as a model of what a study of the thought of an economist should be.’ Among the many complimentary letters from fellow economists was one from Joan Robinson on 10 July. She was ‘very pleased to be able to write, most sincerely, a pleasant review’. As her review in the Cambridge Review concluded, ‘He makes no exaggerated claims for Torrens, but he has evidently enjoyed the work and the reader in turn enjoys seeing a good job well done’ (Torrens Letters & Reviews, RP). Lionel had to decide what to do next. He commented to his sister (13 August 1956): ‘Do I stay on in academic life & have a shot at a couple of really authoritative works before I am gaga or ought I to look elsewhere for more money for my family. At the moment I am inclined to staying where I am. But the inflation & the crushing taxation which takes much more than half anything one does extra, not to mention the thought of retirement at 65 . . . nag continually in the other direction.’ In an article for Lloyds Bank Review (1955c) he had voiced his concern that the heavy weight of taxation, and the way it was raised, by steeply progressive income taxes, were discouraging to incentive and initiative. ‘I think it is about time that someone who is not deeply involved personally, having chosen a different way of life, should say bluntly that the higher reaches of our own progression are quite indefensible save upon avowedly confiscatory theory. So far as earned income is involved, they constitute a discrimination against enterprise and ability such as never before existed for any long time in any large-scale civilized community.’ He was also worried that the difficulty of accumulating even a small fortune reduced the opportunities of private support for the arts and culture. Admitting that politically a reduction in the degree of progression of the taxes on higher incomes was not likely in the near future, he made two practical proposals. One was the abolition of the ‘tax on marriage’, whereby two persons living together without being married paid less tax in total than a married couple; the other was to reform death duty from a tax whose amount depended on the size of the estate to one whose amount depended on the size of the legacy. As he reiterated

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in shorter pieces in the Financial Times (1956b, 1958e) and in a talk to the Conservative Finance Committee in July 1957, the reform of the death duties would be a useful and immediately practicable step in the opposite direction from the collectivist tendencies of the current tax system. With the objective of a property-owning democracy he also argued for profitsharing so that workers would own equities. As he concluded his 1955 article, ‘Relentlessly, year by year, it [the operation of the present tax structure] is pushing us towards collectivism and propertyless uniformity. Why . . . should we not begin to use it to produce change in another direction?’ As for how far moves in this direction should go, he took the opportunity of a request from James Lemkin, a friend of his daughter Anne, to speak in a series of lectures on equality organized by the Bow Group to discuss the objective of equality, especially equality of income and wealth, on 29 October 1956.12 He did not need to argue the desirability of equality before the law to his audience; he also thought they would agree that equality of opportunity was a desirable objective, but not a sole objective to which all other objectives should be sacrificed: after all, the children of ‘happy and sensible parents’ will have a better chance than those of ‘unhappy and stupid’ ones, but ‘how many of us would be willing to destroy the insitution of the family to rectify this inequality? Plato was; but the majority of even dyed-in-the-wool collectivists have hesitated to follow him thus far.’ The real issue was the desirability (or otherwise) of equality of income and wealth. He argued that equality of earned income was neither practicable nor morally appealing. While he was well aware that ‘scientists and social reformers and others whose product is of great importance do much without much regard to reward,’ ‘you cannot assume that the workaday business of the world will get done very well without some direct connection between effort and reward’ and he could not see ‘anything particularly ethically attractive in a total divorce between earnings and the value of contribution to the social product; and [found] something positively incompatible between the objective of equal opportunity, which I support, and the objective of equal reward, which 12

Lemkin to LCR, 6 July, LCR to Lemkin, 24 July 1956, General Correspondence January-July 1956; ms notes, ‘Equality: talk to the Bow Group’, Speeches & Articles on Public Affairs Postwar, RP. The Bow Group was founded in 1951 ‘to counter the Tories’ image as the “stupid party”’ by a group of graduates of the Federation of University Conservative and Unionist Associations; LCR’s talk appeared in the first issue of its journal, Crossbow, in 1957 (Robbins 1957c; Barr 2001, 8, 23–32). LCR still gave talks at Toynbee Hall, for instance on ‘England’s Economic Situation’ on 26 June 1957 to the American Seminar 1957 directed by J.J. Mallon (programme in Acc2486/162, London Metropolitan Archives).

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I reject.’ As for wealth and unearned income, ‘Once private property is allowed at all, some degree of inequality is more or less inevitable. . . . If, therefore, you believe in private property, if you think it safeguards liberty and decentralized initiative, you are ipso facto committed to a social objective which involves some negation of the objective of equality.’ Before arguing again for reform of the death duties, he returned to his dislike of a high degree of progression in taxation, at least when it was designed deliberately to reduce inequality rather than to share the burden of taxation equitably: ‘Some, whom I respect, may like the idea of the tremendous reduction which has taken place in the numbers of higher incomes. But if I think of it in terms of concrete results, the appearance of the consumption pattern, the colour of town and country, the narrowing of the scope for variety and experiment, I do not share this feeling. . . . At present levels of productivity at least, there is a certain drabness implicit in the operation of the levelling process.’ The general election on 26 May 1955 had returned the Conservatives under Anthony Eden, who had succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister in April. Lionel found the election ‘boring in the extreme’ although he was anxious about the result: Labour MPs had seemed so demoralized recently (during the struggle between the Gaitskellites and the Bevanites before Gaitskell became leader in November 1955) that he would be ‘seriously disquieted’ if they had to undertake international negotiations (LCR to Kahane, 27 May 1955, Economists Correspondence January 1955–July 1956, RP). As it turned out, Eden led the country into ill-advised military intervention in Egypt in November 1956 after the Egyptian government had nationalized the Suez Canal in July, ‘almost the last independent British military venture in the twentieth century, and amongst the most humiliating’ (Morgan 2001, 154). One of Lionel’s colleagues (Kurt Klappholz) recalled that he first backed Eden but afterwards changed his mind. Certainly he was glad to see Eden resign on 9 January 1957, telling Caroline on 24 February: ‘Behind the scenes, it becomes more and more clear that what happened is largely the doing of one hysterical man – giving his colleagues not more than a few minutes to make up their minds. . . . We are very lucky to have lost him.’ There were several items of good news for Lionel in 1956. He and Iris became grandparents when Richard’s first son William was born on 16 June. At the beginning of the year he became a director of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, invited by the chairman, Lord Waverley, at the suggestion of Garrett Drogheda. According to Drogheda (1978, 241–2), Waverley was upset that he had not thought of Lionel himself. As well as enjoying the

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monthly board meetings (and later its ballet and finance subcommittees) Lionel ‘spent a great many evenings learning the trade, so to speak’ (LCR to Baumol, 5 June 1956, Economists Correspondence January 1955-July 1956). He soon took friends with him: in January 1957, for instance, he invited the Jewkes to one of the first performances of Benjamin Britten’s ballet, The Prince of the Pagodas; later in the month he took Robertson to Die Meistersinger, and in April to Swan Lake, with Margot Fonteyn dancing. He took Lord Crawford to the first night of the celebrated Covent Garden production of Berlioz’s Les Troyens (the first complete performance of the full score, with Jon Vickers as Aeneas), and Stanley Dennison to The Magic Flute (with Joan Sutherland singing Pamina) in June (correspondence with Jewkes, Robertson and Dennison in Economists Correspondence August 1956-April 1958, with Crawford in General Correspondence April-September 1957, RP). Among the truly memorable productions he saw in the late 1950s was the Don Carlos produced and designed by Luchino Visconti, conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini and with an international cast including Jon Vickers, Boris Christoff and Tito Gobbi in the three main male roles (LCR to Peter Gellhorn, 29 May 1958, General Correspondence May-December 1958, RP). In February 1956 Lionel learned that one of his oldest friends, Sydney Caine, had agreed to succeed Alexander Carr-Saunders as the director of LSE on 1 January 1957. When Lionel first heard that Caine, then the first vice-chancellor of the University of Malaysia, was a possible candidate, he asked Edward Bridges and Frank Lee to write supporting letters to the LSE governors; Bridges encouraged Lionel to urge the School to make up its mind quickly as Caine was being considered for a government job. When Caine was approached, Lionel sent him a telegram urging him to accept (correspondence in General Correspondence January-July 1956, RP). Bridges himself, possibly at Lionel’s suggestion, joined the Court and the Standing Committee at the same time that Caine arrived (and became chairman six months later). Hence, when Lionel wrote to Caroline on 24 February 1957, he could tell her: ‘The public side of life goes quite satisfactorily. The Govt have now promised to rebuild the west wing of the N.G. & the School is settling down splendidly after the transition to a new Director . . . [who] is proving even better than I hoped. Private life more mixed. My galley proofs are now with the printer & I am making preparations for another book – a Principles of Economics, if I can bring it off. But this is a big job & I am always remembering now that I have only seven years to retirement – which will create many problems if I am still as active as I am now.’

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When Eden resigned, Harold Macmillan succeeded him. Lionel told his sister on 24 February that he thought Macmillan ‘may make quite a good P.M. But he has a tough job – partly because of the external [economic] difficulties . . . partly because of internal discontents – weight of taxation, rents etc which naturally redound to the benefit of his opponents although they would probably make things worse.’ Lionel’s friend Peter Thorneycroft became Chancellor of the Exchequer. At the National Gallery, the second postwar report having been issued in 1956, Lionel recommended to the Publications Committee that there should be ‘one more extraordinary report’. Because the first had focussed on fifteen years of history and finance and the second on the building and the Conservation Department, he thought the third should be a survey of the collection, drawing attention to deficiencies such as the seventeenth-century Italian and nineteenth-century French schools, as part of his campaign to persuade the Treasury to increase grants-in-aid (National Gallery Publications Committee 16 January 1957, NG26/99). When the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery were informed that the Treasury would not increase their grants for the coming financial year, their trustees decided to send a joint deputation to the new Chancellor. John Witt, Henry Moore and Lionel Robbins would represent the National Gallery; Lord Cottesloe, Sir Colin Anderson and Dennis Proctor the Tate. They decided not to mention the possibility of entrance fees (Tate Board 21 February 1957, TAM 72/30, Tate Archive; NG Board 14 February 1957). Lionel prepared their arguments for the meeting on 19 February. ‘May I suggest at once that we are well aware that what we have to do is not only to prove that absolutely speaking our requests have justification but also that comparatively they are so urgent that they warrant exceptional treatment.’ He first pointed out that in 1880 the Treasury’s annual grant to the National Gallery was £10,000; in 1956 the combined annual grant to the two galleries was £23,000; during the same period the cost of living had increased more than four times, the price of a masterpiece ten or twenty times. In this situation it was difficult to negotiate with owners: ‘If do buy with special grant as likely as not pay through the nose.’ These arguments provided a justification for an increase of, he suggested, £77,000. ‘But as I said earlier [we] must make out a case for special action now. Therefore wish to argue a particular anomaly – specially urgent to rectify – tangible gains associated with rectification.’ The anomaly was that in the 1880s the national income was only £1000 m while in the 1950s it was £15,000 m, so that the original grant to the National Gallery was 1/100,000th of national income, the current combined grant only 1/500,000th. ‘Surely this [is] not something which has been intended. . . . The thing has just happened in

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a fit of absence of mind.’ And rectification of this anomaly was urgent, for ‘[the] Days when we can make good gaps are numbered. Every year the masterpieces in private possession shrink. This true even for modern masters. And once private stock gone – no replenishment. If we still have second rate XIXth c[entury] collection in 10 years time we shall always be in that position.’ Finally, he produced another ‘economic’ argument, the attraction of London as a tourist centre: ‘Suppose increased annual expenditure meant every year extra 25,000 Americans spent one day extra spending 20$ a day’; this would mean an extra $500,000 on the current account of the balance of payments. However, he was ‘sorry to base our plea on this’; the ‘main basis’ of the plea was the ‘duty to ourselves & to posterity not to neglect this form of national wealth’ (Gallery Purchase Grants (Deputation 19.2.57), Art & Music, RP). The Chancellor was unmoved. Proctor told the Tate board on 21 February that he ‘intimated that he was in full agreement with all the arguments the deputation put forward but regretted that no increase in the purchase grant could be made this year’. Robbins and his fellow trustees continued their campaign less directly and more publicly. In April he dined with the Arts and Amenities group of Conservative MPs making the same numerical arguments to them as he had to Thorneycroft: they told him not to press the Chancellor too forcibly and that they would invite the Chancellor to dine and urge him to raise the annual grants to the desired £100,000 (NG Problems Arts & Amenities Group (Conservative) HC 10–4-57, Art & Music, RP; NG Board 11 April 1957). On 8 May he wrote to Hugh Dalton, who as Chancellor of the Exchequer had created the National Land Fund. He argued for an extension of the fund to allow it to purchase works of art for the nation, not just at the death of their owners but as they came on the market, and asked Dalton to put this idea to the Chancellor – which Dalton duly did. Thorneycroft, who was already well aware of Robbins’s ideas but who had recently decided to reduce the size of the fund, responded to Dalton on 24 May with a pertinent question: ‘Why, it would be asked, should such exceptional privileges be given in respect of pictures? We might well be asked that the housing of the arts should be tackled in this way, or the support for opera’ (NG26/92). On 13 June Robbins urged the peers on the National Gallery board to speak in a debate in the House of Lords on the finance of the arts. He agreed to contribute to a series of BBC radio talks on museums and galleries: when he did so he reiterated the arguments he had made to the Chancellor, some of which were broadcast (The taxpayer and the arts, 12 August, and The State and the Fine Arts, BBC Third Programme, 25 October 1957, Art & Music, RP). At the same time the director of the

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Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, Mary Woodall, took up his offer to address their Friends ‘about economic problems connected with works of art’, asking him to talk on ‘some such subject as the “Picture Market”’. She thought ‘people in an industrial city like this would like to have a talk on some aspect of the Art market and the values of works of art’ and that ‘it would create interest if something could be said about the question of the export of works of art and the machinery behind it’ (Woodall to Robbins, 16 August and 11 October 1957, General Correspondence October 1957-April 1958, RP). Lionel gave his talk, ‘Art and the State’, in March 1958 and published an expanded version in a collection of his essays (1963a, 53–72). In this paper he was ‘the first British economist of modern times to analyze the economic role of the state in support for the arts in financing public museums and galleries’ (Throsby 1994, 2). He began with the general question of the relation between art and the state: ‘Is the encouragement of the arts a proper function for political bodies? Is such encouragement compatible with liberal notions of the duties of the state?’ According to his notes (Art & the State, Miscellaneous Articles & Lectures, RP), when the date had been fixed he had decided to ‘refresh memory of views of Bloomsburies from whom as young man learned so much – [Clive] Bell & [Roger] Fry’ and had been ‘Interested to find great scepticism & reserve’ – which he did not share. As he put in the published essay, their ‘aggressively laissez-faire attitude . . . seems to me to pour out the baby with the bathwater [for] the implication that the role of the state in relation to art is necessarily negative seems to be untrue, both historically and in reason’. Historically there were plenty of examples to the contrary: as he put it in his notes, ‘Architecture notorious. Painting & sculpture. Church. State (Venice). Kings & Despots. Charles V & Medici. Just not true that good products [are] only response to private demand in sense that much Dutch & XIX French is. Same with music. Church music. Opera. Wagner.’ Analytically Bell and Fry were equally unconvincing: for a start the state had to be housed in often large buildings. ‘Is it really to be argued that all this must be catered for solely in terms of protection from the weather and the provision of proper acoustics? Why should public buildings be the only buildings to be unadorned?’ As a (philosophical) liberal he did not think such ‘a self-denying ordinance’ was needed ‘as a sort of penance against the dangers of undue paternalism’. His answer to the ‘wider question’ – ‘Beyond what is involved by the needs of the apparatus of government, is there not a more general case for public patronage of the arts, some general encouragement of high excellence in culture[?]’ – was the one to be expected of the author of the Theory of

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Economic Policy (1952): ‘unhesitatingly yes . . . on the same ground as I would give support to the maintenance of sources of high excellence in learning and pure science, Archeology, Pure Mathematics, Astronomy, for instance – subjects of no special relevance to practical affairs as such, but which impart quality and meaning to life on this planet by reason of their mere existence.’ If the arts are like – or part of – education in conferring collective benefits to society as a whole as well as private benefits to individual consumers, the market cannot be relied upon to produce the optimum level of the product: ‘one of the main arguments for the educational function [of the state] in general and for these forms in particular is just this, that the benefit is not merely discriminate, and that the positive effects of the fostering of art and learning and the preservation of culture are not restricted to those immediately prepared to pay cash but diffuse themselves to the benefit of much wider sections of the community in much the same way as the benefits of the apparatus of public hygiene or of a well-planned urban landscape.’ The state should not have a monopoly but ‘for the state to be one among a number of sources of supply, its special duty to preserve and, by example, to forward the highest possible standards . . . [would be] in full accordance with the best tradition of the liberal outlook.’ The benefits included both the pleasure of contemplating works of art and the inspiration of old masters to the creation of new works; in his notes for his talk he added increased future benefits through taste formation: ‘In part can be regarded in modern setting as infant industry on the consumption side. Demand rising will pay later on when taste created. This [has] some application to Ballet. Twenty years ago prediction of present audiences for Ballet would have been regarded as ridiculous.’ As he emphasized, this market failure argument is a standard one for the provision of public goods in an otherwise free-market economy. Given his love of the arts it has been criticized as something of a smokescreen. His definition of economics had been deliberately intended to include the arts as one of the ends competing for scarce resources (see Chapter 6). As his equally art-loving colleague Alan Peacock wrote (1969, 330), ‘One cannot make a case on grounds of externality in absolute terms alone, however much one shares the value judgements of its proponents.’ But Robbins also emphasized that the allocation of resources should depend on a democratic political process. As he had pointed out in his LSE lectures on the theory of economic policy (see Chapter 18 and Howson 2005, 621–2), economists could help to improve the process by encouraging civil servants and their masters to consider the consequences of alternative levels of provision of

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public goods and alternative uses of government revenue. It was always necessary to make a case for specific expenditure by government on the arts in light of the other uses to which the money could be put, and such a case should include reasons why this expenditure was more urgent than others. In the 1950s there was ‘a further raison d’etre’ for government support of public galleries in Britain: the breaking up of large estates by death duties and the resulting export of works of art previously in private hands. If the state did not wish Britain to lose ‘a stock of treasures which was once the envy and admiration of the world’, it would have to back its desire with hard cash, and enough of it to cope with rising prices in the international art market. As in his NACF address he explained the reasons for these prices: the diminished supply of old – and not so old – masters; increased demand for works of art as a result of rising real incomes in the Western world; general price inflation; and the use of art as a hedge against inflation. He also pointed out as he had to the Chancellor the drastic fall in the National Gallery’s grant in real terms since the 1880s. This time he blamed neither the senior civil servants, who he knew were ‘at least as sensitive and cultivated as their critics’, nor MPs, who he had previously thought might be to blame: ‘the responsibility for the present disgraceful state of affairs rests fairly and squarely with ministers’. Would ministers be justified in providing more money for museums and galleries at a time of inflationary pressure? It was true that there was too much spending in the aggregate but ‘the necessity to curb spending in general does not in the least imply a necessity to apply the curb equally in all directions. In private finance, if a man has been overspending on orgies, so that his total expenditure has to be reduced, that does not mean that he should not increase his expenditure on his eyes and his teeth, if his spending on these in the past has been deficient; it only means that there have to be further balancing cuts elsewhere.’ He noted that ‘we pay up to three hundred million pounds in subsidies to various branches of agriculture, to say nothing of other subventions to high-cost enterprise at home and dubious connections abroad. Can it seriously be argued that, if such subsidies were to be halved, we could not spare a million or two from the savings for the galleries and the arts generally?’ In the summer of 1957 the UK suffered another major foreign exchange crisis. Unlike the run on the pound during the Suez crisis at the end of 1956, the crisis of August and September 1957 ‘blew up out of a blue sky’, its proximate cause a wave of currency speculation set off by a de facto devaluation of the French franc and rumours of a revaluation of the German

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mark (Dow 1964, 96–100). In the UK concern about persistent inflation was growing, but was increasingly blamed on trade union demands for higher wages – a view Lionel did not share. He pointed out, for instance in the Financial Times on 28 August (1957b), that the evidence (such as earnings rising faster than wage rates) did not support the cost-push hypothesis. While the effects of demand inflation and wage inflation were the same, they had different implications for policy. ‘If the root of the trouble lies on the expenditure side then the remedy is clearly in the hands of the Government. In one way or another, demand must be restrained either by the diminution of public spending or by checks of one kind or another on private consumption or investment, or by a combination of both. But if things began on the cost side, then the remedy may be more difficult.’ Thorneycroft tried to tackle the problem from both sides. In April he set up the Committee on the Working on the Monetary System under Lord Radcliffe, in July the Council on Prices, Productivity and Incomes (COPPI), a three member body under the judge Lord Cohen. The idea of the Radcliffe Committee had been around for some time (Cairncross ed 1991, 99). Since its ‘revival’ in 1951–2 monetary policy had been assigned the task of maintaining external balance, but the ‘packages’ of monetary measures combining Bank Rate changes with requests to banks to restrict their lending had not been very effective. Treasury officials, especially in the Economic Section (in the Treasury since 1953), were disillusioned with the Bank’s claims for the efficacy of monetary policy. The Bank did not want an enquiry, but in February 1957 its Governor (Cobbold) proposed Radcliffe for the chair and a membership including two economists Richard Sayers and Alec Cairncross. When Roger Makins reported this to the Chancellor on 7 February, Thorneycroft wanted Robbins. Cobbold was not keen, according to Makins on 22 February (T233/1686, TNA): ‘As regards the economists, he regards it as essential that Mr Sayers should be a member as he is the foremost authority in the country on the subject of monetary policy. He has no objection to Lionel Robbins, but he is rather “emeritus” and the Governor doubts whether he will make a major contribution. There is also the point that he, like Sayers, comes from the London School of Economics. If the Chancellor is set on having him, he hopes that Professor Cairncross might still be kept as a member . . . since he regards him as the best foil to Sayers.’ The Prime Minister also wanted Robbins for the monetary committee but he had offered him the chair of a Royal Commission on the Pay of Doctors and Dentists. When Lionel turned that down, Thorneycroft ‘press[ed] for Robbins . . . [now that] he is available after all’ (Mynors, Talk with Roger Makins, 8 March 1957, G3/20, BOE). Although the Treasury records do not reveal it, Robbins may have been informally

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approached, since he commented to Macmillan in July that he had already declined ‘two very splendid offers from you’ in the last six months. As it was, Radcliffe, having agreed to serve, told Makins on 4 April that he wanted only two economists, preferably Sayers and Cairncross (Record of Conversation, T233/1686). Lionel may have been asked to be one of the three ‘wise men’ of COPPI. Robert Hall recorded (Cairncross ed 1991, 119) that when Lord Justice Morris declined to take the chair, ‘The Chancellor pressed us very hard to put Lionel Robbins as Chairman but I felt strongly that the whole left wing of the country would regard this as the choice of a notorious reactionary to do the work of a Tory Government. It is not true, as Lionel would be a very good Chairman . . . but it would be said.’ However, on 15 July Lionel wrote to Macmillan: ‘I have now had time to read the notes on the duties of the post which you offered me on Wednesday and to reflect a little on their implications. . . . But after pondering very carefully I am clear that I ought not to take it.’ He explained that ‘it would involve also the abandonment of the literary and scientific ambitions of years and indeed the majority of my present commitments.’ Although he had ‘no desire at all to be merely a secluded academic making no contribution to the conduct of affairs’, this particular job would mean ‘more or less ceasing to be academic at all – for at my age, unless one is doing new work all the time one tends to become stale and no help to one’s younger colleagues’. Macmillan replied on 16 July that he had ‘fondly hoped’ Robbins could combine his academic work with the appointment, but ‘if it is not possible, then I have no doubt at all which you are right to prefer. You know, I think, how much I value all the work, both academic and public, that you are now doing’ (Letters from Ministers & Civil Servants about Offices etc, RP). At the beginning of September 1957 Lionel and Iris set off by train for a three-week holiday in Austria. Lionel wrote to his son from there on Saturday 7 September. Mayrhofen is a large village, well organized for tourism, situated at the southern end of the Zillertal – a large fertile valley leading down from the Lienz basin into the heart of the Austrian Alps – and at the northern junction of no less than four valleys or gorges cutting right into the uplands. . . . It is not very high only about 2000 ft. But the almost infinite variety of walks & excursions enable one to get considerably higher if one wishes. All in all it is very well suited for the likes of us. If we are lazy we can sit about in the garden of the Gasthof, a most agreable orchard, or potter about the village & the numerous short walks around. If we want normal exercise there are plenty of outings which take half a day either before lunch or after. While if we are feeling strenuous, there are enough long trips to last a month without much repetition of terrain.

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They did not enjoy the walks for long. Three days later, ‘out for a tramp’, they came back to find a message to telephone Thorneycroft, who wanted Lionel to return to London at once. According to Iris, who had never been in an aircraft before, they were flown home from Innsbruck in a ‘tiny aeroplane’ which made her feel ill, and ‘arrived to VIP treatment’. Thorneycroft later sent her flowers with thanks and apologies (card in Articles & Letters on Public Affairs, RP). He asked Lionel to read a draft Cabinet paper overnight and to come and see him the next morning (Thorneycroft to LCR, 10 September 1957, Letters from Ministers & Civil Servants about Offices etc, RP). Thorneycroft’s paper was a draft statement of the crisis measures he wished to announce before attending the IMF annual meetings. He had, according to Hall (Cairncross ed 1991, 124), returned from holiday at the end of August with ‘increased . . . conviction that it is too much money which is at the root of all our troubles’ and wanted to restrict bank lending on the one hand and to cut public expenditure on the other – as he then told Humphrey Mynors, Deputy Governor of the Bank (the Governor was on holiday), and the chairman and deputy chairman of the Committee of London Clearing Bankers on 9 September. He saw the other members of the Committee of London Clearing Bankers on the afternoon of Wednesday 11 September (by which time he had seen Lionel) and repeated that it was ‘his intention to make a public statement on the measures to limit the supply of money by the Government and the banks, with a decision that the pound would be left at $2.80, before he left for Washington on 20 September’.13 Thorneycroft had not been put off by his officials’ doubts that he could get the economy measures through Cabinet or by the bankers’ claim that they could not be compelled to limit their lending to a specific figure but only ‘requested’ to be restrictive as they had been several times since 1947 by Cripps, Gaitskell, Butler, Macmillan and (in March 1957) Thorneycroft (Howson 2004b, 145–8). Fforde (1992, 670) noted: ‘The new Chancellor was unlike Macmillan or Butler. Intellectual subtlety and persuasive charm were not his style. He preferred clarity, simplicity and the issue of clear instructions rather than carefully phrased requests. . . . Nor did the record of [recent monetary policy] predispose him to rely only on Treasury economists for professional advice.’ While it is clear Thorneycroft’s views on the need to control the money supply reflected, or at least had been reinforced by, Lionel’s before the Robbinses went to Austria, it is not known what Lionel said about the 13

Note of a meeting held at the Treasury on Monday, 9th September 1957, at 11.45 a.m., and Note of a meeting held in the Chancellor’s room at 3 p.m., Wednesday, 11th September, G1/75, BOE.

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draft Cabinet paper. We do know he shared Thorneycroft’s (and Hall’s) disinclination to believe the Bank line that monetary control could not be improved. On Friday 13 September Thorneycroft told Mynors (Deputy Governor’s Diary August-September 1957, G3/24, BOE) that he ‘cannot wait for [the] Radcliffe [Committee] to report and has sent for Lionel Robbins. He proposes an urgent informal working party under the Economic Secretary [Nigel Birch], with Lionel Robbins and possibly another outsider e.g. Sayers; Compton [of the Treasury] and Hall and somebody from the Bank: to do a “repair job” and come up with what legislation would be necessary if “the control of the supply of money” cannot be otherwise secured.’ Thorneycroft mentioned Bank Rate, which the Bank was keen to raise, and ‘[gave] the impression of being prepared to think of 6 [per cent], but no higher.’ Mynors then learned that Thorneycroft had fetched Lionel home from Austria and that Thorneycroft’s private secretary had warned him that ‘anything like a formal committee, with Radcliffe sitting, might lead to the resignation of the latter’, hence the informal Treasury working party. The Governor returned from leave on Sunday 15 September and recommended an increase in Bank Rate to 7 per cent – the highest for thirty-six years. Thorneycroft insisted that if it took place it should be at the same time he made his own statement on Thursday (19 September). By Wednesday Cobbold persuaded him to allow the move to 7 per cent and to water down the passage in his statement on the supply of money and bank advances to call for the bankers’ ‘cooperation’ as usual (Fforde 1992, 683–6). As for the Treasury working party, he commented in a note (G1/78, BOE) that Makins ‘likes it no better than we do, but is convinced we shall have to go through with it & try & steer it to a pigeon-hole’. The Working Group on Credit Control first met that Thursday. Its instructions were: ‘To consider in the context of the Chancellor’s statement . . . what steps are required to get effective control of the credit base.’ The Treasury produced a short note of the pros and cons, especially the latter, of various possible ‘devices’ (such as requiring banks to hold a fixed ratio of cash to deposits) to control bank lending. The Bank produced an even shorter note to the effect that given the Chancellor’s statement there was no need to make any further attempt to restrict credit, and instead the government should be trying to limit its short-term borrowing from the banks.14 But, according to Fforde (1992, 688–9), who attended the 14

Chancellor to Economic Secretary, Monetary policy, 17 September 1957, Working Group on Credit Control, Note of a meeting held in Economic Secretary’s Room, Treasury Chambers, at 4 p.m. on 19th September 1957, Credit Control, 19 September 1957, T233/2122; Paper taken by the Deputy Governor and Mr Fforde to the meeting in the Economic Secretary’s Room at H.M.T. on 19th September 1957, G1/78, BOE.

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meetings, ‘despite . . . diversionary tactics, the Bank could not stop the group from devoting almost all its time to alternative methods of controlling the banks, usable statutory powers being assumed throughout.’ The group agreed to concentrate on three possible methods: directions to the banks as to the level of their advances, variable liquidity ratios and an investment ratio. Hall (Cairncross ed 1991, 127) was ‘delighted’: ‘I have always felt that it was ridiculous that we had so little power, so Lionel and I collaborated – he is of course very good in these practical problems and he came out very strong in favour of a prescribed liquidity ratio plus something like TDRs [Treasury Deposit Receipts] to keep down the banks’ supply of Treasury Bills.’ For the next meeting Lionel prepared a paper as long as the Treasury’s paper, which concentrated on the merits and demerits of the three methods, and much longer than the Bank’s contribution, a largely factual account by Fforde of the variations in the actual liquidity ratios of the clearing banks.15 He proposed a particular way of dealing with the practical problem of monetary control in postwar Britain. As he saw it, the objective was to find an effective monetary instrument for combatting inflation in a situation in which wartime financial policy had left the banks holding a large amount of short-term government debt, mainly Treasury bills, so that they could replenish their cash reserves in a matter of weeks – and hence maintain their lending because they adhered voluntarily to a 8 per cent cash reserve ratio – by not replacing Treasury bills as they matured. The permanent solution to this wartime legacy was obviously to replace the short-term bills with longer-term bonds. Robbins did not think the increased interest cost of funding was the obstacle he had thought it was at the end of the war when it had looked as though interest rates would fall after the postwar transitional period. But the present time, when investors were switching out of gilt-edged securities in search of higher nominal yields, was singularly unpropitious for funding. He suggested the government might consider issuing index-linked bonds, which unlike conventional fixed-interest bonds would maintain their returns in inflationary times. On the first of the three methods of controlling bank lending left for consideration at the end of the working party’s first meeting, ‘the direct limitation of advances’, he found the bankers’ objection that it could not be done ‘unimpressive’: after all it had been done in the past (during the war). But if the desired effect of funding was to control bank lending by reducing 15

LCR, Notes on the more general aspects of the exercise, 25 September 1957, T233/2121, G1/78 and Articles & Letters on Public Affairs, RP; Downie, Control of Credit, T233/2122; Fforde, The liquidity ratio and the floating debt, 25 September 1957, G1/78, BOE.

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banks’ liquid assets, why not seek directly to influence lending policy by varying a prescribed liquidity ratio (the ratio of the banks’ holdings of cash, Treasury bills, etc to their deposits)? The objection that banks could dispose of their holdings of longer-term government bonds was not convincing, because if they sold securities to the nonbank public that would reduce bank deposits, just what was required, and if it raised long-term interest rates that too was desirable. ‘Whatever we may think of the effect on aggregate demand of changes in short-term rates, the influence of long-term rates on [capital] investment is most certainly not to be denied. I would say that the effect on active investment of an upward movement of long-term rates . . . is as salutary for our purposes as direct limitation of advances.’ A prescribed investment ratio was therefore redundant. To the more serious technical objections, the practical difficulties of varying a liquidity ratio, he had a good answer, namely the revival of the wartime expedient of Treasury Deposit Receipts, special deposits of six months’ maturity which the banks were required to make in specified amounts each week in addition to whatever government debt they held. (The wartime intention was to fill any shortfall in government borrowing but it also mopped up the excess liquidity of the banking system.) A concluding reflection was that since the monetary measures fell more heavily on investment than on consumption, the government might consider introducing the countercyclical variations of social insurance contributions proposed in the 1944 Employment Policy white paper and included in the Labour government’s social security legislation in 1946 but still not implemented. Hall thought Lionel’s idea of funding by indexed bonds ‘a very ingenious one’ but claimed it needed further thought. On the three methods of credit control he did not think it mattered much which was chosen as long as one was chosen, and therefore supported Lionel at the second meeting of the working party. The draft report, discussed at a third meeting on 3 October, considered two possibilities: a ceiling on bank advances, which was ‘a continuation by compulsion of the policy we are now pursuing through co-operation’, and Lionel’s proposal, with TDRs now called ‘stabilisation bills’, and came down in favour of the latter. As Birch told Thorneycroft, the report ‘represent[ed] the agreed views of the Treasury representatives and Professor Robbins’, since the Bank wished to reserve its position.16 16

Hall to Padmore, Credit Control, 27 September 1957, Working Group on Credit Control, Note of a meeting held in Sir Thomas Padmore’s Room, Treasury Chambers, at 3 p.m. on 27th September 1957, Working Group on Credit Control, Note of a meeting held in the Economic Secretary’s room, Treasury Chambers, at 2.30 p.m. on 3rd October 1957, Birch to Chancellor, 7 October 1957, T233/2122.

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Birch warned Thorneycroft that ‘it would be worth your while to fire a warning shot across the Governor’s bows. I think the Bank of England would prefer the scheme I recommend to any other scheme, but they have made it perfectly clear that their own preference is for doing nothing.’ Cobbold told Thorneycroft on 9 October that he did not believe the authorities had lost control of the money supply. Thorneycroft responded by asking for a study of the Robbins scheme, to which Cobbold agreed on 15 October (T233/2122). Padmore therefore told Lionel that day (Letters from Ministers & Civil Servants about Offices etc, RP) that ‘The Chancellor . . . has decided that for the moment he intends to set on one side the matters of policy which arise and any question of taking a decision’ on the working group report while the Treasury and the Bank studied the ‘practical and technical questions’ involved. Lionel ruefully noted on his paper: ‘Its deliberations had no influence on the measures adopted which had been decided upon before it was constituted & – I believe as a result of Bank of England pressure – wound up before anything was finally agreed upon.’ But Robbins also noted: ‘Summer 58. The main proposal has however now been adopted. Apparently the B. of E. took it up after all.’ As Fforde (1992, 690–1) explained, the Governor, realizing the Bank could not keep on stonewalling every time the Chancellor asked for some more effective monetary policy, decided it might be better to adopt the Robbins plan or a variant of it, if only to prevent the government trying something worse from the Bank’s point of view. ‘Why not offer them [the government] the kind of new instrument favoured by Professor Robbins, suitably adapted and to be agreed voluntarily between the Bank and the banks? . . . why not pre-empt both the Government and the [Radcliffe] Committee by constructing a Bank version of the scheme favoured by Robbins and selling it to both? This is what the Governor now began to do,’ suggesting that his officials take as their starting point a paper on alternative techniques of monetary control the Bank was preparing to submit to the Radcliffe Committee. When the paper was completed in November, it described the sort of scheme put forward by Robbins as the least objectionable of the alternative techniques. The Bank and the Treasury then developed a new ‘Special Deposits’ scheme, whereby the Bank could call from the banks special interest-bearing deposits, which it would onlend to the Treasury, and announced the scheme on 3 July 1958, without waiting for Radcliffe to report. The first calls for special deposits were made in April and June 1960 (Dow 1964, 240–2). That Thorneycroft had consulted Robbins came out during the Bank Rate Tribunal set up in November 1957 to investigate alleged leaks before the September Bank Rate rise (ibid., 100–2). Lionel was already upset when

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he heard that Harold Wilson in the House of Commons on 29 October had made some reference to the Chancellor receiving advice from ‘extreme laissez-faire economists – economic Rasputins, I am told’. He wrote to Robert Hall on 31 October (Economists Correspondence August 1956-April 1958, RP), telling him that he had told only ‘Paish, Sayers and Sydney Caine, whom you yourself authorised me to speak to’ about his recent visits to the Treasury, for ‘I should not be cheerful . . . if there were any thought in the Treasury that I had lost the good habits of discretion that I learnt when I was a public servant.’ Hall reassured him on 5 November: ‘we know you too well for that’ (Letters from Ministers & Civil Servants re Offices etc, RP). Lionel wrote an article for Lloyds Bank Review (1958f), telling Gottfried Haberler on 15 May 1958 (Economists Correspondence May 1958-December 1959, RP) that it was ‘more or less dragged out of me by the crudities of the cheaper press which, having formed the erroneous notion that I was continously associated with the financial policy of the present Government, proceeded to attribute to me all sorts of thoughts and intentions about recent events which I never entertained’. In it he repeated many points he had made to the Treasury working party. He also commented on the measures Thorneycroft had taken in September. What had to be done was ‘the course which was actually adopted: a clear statement that the rate of exchange was not to be changed, backed up by the announcement of measures which should prove unmistakably to the world at large that the inflation was not to be allowed to continue’. He found ‘the surprising thing about [the Bank Rate rise] . . . not that it happened but rather that so many people were surprised that it happened’, for it was the obvious step to take. The limitation of advances agreed with the banks was also a useful short-term measure but not as a long-term one to fight inflation. Here, given the amount of government debt held by the banks he again commended the idea of a fixed liquidity ratio plus a revival of TDRs as superior to variable liquidity ratios. He said little on the expenditure ‘cuts’ other than that they were not reductions but standstills in government spending: ‘This is so political a matter it is not easy to say much about it that is not right outside the sphere of economics in any sense whatever.’ In January 1958 Thorneycroft and his two junior ministers (Birch and Enoch Powell) resigned over his failure to persuade his Cabinet colleagues to allow stronger deflationary measures. In the circumstances of the economic crisis he had been unable to increase the annual grants to the National and Tate galleries. His successor, Derick Heathcoat Amory, like Thorneycroft a personal friend, made the same point to Lionel as chairman of the National

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Gallery on 10 February. Lionel told him on 20 February that the trustees were ‘naturally disappointed’ but ‘we comforted ourselves a little with your recognition that in principle the grant is inadequate’. It was after all, he told Denis Mahon, recently appointed a trustee, on 21 February, ‘a very unusual thing’ for the Chancellor to write to a gallery; he also reminded him of the strenuous efforts that Sir Alexander Johnston and his subordinates had been making on behalf of the gallery (NG26/93). Lionel told Lewis Croome on 31 March (General Correspondence October 1957-April 1958, RP) that he was ‘pretty sure that if it had not been for the financial crisis we should have got quite a substantial rise [in the annual grant]. We have been more or less told so at a high level. Hence the immediate problem is to tide things over until this financial crisis is passed.’ The trustees took this opportunity to hold one of their periodic considerations of admission charges (NG Board 13 February and 13 March). The new Financial Secretary, John Simon, had invited Robbins to an interview, in the course of which he had asked if the trustees had ever considered an entrance fee: Robbins had replied they were afraid it would be used as an argument against increasing the grant, and Simon had said it would not be. As usual the trustees differed: Mahon was in favour but the majority were against, either fearing it would militate against an increased grant or not raise much revenue or both. Robbins told Mahon on 25 February (NG26/93) before the meeting that he had ‘always been rather favourable’ to the idea of an entrance fee and that ‘to introduce it at this juncture might well draw attention to the position’. Thorneycroft had done one good turn for the National Gallery. The Government of Canada had been planning to build an office block for its High Commission on the Hampton site. When the British government learned the Canadians might not after all build there, Thorneycroft wrote privately to Lionel on 12 December 1957 (NG26/93) that he and the Minister of Works (now Hugh Molson) had considered the possibility of buying it for future extension of the National Gallery but it would be ‘hideously expensive’ and they had decided against, adding ‘I wanted to let you know of this development in case you saw or heard any announcement about it and to assure you that we had not reached our decision without careful thought.’ In the same letter he confirmed that the Treasury was giving £12,000 for the purchase of Nicholas Poussin, Adoration of the Shepherds, for which the Reviewing Committee had recommended retention in the UK and a special grant. Lionel replied on 13 December (NG26/93) that the latter news had caused ‘great gratification’ to the trustees and ‘I think when you see the picture you will feel that it was certainly worth saving from export. . . . It has

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a general appeal which the works of that austere classicist seldom have.’ But on the bad news, ‘I am tempted to ask whether the possibility has occurred to the authorities of the Ministry of Works of acquiring this site and utilizing it for buildings which, although providing some return on the money, were not of so solid a nature as to be an obstacle to re-development . . . [for the gallery later]’. When a report that the Canadian government would not build on the site appeared in the Manchester Guardian, Robbins told the trustees on 9 January 1958 that he ‘was in a position to confirm this’. He was authorized to write to the Minister of Works on 5 February stating the gallery claim to the site, including the possibility that it could be used for a new building for the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery could expand into the National Portrait Gallery building. The ‘strictly confidential’ reply on 11 February told him the Canadians would not make a final decision until their general election was over (NG26/93). In May, however, Sir Edward Muir (Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Works) telephoned Robbins to let him know that his minister and the new Chancellor had again decided not to buy the site. Before Robbins could report this to the National Gallery board, a report appeared in The Times that the Government of Canada was to dispose of the site. He wrote immediately to the editor without consulting the board. His letter of 27 May, which stressed the ‘great opportunity’ and the ‘great danger’ presented by the Canadian decision, has been credited with generating the necessary public pressure to induce the British government to acquire the site, which it did in November (Amery 1991, 38–9). Certainly he encouraged everyone he could to add their voice to the outcry: his fellow trustees, the chairman of the Arts and Amenities group of Conservative MPs, to whom he also gave an informal talk and who sent a deputation to the Chancellor (LCR to Sir Hamilton Kerr, 4 and 24 June, Kerr to LCR, 25 June 1958, NG26/93), other MPs of his acquaintance and so on. When the site had been bought Lionel thought the National Gallery could not agitate for its immediate development, although he personally would have liked to see the erection of a building which could be leased for the time being and later occupied by the NPG. Although he and Hendy discussed this informally with the Minister of Works early in 1959, they and the trustees kept aloof from the architectural competition launched by the Sunday Times (NG Board 11 December 1958 and 8 January 1959; Amery 1991, 40–2). In 1961 another Chancellor was persuaded to allow the site to be let only on a temporary basis (see Chapter 25). As chairman of the National Gallery Robbins was particularly active in tackling the problem of the Lane Bequest. The Dublin Municipal Gallery of

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Modern Art founded by Sir Hugh Lane had opened in 1908 in temporary premises, displaying his collection of 300 items. He donated his British and Irish paintings and drawings but would give his thirty-nine continental pictures only on condition that the City of Dublin provide a permanent gallery within a few years. As it had not done so he lent the thirty-nine paintings to the National Gallery in London in September 1913. When he went down with the Lusitania in May 1915 he left both a will, in which the continental pictures were bequeathed to the National Gallery, and an unwitnessed signed codicil leaving them to Dublin on condition that the City provide a suitable building to display them within five years of his death. The bitter controversy remaining was repeatedly stirred by supporters of the Irish claim to the paintings, from Lane’s aunt Lady Gregory and her friend the poet W.B. Yeats onwards. The National Gallery, the legal owner, offered to lend them to Dublin but had been rebuffed. In 1953 Lord Moyne took the opportunity of the National Art Collections bill to argue the pictures should be returned to Dublin; Lionel’s former student Lord Pakenham supported him. In the Commons a Labour MP, E.L. Mallalieu, proposed action should be taken to make Lane’s codicil valid (Bodkin 1958, 19–22, 31–44, 85–91). When Mallalieu raised this again in 1956, Lionel drew it to the trustees’ attention on 10 May, commenting that he ‘did not think that the Government was likely to accept the motion but the position was not without anxiety’. The Duke of Wellington thought there was ‘justification for making a compromise’, either by letting the National Gallery of Ireland have the pictures for half of each year on loan or by handing over half the collection. Witt supported Wellington in that he pointed out that the Gallery was ‘placed in a vulnerable position’ through not exhibiting many of the pictures. Hendy replied that he was intending to hang more later. Hendy also said it would only be possible to give the Lane pictures to Ireland if the National Gallery received an ‘enormous’ special grant for purchases to replace them. Bracken raised the dangerous precedents that would be set by making concessions to Ireland. On this occasion further dispute was headed off by agreeing the keeper should prepare ‘a dossier of relevant information’. At the next meeting, on 14 June, when the board had received a letter from Mallalieu advocating a loan, Lionel pointed out that the trustees had offered a loan in the past and that ‘if someone more important than Mr. Mallalieu were to approach the Government for a loan, the Trustees would have to make up their minds whether or not they were ready to implement their undertaking.’ A month later Moyne wrote to the trustees of both the National Gallery and the Tate. Lionel would have liked his trustees to reply that they had not yet received

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any official request for a loan which they could consider on its merits, but they would agree on 12 July only to a provisional reply, to be agreed with the Tate trustees, that they could not enter into discussions with private individuals. He proposed a full discussion at the October meeting. Lionel explained to the Tate Gallery board on 19 July (TAM72/29): Broadly speaking, the attitude of the National Gallery Board was as follows: they were quite clear as regards the legal position; as regards the alleged moral obligation of the British Government he thought they were clear that there was no such obligation. From 1916 onwards the National Gallery had offered to lend the pictures to Ireland and this offer had been renewed in 1926 and in the early ’30s. The Irish had refused all such offers and the National Gallery Board thought that these should not be renewed now. If the Irish were to ask for the temporary loan of some of the Lane pictures Professor Robbins was not quite sure what his Board’s feeling would be, now that the collection had been built up round Lane’s pictures at the National Gallery.

Lionel had to make up his own mind on the Lane problem. On 23 July he told Crawford (NG26/92) he thought that because they had offered a loan in the past, if they were now officially asked for one (not a permanent one for that would in effect be altering the will but something like Wellington had suggested), ‘it might be difficult to refuse. Perhaps we could still refuse on the ground that these earlier offers had been turned down and that circumstances had now changed. . . . [But] this would be generally thought to be a hard attitude and I should myself find it not altogether in accord with the general principles of Christian charity – though I admit that the extent to which these are incumbent when one is managing trust property is a very open question.’ By October Witt had been talking to Pakenham, his contemporary at New College, and Pakenham had written, with the encouragement of the Taoiseach John Costello, to Lionel suggesting a meeting (Witt to LCR, 13 September 1956, NG26/94; NG Board 11 October). The board agreed that Lionel should meet Pakenham ‘in an entirely private capacity’ and that Wellington should show Moyne some of the evidence on Lane’s intentions from Charles Aitken, D.S. McColl, Sir Robert Witt and Sir Joseph Duveen. Their affidavits sworn in 1919 implied, Lionel argued in a memorandum he proposed to send to the Treasury, that Lane had not reached a final decision about the pictures in 1915 and there was therefore no case to alter his will by legislation (LCR, The National Gallery, Resolution and reasoned statement concerning the Lane Bequest, October 1956, NG26/92). When Lionel saw Pakenham he told him of these affidavits and that before he saw them himself, ‘he had been prepared to find a strong

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case against the English attitude.’ Wellington also reported at the 8 November board meeting that he had suggested to Moyne ‘in a purely personal capacity . . . that the Director of the National Gallery and the Director of the Municipal Gallery, Dublin, should meet and choose pictures from the Lane bequest one and one about for exhibition in their respective galleries, and that after, say, five years the lots would be exchanged. He had reason to think that this would satisfy the Irish.’ Lionel supported Wellington, asking him to prepare a memorandum for the next board meeting on 13 December. But at that meeting, according to Wellington the next day, ‘The only member of the Board who even considered the scheme was Witt. . . . The Director became positively hysterical and Bracken blustering and incomprehending . . . ’ Lionel responded on 18 December that Wellington was being a little unfair: ‘Coldstream, Witt and I all spoke in favour of exploring the possibilities opened up by your proposal and I suspect that if it had come to a vote we should have been almost equally divided’ (NG26/94). According to the minutes, Witt had suggested the director of the National Gallery make the division of the pictures, Ford had ‘expressed alarm’ at the thought of the pictures going backwards and forwards between London and Dublin, Bracken and Crawford ‘considered the plan a mistake . . . [as it would be] the thin edge of the wedge’ and Hendy was ‘strongly against . . . because any loan under present circumstances would be tantamount to a gift.’ Robbins, who admired Wellington’s courage and generosity in taking the initiative and wished the board would pursue it, would have liked the board to have replied more fully to Mallalieu and Moyne, and agreed with Wellington that Pakenham also deserved a proper reply, which he could not give in informal conversations. As present he could talk to Pakenham ‘only in my private capacity and as a friend’ and not on behalf of the trustees, although Pakenham was ‘certainly entitled to draw the conclusion that these are the views which I should urge upon my colleagues in any formal discussion of this matter’ (LCR to Pakenham, The Lane Pictures, 8 March 1957, NG26/94). Pakenham took it upon himself to mediate between his two countries. When he saw the Prime Minister in August he told him that, as Wellington and Robbins already knew, the Irish government was now prepared to consider a loan and that he wanted to discuss it with Robbins. Macmillan told Robbins on 7 August that he had responded that he would be pleased with an agreement between the two galleries but he would not be prepared to introduce legislation to overturn Lane’s will; he had ‘no doubt you are willing to see Lord Pakenham, who is very agreeable’. Lionel met Pakenham on 16 August, shortly before his truncated trip to Austria, warning Macmillan on

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13 August of the ‘very great difficulties’ of the proposed loan for the trustees and Pakenham on 14 August that the trustees would not meet until October (NG26/94). As Robbins (1971a, 257) remarked, ‘This was a problem on which each school of thought felt deeply. We argued it anxiously month after month at regular and at extraordinary meetings.’ After the first of the heated discussions Lionel wrote Pakenham a ‘strictly private line’ on 14 October 1957 (NG26/94) to warn him that he would have to wait a long time for a response from the trustees: ‘there proved to be all sorts of matters, legal and historical, on which various members of the Board declared that they must have information’; they had set up a subcommittee to look into these but it had to include the long serving Crawford who was not often in London. It took six months for them to approach a consensus. Most of the arguments on both sides had been made already. According to the draft minutes of the 10 October meeting which were subsequently toned down (NG26/86), Robbins first reported that Pakenham had said he was empowered to approach the gallery on behalf of the Irish government which would honour any agreement made with the trustees. He continued: The Chairman thought it was always wrong to tamper with legal ownership, but he personally was influenced by the fact that previous Trustees, while holding fast by legal ownership, were yet sufficiently impressed by the conflict of evidence to feel justified in making some arrangement as regards a loan to Dublin. The Irish had rejected these offers and some people felt in consequence that, as the offers had been rejected, they should not be renewed. He . . . was not of this view. He felt that the Gallery should consider making a loan, even though previous offers had been turned down.

Bracken claimed the board needed legal advice; Herbert thought they had all the information they needed; Ford that they needed more. Mahon had gone through the records of the history of the Lane Bequest and concluded that the English case was not as sound as the trustees had assumed. (He assured the board that in spite of his Irish name he was entirely an Englishman.) Wellington and Witt argued for a compromise, with Witt arguing that a loan should not be permanent, the National Gallery should divide the pictures and the pictures must be fully insured by the Irish authorities, and that these conditions should be included in a letter to Pakenham. Henry Moore joined those worried about the subsequent movement of the pictures between London and Dublin. The subcommittee spent a long time discussing Mahon’s survey but Lionel managed to persuade him to withdraw a motion submitted at the 12 December board meeting which would have obliged the trustees to spend

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hours discussing the history and on 9 January 1958 got them to vote on (1) whether to take any action at all in response to Pakenham, and (2) if so what action. He made it clear that if they agreed on (2) they would need assurances that the government would support their action. Under (2) there were two practical alternatives: the board could divide the Lane collection into (approximately) two halves and offer to lend one half for five years and the other half for the succeeding five years, without making any agreement for subsequent years, which was Witt’s proposal; or the board could divide the Lane collection into two halves and offer to lend first one half and then the other for five-year periods in perpetuity, the modified Wellington proposal.17 Only Bracken, Crawford and Moore voted against (1), so discussion continued. When the board eventually voted on (2), only Ford, Mahon and Robbins voted for the second alternative. The board agreed the next step was for a committee to meet Pakenham. Crawford declined ‘in view of the fact that he was strongly opposed to the principle of a loan, and that . . . the Board’s decision to negotiate was very wrong’, Hendy because his predecessors ‘had worked hard to obtain the Lane pictures and he did not wish to have any part in undoing their work’. So Robbins and Witt were left to talk to Pakenham and Moyne. Pakenham and Moyne were not surprised to learn that the National Gallery had legal advice that a permanent loan was impossible: ‘What they had always hoped for was loan arrangements for a determinate period, coupled with a gentleman’s understanding that such arrangements would be renewed.’ They confirmed that they had authorization to negotiate for the Irish government and agreed to ask the Irish government for the necessary assurances (that it would drop claims to ownership, adequately insure the collection, etc) (LCR, Interview with Lord Pakenham on Friday, 17th January, 1958, NG26/94). These were discussed at the 13 March board meeting, by which time Robbins and Witt had prepared draft loan terms for a twenty-year arrangement. The anxious discussion, judging from the minutes, focussed on the physical conditions of the Dublin galleries where the loaned pictures might hang. Lionel said he was prepared to continue negotiations but he wanted other trustees to join him and Witt, and that he would prepare a draft letter to Pakenham for the next board meeting. 17

LCR, Sub-Committee on Questions arising from Lord Pakenham’s letter Note by the Chairman, 3 December 1957, NG26/94; Chairman’s Agenda for NG Board 12 December 1957, NG26/99; Mahon to LCR, 6 January, Mahon to LCR, 7 January, LCR to Mahon, 8 January 1958, NG26/94.

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When the revised version of the letter was approved on 17 April, Bracken and Crawford wanted their dissent to be recorded, as did Hendy. Once the letter was sent on 25 April, Lionel went to see the Prime Minister who promised government support if the loan arrangements went through and there were criticisms in the House of Commons (LCR to Mahon, 29 April 1958, NG26/94). He told Sir Alexander Johnston on 18 April 1958 (NG26/94): If you were to ask me to put in a nutshell the grounds for our deciding to make so considerable a sacrifice, my answer would be as follows. I do not think it is possible at this distance of time to be quite sure of Lane’s intentions. . . . But I am quite clear that on any objective assessment of the conflict of evidence, the Irish case has a weight, which is not far from equal, one way or the other, with our own. And I think it is a significant fact that the Trustees of the period when the discussion was acute . . . were from the outset willing to settle the business on a loan basis. Now although conditions have changed a good deal since the twenties, and the sacrifice involved for London in a loan arrangement is much greater than it would have been in those days, yet I cannot feel that it would be a morally right thing if . . . we should now abandon that attitude when the Irish have so far swallowed their pride as to indicate that they are willing to negotiate on that basis. In the end I think it is just as simple as that. The whole affair has been immensely worrying and continues to make me very miserable. It has entirely spoiled my enjoyment of that part of the Gallery in the last six months. I have not any real confidence that the pictures will give as much pleasure [in Dublin] as they do in London, and I have always viewed with a little distaste the stridency of the Irish declamations. But a promise is a promise, and I feel very clear that we should do wrong not to stand by our earlier declarations.

Eighteen months passed before the Anglo–Irish negotiations were complete. In the summer of 1958 Pakenham produced a draft statement to be made by both governments but Robbins could not get an agreed reaction from the trustees on 10 July. On 9 October they grudgingly agreed that a revised version of Pakenham’s statement, prepared by a new subcommittee of Lord Chandos, Sir Thomas Merton, Robbins and Witt, could be sent to Pakenham. Sending it on 17 October, Lionel asked Pakenham to persuade the Irish government to allow them to start negotiating a legal agreement (NG26/95). In April 1959 the Irish Ambassador sent Robbins a draft Memorandum of Agreement, which the subcommittee discussed with him in May and again in July (LCR, The Lane Pictures, A note on recent developments, 7 May, and The Lane Pictures, 7 July 1959, NG26/95). Lionel was able to announce at the last board meeting of his term of office on 9 July that the two sides were now discussing the wording of identical statements to be made in the Dail and the House of Commons. A twenty-year agreement (since renewed) was

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signed on 6 November 1959 and announced by the Taoiseach and the Prime Minister a few days later. When the first group of the Lane pictures was exhibited at the Dublin City Gallery in Charlemont House, Parnell Square, its permanent home since 1933, in February 1961, Lionel was delighted to be asked to attend, with Witt and Hendy, the celebratory banquet given by the Taoiseach (now Sean Lemass) in Dublin (LCR to Irish Ambassador, 6 January 1961, General Correspondence January-May 1961, RP). Before the paintings left London, the National Gallery exhibited the full thirty-nine continental pictures. They have been hung together once more, in 2008, as part of the Hugh Lane 100 Years exhibition, ‘for the first time since 1913 . . . tak[ing] their place with the rest of his collection in Dublin’ (Dawson 2008, 7). There was other good news in Lionel’s last months as chairman of the National Gallery. Besides the decision to purchase the Hampton site in November 1958, the government agreed to increase the annual grant-in-aid for 1959/60 to £100,000. Informing the trustees ‘in strictest secrecy’ on 8 January 1959, Lionel also told them that the Treasury was offering a special grant towards the purchase of Paolo Uccello, St George and the Dragon (1460). In October 1958 Hendy had been negotiating with the owner in Switzerland, Count Lanckoronski, who was willing to negotiate but unwilling to let the painting be viewed by the trustees in London. At the same time the gallery was planning to bid at auction for a C´ezanne (Portrait of a Boy) and a Van Gogh (Landscape), and Robbins wrote to the Prime Minister asking him to authorize funds to help with these purchases. Macmillan said he could provide £125,000 for the C´ezanne and £75,000 for the Van Gogh, but the pictures went for much larger sums. When Robbins wrote to thank him for the offer, Macmillan replied: ‘I am sorry about the pictures, but they were a great deal too expensive. But could we not buy some less fashionable pictures?’ Lionel promptly suggested the Uccello, sending Hendy’s report on the painting and a copy of the Phaidon book on the artist (LCR to Winnifrith, 29 October 1958, NG26/93). As he told Crawford on 3 November (NG26/95), Lionel was ‘not prepared to lay bets on what will come of it [but] I feel at least that the ice is beginning to break’. The count had still not named a definite price, so the board decided on 13 November that some trustees should view the picture: Hendy ‘thought it would be important in the circumstances to get the Count to put a price to the picture in the presence of the Chairman’. Robbins, Crawford and Hendy agreed to visit Zurich the following Sunday (16 November).

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When they reported on their visit to the board on 11 December, Robbins said he thought it was ‘very fine and would be a most desirable acquisition’. Crawford, however, was worried about its condition and doubted whether it was by Uccello. Since the count had now reduced his price from £140,000 to £125,000, the trustees decided on 8 January to send their experts to Zurich. In Zurich on the 13th the experts were immediately satisfied it was genuine and Hendy concluded the deal the next morning. Back in London in the afternoon he called at the Treasury, who immediately instructed the Bank of England to arrange for him to collect the cash at the Swiss National Bank in Zurich the next day. Hendy flew back to Zurich, picked up the Swiss francs and carried them to the Kredit Anstalt where he met Count Lanckoronski and exchanged them for the painting, which he then carried back with him on the aircraft: it is a small picture, which ‘fitted easily on the cabin rack.’ The Financial Secretary announced the acquisition, along with the increase of the annual grant, in the House of Commons a week later (Director’s Report, 12 February 1959, NG26/100). David Laidler’s most vivid recollection of Robbins’s lectures on economic theory at LSE is his telling the class about the painting the same day. At LSE there had been many changes in personnel since 1954 in addition to a new director in 1957. In Lionel’s own department a group of very bright young economists with varied backgrounds had been appointed. They maintained the very high standard of teaching for undergraduate specialists in economics, in spite of the problems of the new degree with a single year Part II. What saved Laidler and others was (Laidler 1997, xi) the particular age structure of the LSE economics department at that time. To the outsider the place was dominated by such luminaries as Roy Allen, James Meade, Frank Paish, Henry Phelps Brown, Arnold Plant, Lionel Robbins, Richard Sayers, et al. . . . Serious teaching was done in small groups (there were only about a dozen specialists in Economics Analytical and Descriptive in my year) by those known as “the younger members of the staff”: Chris Archibald, Bernard Corry, Bob Gould, Kurt Klappholz, Kelvin Lancaster, Dick Lipsey, Maurice Peston, not to mention Ed Mishan, Bill Phillips and Jack Wiseman, who belonged to this group in intellectual spirit if not in years. And further instruction was on offer in the Three Tuns (the School Pub) at lunch time and in the early evening, particularly from Archibald, Corry and Lipsey. For this group, economics was a way of life, and an enjoyable one too, rather than merely an academic subject.

Archibald, Corry, Lancaster and Lipsey had applied for three assistant lectureships advertized in 1955. The last two were appointed that year, the first two later. Lancaster, an Australian, had several degrees: a BSc in

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mathematics and geology, a BA and an MA in English literature from the University of Sydney and an external BSc(Econ) with First Class Honours in 1953. He had been a doctoral student at LSE for a couple of years, as had Lipsey, a Canadian with a BA from the University of British Columbia and an MA from the University of Toronto, who was working on the theory of customs unions under Helen Makower’s supervision. Lancaster was also not one of Lionel’s supervisees, but having heard him in the seminar, Lionel ‘regard[ed] him as a man of very great intellectual distinction’. Archibald and Corry were both LSE graduates of 1951. Archibald, who had held a temporary lectureship at the University of Otago in New Zealand before returning to LSE as a graduate student in 1955, was appointed in 1956 along with Mishan, who had a BA from Manchester 1946, an LSE MSc 1948 and a Chicago PhD 1951. Mishan, whose appointment was initially for one year, was an eccentric: Ralph Turvey recalls being consulted by Robbins about hiring him, when Turvey replied: ‘You had Abba Lerner before the war and you don’t regret that.’18 Klappholz had met Lionel in September 1948 at the end of his first year as an undergraduate when he had not done well: Lionel asked him what he had done during the war. On Klappholz’s replying that he had spent approximately half of it in concentration camps, Lionel asked what sort of education he had received there. Klappholz was taken aback by the question but ‘I told him [and] when I finished he had tears in his eyes. I think his concern for me dates from that interview.’ Four years later Lionel wrote that his pupil had worked under his supervision for three years. ‘He had come to this country after an interruption of his education for four years in a German concentration camp, at the end of which time, on emerging, he had discovered both his parents to have been murdered by the Nazis. In spite of these dreadful experiences, he settled down to his studies in a most excellent manner and crowned his career here [LSE] by taking his final examination with first-class honours’ in 1951.19 Lionel supported him strongly for a fellowship at Duke University in 1951/2, from where he went to Columbia as an instructor: Lionel met him there when he attended the bicentennial celebrations in 1954. When Lionel returned to London he wrote Klappholz on 7 July asking if he would be prepared to run the 18

19

Assistant Lectureships in Economics (closing date: 20.6.55) and Lectureship in Economics (Closing date: 20.6.55), Staff II October 1950-December 1957, RP; Agenda for Standing Committee 27 September 1955; LCR to Tattersall, 21 March 1955, Testimonials April 1953–21/10/55; Application from Mishan in Staff II October 1950-December 1957, RP; Agenda for Standing Committee 20 November 1956. Conversation with Kurt Klappholz, LSE, 17 December 1992; LCR to H. Taylor, 4 March 1952, Testimonials 1.9.50–31 March 1953, RP.

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risk of returning for a one-year post, which could be offered without an interview and which might be converted to a four-year appointment once he arrived. Klappholz replied that he would take the risk. When Turvey, on leave at Johns Hopkins, told Lionel that Klappholz was very hard up and the transatlantic fare would exhaust his resources, Lionel arranged for him to be appointed from 1 September 1954 (Staff II October 1950December 1957, RP; Agenda for Standing Committee 26 September 1954). Klappholz remembered that when the Appointments Committee’s selection subcommittee on economics recommended a four-year appointment at the end of the Michaelmas term, Robbins ‘came down to my room, overjoyed, to tell me’. Klappholz remained on the staff until his retirement. Peston was another outstanding LSE undergraduate. On marking his Part II final examination papers Lionel commented in a letter to Baumol on 29 June 1952 that he was ‘the best analytical mind since Ralph [Turvey]’ (Baumol Papers). After a postgraduate fellowship at Princeton he had been working on operations research for the War Office and already had seven published articles to his credit when he was appointed to an assistant lectureship in 1957 (Agenda for Standing Committee 7 May 1957). J.R. Gould, a First Class BSc(Econ) graduate in 1951, also won a scholarship to Princeton but could not in the event take it up; he had specialized in accounting but did not want to become an accountant, so Professor Baxter suggested he might be given a one-year assistantship for 1957/8; a year later he was appointed to an assistant lectureship (Baxter to Edwards and LCR, nd but July 1957, Staff II, RP; Agenda for Standing Committee 30 September 1958). Corry, appointed in 1958, was one of Robbins’s doctoral students. Lionel was at first uncertain about him. Corry had had a difficult time as an undergraduate, perhaps because of pressures from his working-class parents in the East End of London; then ‘he went away and did his military service, got thoroughly browned off in the process, and when he was discharged, somewhat against my advice decided to come back and do graduate work’, since when ‘he has been struggling back into form and has done rather better than I thought he would’ (LCR to Graham Hutton, 9 February 1954, Testimonials April 1953–31.10.55, RP). Corry recalled that he ‘found it difficult to get going’ but Lionel was ‘very sweet. He never pushed me. Just gave me general essays, eg history of quantity theory [which] took me a year’ (to write a hundred-page survey paper). By the end of Corry’s second year in the Graduate School, Lionel judged him ‘a man of ingenious mind and real devotion to his subject’, although ‘some immaturity both of manner and judgment . . . might conceivably be an obstacle to his being immediately successful as a teacher’ (LCR to Miss Sheppard, 14 June 1955, Testimonials April 1953–31.10.55, RP). In Corry’s third graduate year he became Lionel’s

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research assistant, spending hours tracking down the details of Robbins’s inadequate references for Torrens. He completed his dissertation while he was a lecturer at the University of Durham in 1956–8. When Lionel wrote on 30 December 1957 to advise him to submit his thesis (Staff II, RP), he was ‘glad to hear . . . that the negotiations for your return to this institution as a member of the staff are now in active progress. Needless to say, it will give me very great pleasure to welcome you here as a colleague.’ In the 1960s Corry was one of the best teachers at LSE and, like Robbins, very supportive of his undergraduates. There were also major losses to the School: Terence Hutchison to the chair of economics at Birmingham and Alan Peacock to the chair at Edinburgh in 1956 and, worst of all from Lionel’s personal point of view, James Meade to the Chair of Political Economy at Cambridge in 1957. Lionel strongly supported the applications of both Hutchison and Peacock: as he told Hutchison on 30 September 1955 (Staff II, RP) he could not bring himself to argue against their deserved promotions. When Edinburgh asked him to recommend names for the chair there the two people who were not already professors he thought the university should consider were Peacock and Tom Wilson of University College Oxford. He admitted that ‘I am not at all anxious to see Peacock leave the School. He is the Reader in charge of the Public Finance teaching . . . [and] a tower of strength in all sorts of ways. He is a man of penetrating good sense and administrative ability. . . . I am afraid I think [he] is very well suited for the post.’20 Lionel had warned the new director that one of his greatest fears was that Meade would be offered Robertson’s chair. When he heard rumours from Cambridge that he himself had been responsible for the appointment, he wrote to Nicky Kaldor on 4 February 1958 (Economists Correspondence August 1956-April 1958, RP): ‘If I had wanted to influence the election one way or the other I could have remained a member of the Board [of Electors]. But precisely because I did not want to be mixed up in what I knew would be an acutely controversial subject I resigned years ago.’ As it was, ‘James is one of my best friends. His departure is not only a severe blow to the School, but also a grievous impoverishment of my daily personal relations, and whatever appointment is made to his chair, this cannot be made good.’ With the additions to the junior economists at LSE the Robbins Seminar recovered its old sparkle in the mid-1950s despite the greatly increased 20

LCR to W. Croft Dickinson, 20 February 1956, General Correspondence January-July 1956, RP. Alan Day was promoted to Hutchison’s readership, Ralph Turvey to Peacock’s with a change in title to a readership in economics with special reference to public finance.

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number of graduate students compared with prewar. Lionel told A.D. Scott on 18 February 1955 (Economists Correspondence January 1955-July 1956, RP) that there was ‘a very good seminar again for the first time in about three years – at least half a dozen graduate students who are prepared to stand up to the staff in arguments’. (The half dozen included Lancaster, Lipsey and Corry.) Roger Opie gave a paper on the German currency reform of 1948 and someone else on the Brazilian balance of payments 1947– 52. In 1955/6 the general topic for the year was inflation. Lionel opened the discussion himself at the first session on 8 November and persuaded Ralph Hawtrey and Manning Dacey to address the seminar in December. Corry gave his first seminar, on the Bullion Report and the restriction of cash payments, in the Michaelmas term, following the example of Opie (and the unknown presenter on Brazil) the previous year by handing out tables of statistical data. In the Lent term the discussions of A.J. Brown’s recent book, The Great Inflation, 1939–51 (1955), were opened by several students including Arthur Lerner (Abba Lerner’s younger brother, who moved to Canada to teach at the University of Guelph in 1963).21 At least one graduate student found the discussion of Brown’s book immediately useful when he abandoned his studies to work as an economist in the Economic and Financial Division of NATO (H.G. Hambleton to LCR, 27 September 1956, General Correspondence August 1956-March 1957, RP). Lionel told Baumol on 5 June (Economists Correspondence January 1955July 1956, RP) that overall the seminar this year was ‘quite lively and some of the papers at least of considerable intellectual importance’. The ‘younger members of the staff’ were less certain of the value of the Robbins Seminar. Turvey, who was still perhaps the closest to Lionel but had ‘begun to react’ against Lionel’s dominance of the department, took the bull by the horns and wrote to Lionel on 25 April 1956 (Economics Department Correspondence 1/10/55–30/8/61, RP), suggesting a separate staff seminar. Robbins’s seminar was trying to do too many things at once: (1) It is the seminar for graduates working in General Theory, just as, for example, James [Meade’s] seminar is the seminar for graduates working in International Economics. (2) It is a second seminar for graduates who have a ‘specialist’ seminar and who want to keep in with general Economics. 21

Student papers in Seminar Papers II; LCR, Inflation Introductory Remarks Seminar 1955– 6, Speeches & Articles on Public Affairs postwar; LCR to Hawtrey, 7 and 11 November, Hawtrey to LCR, 8 November, LCR to Dacey, 7 November 1955, Economists Correspondence January 1955-July 1956, RP.

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(3) It is the staff seminar. Of these classes, the second are already catered for reasonably well. It seems to me, however, that the first and third are not at present catered for well, simply because the numbers involved are so much larger than pre-war. Only a fraction of the staff come and there is no longer an interchange of ideas among the staff members which one feels there was before the war. I think we need a much greater amount of contact and cross-fertilisation of ideas than at present we get.

Lionel canvassed his colleagues with the suggestion of alternating Tuesdays for staff and student seminars. They supported him in principle but few were prepared to commit themselves to regular attendance at a staff seminar. Lipsey, in particular, thought it was worth a year’s trial but only as an occasional seminar rather than a fortnightly one. He suggested that as well as providing a forum for LSE economists to present ideas and theories not fully worked up to each other, it should discuss ‘significant contributions to economics made by persons outside of our immediate circle’, such as the books published recently by Hicks, Patinkin and Joan Robinson. Lionel decided to continue with his usual seminar, leaving open the possibility of additional meetings for staff only in the Lent term, and to take as topics for discussion in 1956/7 the recently published books of Patinkin, Hicks, Robinson and Kaldor (LCR to members of the Economics Department, 10 October and 2 November 1956, Lipsey and other replies in Staff Seminar Replies, RP). The whole of the Michaelmas term 1956 and some of the Lent term 1957 was devoted to Don Patinkin, Money, Interest and Prices, which Robbins himself thought ‘easily the most important book on the theory of money since the General Theory’ (LCR to W.H. Hutt, 5 February 1957, Economists Correspondence August 1956-April 1958, RP). The exposition of sections of Patinkin’s large book was assigned to graduate students (for instance Haim Barkai, one of Robbins’s doctoral students and a former student of Patinkin’s at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem); other members of the seminar began to contribute as the discussion proceeded (Seminar Papers II, RP). The liveliness of debate, and the fruitfulness of the exchanges, matched those on the innovations of Hicks and Allen in the 1930s. Several participants spotted serious problems in Patinkin’s arguments, most notably Archibald and Lipsey, but also Philip Bell, a former student of Viner’s and an assistant professor at Haverford College who was visiting for a year. Bell wrote a note and left it for Robbins to read. Lipsey, as a colleague, simply told Lionel he had found a weak spot in Patinkin’s analysis and Lionel immediately suggested he present something on it at the next meeting: when he did so

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Lionel congratulated him on his presentation and urged him to publish it. Meanwhile Bell, partly because he was receiving less attention from Lionel than Lipsey was, began to correspond with Patinkin himself. When Bell put his grievances in writing, Lionel wrote him a long letter and took him to lunch at the Reform.22 Although Bell had been oversensitive, it should be said that Lionel was most generous of his time and attention to those, like Lipsey in this instance, he considered the brightest and the best. Another result of this year’s seminar was that Patinkin was invited to lecture at LSE and came for two weeks in March 1958. For the Lent term 1957 Lionel allotted most time (four weeks) for Hicks, A Revision of Demand Theory, followed by Joan Robinson, The Accumulation of Capital (two weeks) and Kaldor, An Expenditure Tax (one week) (Graduate Seminar in Economics, Seminar Papers II, RP). The discussions of the three books continued in the Michaelmas term 1957. In the Lent and Summer terms 1958 there were, Robbins told Tapas Majumdar on 9 June (Economists Correspondence May 1958-December 1959, RP), ‘long and agitated debates on welfare economics’ prompted by the recent work of Will Baumol (1952), Jan Graaf (1957) and Ian Little (1957). Baumol, who was visiting the School, attended some of the discussions. Lionel missed the presence of Majumdar, his former doctoral student, who had been ‘the most outstanding person’ in the sessions on Hicks’s book the previous year (LCR to F.A. Mehta, 26 June 1958, General Correspondence May-December 1958, RP). Majumdar, an assistant professor at Presidency College, Calcutta, had completed his thesis on the measurability of utility and returned to Presidency College as professor (Bose, Rakshit and Sinha eds 1997, v–vi). As Lionel thought the thesis ‘of quite outstanding intellectual importance’, he arranged for Macmillan to publish it (LCR to Robert Rauner, 12 August, LCR to Majumdar, 2 August 1957, Economists Correspondence August 1956-April 1958, RP; Majumdar 1958). In 1958/9 Phillips and Robbins ran the seminar together. The most important topic was Dorfman, Samuelson and Solow, Linear Programming and Economic Analysis (1958), at the suggestion of George Morton and Maurice Peston. They let Morton run the sessions for several weeks, when Lionel enjoyed ‘sitting back watching quite Homeric contests between the 22

Information from Dick Lipsey, June 2008; LCR to Bell, 30 November 1956, Bell to LCR, 27 January, LCR to Bell, 11 February, and Bell to LCR, 13 February 1957, Economists Correspondence August 1956-April 1958; Philip W Bell, Patinkin-Bell correspondence, 21 January 1957, Seminar Papers II, RP. Archibald and Lipsey (1958) acknowledge their indebtedness to ‘all members of the seminar’.

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sceptics and the enthusiasts’ (LCR to Ralph and Sheila Turvey, 25 March 1959, Economics Department Correspondence 1.10.55–30/10/61, RP). The Robbins Seminar was still too big, with the large number of graduate students in attendance, and there was no staff seminar. The young turks, led by Lipsey and Archibald, started their own informal seminar in 1957/8, calling it after a while the LSE Staff Seminar in Methodology, Measurement and Testing, or M2 T. There were a number of reasons behind their action, some revealed in the title: it was a seminar for the (young) academic staff and it was concerned with empirical testing of economic theories. According to Bernard Corry, only Phillips was invited of the older staff. A challenge to Robbins’s academic leadership of the department, it also challenged the dominance of his Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. Lipsey, in particular, had longstanding doubts about the utility of deductivist economic methodology (Lipsey 1997, xi–xii and xix–xx). The participants became, at least for a while, enthusiastic Popperians, with the help of Joseph Agassi, Karl Popper’s research assistant since 1953 (and on the staff 1958/9). Neil de Marchi (1988) described the methodological aspects of M2 T as ‘a border skirmish’ at the junction of economic theory and econometrics. He also cast Robbins as the representative of non-quantitative and logically unfalsifiable economic theory. Although this was the stance of Nature and Significance, it is somewhat unfair to Robbins, whose methodological viewpoint in the 1950s was not identical with his in the 1930s. In spite of his lack of mathematics and statistics he had sat in on Kendall’s econometrics seminar for a couple of years (1951/2 and 1952/3) (LCR to Kendall, 19 October 1951 and 10 November 1952, Miscellaneous (LSE Staff, Departments, etc) October 1951-September 1957, RP). He spoke with a little knowledge when he wrote to Arthur Lewis who had sought his opinion of the subject (21 June 1955, Economists Correspondence January 1955-July 1956, RP): ‘The essence of econometrics is the attempt to make refined measurements of economic phenomena in such a way as to permit verification of propositions in theoretical economics. While I would concede that the making of such measurement is attended with very special difficulty and the significance of the measurements once they are made may well be of a transitory nature, yet I cannot think that the aim is intrinsically absurd or, indeed, in any way out of line with the general procedure of any selfrespecting science.’ He was sceptical of extravagant claims for econometrics, in which he included ‘Lawrence Klein’s attempt to analyse the laws of movement of the American economy’ [Klein and Goldberger 1955], but ‘one should not judge a branch of study by the occasional utterances and claims of its less sensible practitioners. . . . without any doubt . . . the use of

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methods which have come to be called econometric is now an indispensable part of a properly organized department of economics.’ The Canadian economist Harry Johnson, then at the University of Manchester, was a good friend and a mentor to several of the young economists at LSE (Lipsey 2001). Robbins did not share their enthusiasm, largely because Johnson had written a critical review of the first volume of Meade’s Theory of International Economic Policy (Johnson 1951), and tried (successfully) to prevent him getting Meade’s chair at LSE when Meade went to Cambridge. In September 1957, in advance of a meeting of the Appointments Committee, he put down in writing his strong opinions of the possible candidates (Notes on the vacant chairs in economics, 17 September 1957, Staff II, RP). He began by reminding his colleagues the Tooke chair was still vacant. Hence there was a question as to which chair to fill first. ‘On this my own attitude, reached after much reflection, is very definite: we should proceed first to fill the Tooke Chair: and we should definitely submit to the University the name of Phillips.’ There were ample reasons for appointing Phillips: he might otherwise leave LSE which would be ‘the worst blow to the theoretical side of our work that I can conceive’; none of his colleagues would resent his promotion; and he clearly fitted a chair in economics and statistics. Lionel then claimed there was no urgency in filling the chair in international economics, offhandedly remarking that Day and Makower could give the lectures and he and Phillips could look after the graduate students. As for possible candidates, he raised seven possibilities, of which, considering ‘their relative suitability, both in regard to the special duties of the chair and in regard to wider questions of School policy’, he preferred Alec Cairncross, Donald MacDougall and Alan Day. His remarks on Johnson – to any unbiased observer the strongest candidate for a chair in international economics – were, to put it mildly, dismissive. Johnson. I mention him because I know some members of our profession think him to be eligible. I have indeed heard his name mentioned as a desirable choice by one of the juniors at the School. I have no doubt that he is a clever fellow and I can conceive that in years to come we may want to have him. But I definitely do not want him now. His articles, though showing obvious power, seem to me to lack a sense of direction and his practical judgment to be definitely poor. And it is a relevant circumstance that, when he deputized for Alan Day while the latter was at the Treasury, he was certainly not a success as a teacher. I know that Meade, who was responsible for inviting him, was worried about this. In any case, I cannot think that he is as good as at least four of our Readers and I should be very sorry indeed to appoint such a man over their heads.

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Although Lionel said he would be happy to have either Cairncross or MacDougall as colleagues, he argued for the appointment of a younger man (given the present age structure of the professoriate) and for the School to wait eighteen months or two years to fill the chair so that Day could then be considered. Lionel’s colleagues readily agreed Phillips should be appointed to the Tooke chair. They did not agree about the Chair of Commerce (with special reference to international trade), certainly not about leaving it unfilled, and the School asked the University to fill both chairs (Agenda for Standing Committee 19 November 1957). The next relevant item in Robbins’s files is an ‘entirely personal’ letter of 3 February 1958 to his friend from wartime Whitehall, Ely Devons, Professor of Applied Economics at Manchester since 1948, wondering if he would be interested in Meade’s chair (Staff III January 1958-April 1961). He claimed that while he and his colleagues were ‘very content’ with Meade’s theoretical approach to his subject, ‘many of us feel that it would be desirable that the focus of interest should revert to a somewhat earlier pattern’ of more applied regional economics similar to the work of Benham and Condliffe. He alluded to a new readership in Russian Economic Studies (which was to go to Alec Nove) and to Vera Anstey who worked on India, as complementary appointments. Devons was interested and came to meet the director at LSE in January 1958 (Devons to LCR, 12 January, LCR to Devons, 13 February 1958, Economists Correspondence August 1956-April 1958, RP). With only one application for the chair (from D.J. Morgan, who had been professor at the University of the West Indies since 1955), it was not difficult for Caine to ask the University to consider Devons, who accepted the formal offer in April 1958 and was appointed as from 1 April 1959 (Agenda for Standing Committee 6 May 1958). Lionel told his friend on 1 May (Staff III, RP) that ‘The flags are definitely out in Houghton Street. It is an accession to our strength which will be envied all over the world and to me, privately, a prospect of much new intellectual stimulus and a sense of assurance that the maintenance of the tradition is in the worthiest possible hands.’ This was not the view of his younger colleagues. In the interval before Devons arrived, Makower gave the lectures in the theory of international economics that Meade had given. Lionel took the opportunity to teach ‘Principles’ again, the Survey of Economic Analysis which Makower had been giving. Corry took over his History of Economic Thought course, Klappholz the Theory of Economic Policy. After the ‘curse of Kaldor’ in 1947–50 it might seem surprising Lionel should wish to offer a

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full forty-lecture course on economic theory, but he wanted to begin work on his long planned book on the principles of economics. When Claude Guillebaud asked him to write a replacement for Henderson’s Supply and Demand in the Cambridge Economic Handbook series, he replied on 6 August 1957 (Economists Correspondence August 1956-April 1958, RP) that he was ‘already embarked upon the attempt to write, not exactly a Principles, but an Essay on Principles of very much greater length than anything that would fit into your series. Whether this will come to anything or not I am not yet clear . . . it may be that I have left it too late. But I want to have a shot at it and so far things have not gone too badly.’ He devoted the summer of 1958 to the project and by July 1959, having lectured on most of what he wanted to cover, he had written four chapters.23 The eighteen months from January 1958 to July 1959 had seen many distractions from serious academic work: as well as the National Gallery and the Royal Opera House another round of degree reform (see Chapter 22). As far as his health was concerned Lionel had ‘an abominable winter . . . one long succession of upsets of one sort of another: repeated attacks of flu . . . and other evils’ (LCR to Liesl Henderson, 14 March 1958, General Correspondence October 1957-April 1958). Richard and Wendy had a second son. As Lionel told Stanley Dennison on 31 January (Economists Correspondence August 1956-April 1958), ‘It is very nice being a grandfather [except] when both grandchildren shriek uninterruptedly through long stretches of the night.’ Iris was ill in the spring. However, ‘Amid all the depressions & anxieties of this winter [which included his father’s declining health] it [was] wonderful to see [the] happiness’ of his daughter Anne and her husband Christopher Johnson (LCR to ICR, 23 April 1958). They had met while her parents were in Austria in September 1957 and married on 4 January 1958. ‘You can imagine the flap that has ensued.’ Lionel thoroughly approved of his son-in-law, a journalist on The Times, telling Caroline in December 1957: ‘he is very distinguished – Scholar of both Winchester and Magdalen [College Oxford] & an oustanding first. . . . He writes like an angel & is the sort of young man I like talking to.’ After a church service, which was ‘very simple & contained nothing that could possibly offend the most fastidious’, the wedding reception was held in the Shaw Library at LSE and, ‘attended by some 150 people, . . . went very well indeed – plenty of food & drink’, whose cost Lionel’s father shared (LCR to ICR, 6 January 1958). 23

LCR to Toby Low, 11 November 1958, General Correspondence May-December 1958; LCR to Knight, 22 July 1959, Economists Correspondence May 1958-December 1959, RP; see Chapter 22.

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Lionel’s letters to his sister Caroline in 1958 were frequently concerned with his ageing father, sometimes Richard’s troubled marriage, and his third grandson, Anne’s first child, born in November. There was sad news of his schoolfriend Eddie Rose who died of a heart attack on 18 November: ‘I can’t believe that old age would have been a happy time for him. But I loved him very much & his going makes the world emptier.’ Lionel had last seen him when he took him to The Trojans at Covent Garden. ‘As for me,’ he reported on 18 December, ‘I have been quite overwhelmed lately with all sorts of extra mural chores. An N.G. Report: A Covent Garden Report & difficult conversation and negotiation about the Hampton Site, now definitely promised to us. So that for the whole term the book [his proposed Principles of Economics] has had to wait. But this sort of thing has never been so bad before & I am disposed to regard it as a statistical fluke & hope for better times next term.’ On 20 January 1959 he had some different news. ‘The P.M. has asked me whether a recommendation for a life peerage would be acceptable to me; & after much hesitation I have said yes.’ He hoped his sister would not disapprove: ‘it does mean membership of a deliberative assembly which still has some functions to perform: & although I should not be a constant attendant, I think I could contribute something.’ He added it was ‘at present the deadliest secret & should be mentioned to no living person. I mentioned it now as I would not like you to be surprised by a press announcement.’ At the same time he had ‘very good news of the arts – the position, especially of the N.G. & the Tate, is likely to be substantially improved.’ The announcement of four new life peers – Sir Eric James, High Master of Manchester Grammar School; Sir Edwin Plowden, who was now Chairman of the UK Atomic Energy Authority; Sir Hartley Shawcross QC; and Robbins – was made on 23 January, the same day as the announcement of the increased National Gallery grant, when the Financial Secretary to the Treasury took the opportunity to acknowledge ‘the great honour done today to Professor Robbins, the very distinguished and able chairman of the trustees’. The Economist on 31 January commented that ‘the new quartet of life peers . . . have all the marks of a shrewdly balanced Brains Trust’ and they were all ‘active men of distinction’ who might in the past have been MPs for university seats. Caroline heard the news from a colleague before Lionel’s letter arrived. She was ‘delighted that true merit is recognised if not rewarded exactly’ and hoped she would hear him speak in the Lords. When Lionel replied on 27 January he told her that ‘People had been very kind. The first person to ring me up was Henry Moore who I know refused a K. – he is now

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C.H. – like reassurance from Michelangelo.’ He added: ‘I hope the U.S. papers . . . also carried the much more important news that the N.G. grant goes up from £12,500 to £100,000 p.a. & the Tate from £7,500 to £40,000. Also that with the aid of a special grant we have captured the Uccello St George & the Dragon, one of the most important renaissance pictures which still remained in private hands.’

TWENTY-TWO

Lord Robbins

Events in 1959 were to determine the pattern of Lionel Robbins’s life for the next decade. One event was his elevation to the peerage; another was his joining the board of directors of the Financial Times newspaper. He and Iris bought a small house at Lyme Regis in Dorset, where they spent their free weekends and vacations, often with their children and an increasing number of grandchildren. To his commitments were added in 1960 the chairmanship of the Academic Planning Board for a new university at York, another term as a trustee of the National Gallery and, towards the end of the year, invitations to serve as a government appointee on the board of the partly government-owned British Petroleum Company and to chair a major enquiry into the present and future of higher education in Great Britain. At LSE, although the School remained his ‘main preoccupation’ and he found ‘the work here in the last few years especially rewarding . . . [because of] the excellence of the younger people’ (LCR to R¨opke, 15 April 1959, Economists Correspondence May 1958-December 1959, RP), his dominance of the Economics Department had been challenged by the ‘younger people’ from the mid-1950s. The events of 1959 led to the loss of his chair of economics in 1961. Before that happened, however, the vexing problem of the reform of the BSc(Econ) was resolved in the winter of 1959/60. When Robbins accepted the offer of a life peerage he wanted to become simply ‘Lord Robbins’ and to be known in academic circles as Professor Lord Robbins or just Robbins like Keynes. He received many congratulations (Peerage Congratulatory Letters, RP): from friends in the arts world who thought it was a great day for the arts in Britain, from fellow economists who were pleased to have one of their number in the upper house, from LSE colleagues and former students who were proud for the School as well as from other friends. Former colleagues in wartime Whitehall who 826

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knew he had refused a knighthood in 1943 were delighted an acceptable honour had been found: ‘Some of us,’ wrote Dennis Proctor on 24 January, ‘have conferred together about it in private, but I at least had not hit on this brilliant solution.’ Several wondered what name he would take. Arthur Salter warned him on 26 January not to ‘let anyone persuade to take any name but your own. They tried it on with me but I was determined not to inflict on those who had known me as Salter the job of finding [me] under the mask of Lord Abcadabra or something.’ But the choice of a title depends on the College of Arms which, noting there was a Lord Robins, indicated that Lionel would have to take a territorial designation: he was not obliged to follow, say, the former Fred Marquis who was created Baron Woolton of Liverpool but he was obliged, according to Garter King of Arms, to follow the example of Balfour of Burleigh. Lionel objected. Since he accepted there would be a territorial description which was not part of the title, the acrimonious argument which developed between him and Garter (Sir George Bellew) was over a comma. When he met Garter on 9 February he found no sympathy for his position. His first reception at the College of Arms, by Rouge Croix Pursuivant on 29 January 1959, had been friendly and apparently sympathetic. But with Garter, according to Lionel’s report (Note on conversation at the College of Arms, Dispute about Name, RP), it was obvious that I was dealing with a man who had made up his mind and was only admitting conversation in the hope that he could stampede or overawe me into acquiescence. He interrupted continually. He made it clear that he regarded himself as the spokesman for the Sovereign; and as such entitled to dismiss any argument of fact or logic as either impertinent or absurd. . . . ‘Now you’re making things very difficult for me’, he snapped irritably at one point. ‘You’re arguing very ably’ [my italics]. I enquired whether he wished me to argue feebly. He did not reply. On the central feature of my submission, the disadvantages for an academic of any discontinuity of identity, he dismissed my apprehensions as ridiculous. . . . [Later in the conversation] I was developing the plea that life peerages had been invented in order to introduce a certain desirable elasticity into the constitution of the House of Lords; and to reinforce my point I mentioned Bagehot’s classic argument. ‘No need to tell me anything about the institution of life peerages’, said Garter. ‘I sat on the committee myself. We did not call in Bagehot’ [My italics]. I suggested that it would have been difficult to do so without resurrection of the dead and that I was referring not to some contemporary lawyer but to the author of the standard classic on the English Constitution. ‘When was it written?’, said Garter incredulously.

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I told him. (1867) ‘Oh, I don’t regard an eighteenth (sic) century classic as having any relevance’, said he. ... Our parting lacked cordiality.

When Lionel enquired whether anyone, for example the Prime Minister who had published his books, could bear witness to his academic reputation, he was told the Prime Minister had no standing in the matter. Garter also told him there was no right of appeal, except perhaps to the sovereign but in that case, ‘he added, with quiet satisfaction, “it would only come back to me.”’ So Lionel made a fuss. He presented a memorandum to the College of Arms and sent copies of it to friends in high places. They found it entertaining reading.1 They gave differing advice on what to do: Bridges doubted he would win and after throwing out a couple of entirely facetious suggestions proposed adding ‘Claremarket’: ‘so like an 18th cent[ury] E. Anglian Rotten borough. And so clearly identifying the school. Better than Aldwych. Far. I think the Chairman of the B[oard] of Governors wd approve this.’ Frank Lee, on the other hand, thought Lionel should not give way, as did Eddie Playfair. Playfair, who admitted to a longstanding interest in heraldry and being ‘for years . . . a distant but interested connoisseur of the extraordinary methods and habits of the College of Arms’, strongly advised him (as did Lee) to talk to Norman Brook before he did anything else, but he also encouraged him to write to the Prime Minister. Lionel wrote to Brook. But he, pointing out that the pronunciation of Lord Robins and Lord Robbins would be the same and confusing in the House of Lords, thought there was more to be said for Garter’s point of view than Lionel was prepared to admit and urged him to reconsider his attitude. Friends already in the Lords, such as Bob Brand (Lord Brand of Eydon) and Arthur Salter, pointed out that he could simply not use the territorial designation: Lionel would not accept this way out. Lionel had already written to one of the Prime Minister’s private secretaries and he had sent a copy of his memorandum to Daniel Macmillan. The latter replied on 17 February that although it might be true his brother could not intervene he was sending him the memorandum anyway; a week later he wrote again: ‘I understand from my brother that his office has given 1

The question of my future name, 11 February 1959, Dispute about Name; LCR to Garter King of Arms, 12 February 1959, General Correspondence January-August 1959; letters from Bridges et al in Dispute about Name, RP.

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you some informal advice about the matter you raised. He says that it is not something in which it would be proper for him to intervene, but that he thinks you will probably win your argument with the College of Heralds.’ Meanwhile Garter had responded on 17 February in writing, point by point, to Robbins’s memorandum. Lionel was equally intransigent in his reply on 4 March and ‘not[ing] that nowhere in his observation does Garter King of Arms explicitly refuse Professor Robbins’ request, . . . repeated [his request], that the Crown Office be asked to issue Letters Patent to Baron Robbins, (comma) of (some place to be named)’. On 17 April Bellew asked to see Robbins again but after they met on 1 May, Lionel sent him on 4 May a draft of the letter he was about to send to the Prime Minister (Dispute about Name, RP). Lionel got his comma. After asking Lionel to come and see him at the House of Commons, Harold Macmillan wrote on 3 June (General Correspondence January-August 1959, RP) that he had consulted HM The Queen, who had agreed to his request. Robbins was gazetted as Baron Robbins, of Clare Market in the City of Westminster, on 16 June. He was introduced in the House of Lords on 15 July, by Bridges and Cottesloe (The Times, 17 June and 16 July 1959). Unwilling to be identified with a political party, he took his seat on the cross benches. Just before his first interview with Garter in February Lionel had been ‘laid up with a more than usually virulent influenza bug’. Then, as he also told Frank Knight on 22 July (Economists Correspondence May 1958-December 1959, RP), in March, as he and Iris were leaving the Opera House one evening, Iris tripped over a pavement stone and injured her hip so badly that she was laid up for more than two months: ‘this involved a considerable reversement of the Meadway Close economy and the amount of academic work I managed to do then was almost negligible’. The first diagnosis was that it was not serious but when it became so painful that she could not stand, she had to go into University College Hospital for treatment for two weeks. She could not accompany Lionel on his spring visit to the Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (LCR to Kahane, 25 March and 10 and 30 April 1959, General Correspondence January-August 1959, RP). They had paid what was to be the first of many visits to the Bologna Center in March 1957. As on later visits, Lionel lectured on the meaning of economic integration, as part of a course on European integration, and the lectures financed a holiday, this time a week in Venice, after the lectures. On his second visit in March 1958 he went alone as Iris was ill and returned without visiting Rome or Naples as they had originally intended – but

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he allowed himself a day in each of Parma, Bergamo and Milan to look at paintings and sculpture.2 On the third visit, in April 1959, he went first to Rome where he spoke to Professor Ugo Papi’s seminar on ‘The present position of economics’ (Robbins 1959a). He spent an evening with Jacques and Anne Kahane and went to the opera, where he enjoyed Boito’s Mefistofele and a backstage tour (LCR to Carlo Latini, 8 May 1959, General Correspondence January-August 1959, RP). He also saw Reggie Lawson (Brother David) for the first time since 1925. Reggie/David had been living in Rome since 1950, as an assistant to the English adviser to the Master General of the Dominican Order. He had learned of Lionel’s peerage from his brother Tommy and had written to congratulate him on 29 January 1959 (Letters from Old Friends, RP) although it ‘has nothing to do with those things in which our friendship was planted, and grew, and will, I hope, remain for ever undisturbed’. John Polimeni, who had kept in touch with both Lionel and Reggie, also wrote, from Bologna on 24 January on one of his frequent visits to Italy (Peerage Congratulatory Letters, RP). Reggie commented that he and Lionel ‘have not much common ground left and what there is lies in the past’, but after that first reunion they met many more times in Rome or in London during the next twenty years (Ginger 1991, 224–5). After Italy Lionel read the Cambridge doctoral dissertation of Pierangelo Garegnani, which he was to examine with Joan Robinson, to their mutual amusement. (He had once remarked to Carr-Saunders: ‘When Confucius was asked by his disciples what their attitude should be to the inhabitants of the other world, he replied, “Respect spiritual beings, but avoid intercourse with them.” I have taken this as the guiding motive of my relations with Mrs. Robinson for nearly two decades.’)3 On the day of the oral (27 May) he lunched with Joan and dined with Austin and stayed overnight in Austin’s college. He had admitted to her a couple of days earlier that he found the thesis (which dealt with the insoluble problem of the measurement of capital) ‘fiendishly difficult’ (Economists Correspondence May 1958December 1959, RP). ‘But I take it that in awarding a Doctorate, one marks for quality rather than conformity with what one believes oneself to be 2

3

LCR to Edgar Johnson, 8 April and 27 August 1957, General Correspondence AprilSeptember 1957; LCR to Kahane, 27 January and 14 March, LCR to Johnson, 14 and 31 March 1958, General Correspondence October 1957-April 1958; LCR to Johnson, 22 May 1958, General Correspondence May-December 1958; ms notes European Integration (Bologna April ‘59’), Speeches & Articles on Public Affairs Postwar, RP. Robinson to LCR, 3 February and 10 April, LCR to Robinson, 15 April 1959, Economists Correspondence May 1958-December 1959; LCR to Carr-Saunders, 20 March 1956, Director Correspondence January 1955-April 1963, RP.

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the correct answers to these tremendous questions; one would not refuse a doctorate to Ricardo or Marshall even though one happened to think that some of their positions were not ultimately tenable or perhaps even helpful.’ When Iris was mobile again they resumed their frequent opera (and ballet) going at Covent Garden, often taking economist friends with them, and his sister Caroline when she was over to visit their ageing father: a good season which included The Magic Flute, Parsifal, Madam Butterfly with Sena Jurinac and, most notably, the famous Zeffirelli production of Lucia di Lammermoor with the young Joan Sutherland, whose ‘utterly transcendent’ singing (LCR to ICR, 19 July 1959) Lionel and Iris went to hear at least twice. In July 1959 Lionel and Iris bought 4 Marine Parade, Lyme Regis, which Richard and Wendy had noticed for sale while they were on holiday earlier in the year (information from Richard Robbins). On the waterfront, the threestorey Victorian house, one of a terrace of three, has the view, especially from the first floor balcony and from Lionel’s study, that Jane Austen admired, of the sea and the beach running round to the Cobb which creates the manmade harbour (Taylor 1970, 183–4). They took possession on 23 July, driving down with folding beds to ‘camp out’ overnight in the empty house, which was in bad condition, so that they could arrange for rewiring and repairs. By the middle of August they could go down for several days: ‘It is still very empty & the builders are about. But for all that it’s a heavenly spot & I long to get away from the term & the smell of London.’ Although he would go to a meeting of the Council of the International Economic Association in Copenhagen at the end of August, ‘apart from that I doubt if we shall either of us move this summer beyond Dorset’. With ‘marvellous summer weather’ continuing they stayed until the end of September, by which time they had been visited by Anne and Christopher and their young son Dominic, Clive and Lilian and Gwennie Gardiner, and Richard and Wendy and their two sons. (Fortunately the attic can accommodate several children.) Going up to London once a week for committees and other business, Lionel continued to visit his father, now very frail, at Eastbourne once a fortnight (LCR to ICR, 19 and 27 July, 10 August, 3 and 12 September 1959). At the end of 1958 Lord Poole had approached Lionel about joining the board of directors of the two companies, Financial Times Ltd and Financial News Ltd, which ran the Financial Times. (The FT and the Financial News, of which Lionel’s friend Oscar Hobson had been editor in the early 1930s, had merged in October 1945.) Oliver Poole had joined the board when

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S. Pearson & Sons, of which he was joint managing director, became the controlling shareholders in 1957, as had Pat Gibson, editorial director of the Westminster Press, another Pearson company. Poole became chairman following the death of Brendan Bracken in August 1958. Seeing himself as a stopgap, he enquired whether Lionel might be prepared to succeed him. The other directors included Garrett Drogheda, the managing director, whom Lionel knew well from the Covent Garden board (Kynaston 1988, 253–5, 277–8). Lionel talked Poole’s idea over with their mutual friend Alec Spearman; on 22 December 1958 Poole wrote Lionel (History of Past Employment, RP): ‘I was so delighted to hear [from Spearman] that you might, under certain circumstances, be prepared to consider joining us on the board of that company. Needless to say there is no one we would rather have and I do so hope that you will do so. I have of course discussed this with Garrett Drogheda who . . . is as enthusiastic about the idea as I am.’ Drogheda and Poole had it in mind from the start that Lionel should take over the chairmanship once he had learned the ropes of the company’s business. After lunching with them on 6 January Lionel wrote to the director of LSE the next day for permission to accept the invitation (History of Past Employment, RP). He claimed his duties would be ‘light and involve no work outside fields in which I am already competent. The two boards meet on the same day once a month and the duties I should be expected to perform would be chiefly those of furnishing advice on editorial questions.’ He would receive £1000 a year, £500 from each of the two companies – a very useful addition to his professorial salary of £2590 a year. He admitted he was ‘attracted by the extra income and the probable insurance of my future up to the age of seventy which would go with it. In my more than thirty years service with the School, I have seldom paid much attention to such considerations. But now at the age of sixty, with the purchasing power of my prospective superannuation so greatly reduced by inflation, I feel that I owe it, not only to myself but also to my family to take them into account.’ When the Standing Committee discussed his letter on 27 January, Caine supported his application and Ronald Edwards, Geoffrey Crowther and Michael Oakeshott who were absent had written in support (LCR Personal File C, LSE). After a ‘somewhat prolonged debate’, Caine told Lionel on 30 January, the committee had agreed to his application ‘as a special case’ (History of Past Employment, RP). Lionel took his seat on the FT board on 24 March and was formally elected a director at the annual general meeting on 23 June (The Financial Times Limited Minute Book). Eighteen months later Poole told the board on 9 December 1960 that ‘in accordance

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with arrangements made at the time he assumed the Chairmanship of the Company following the death of Lord Bracken, he now wished formally to tender his resignation as Chairman of the Company to take effect on the 31st December next and to propose the appointment of Lord Robbins as Chairman of the Company from the 1st January, 1961. Lord Drogheda seconded this proposal which was carried unanimously.’ Lord Robbins, of Clare Market, made his maiden speech on Wednesday 11 November 1959 (HLDebs vol 219 cols 508–13). He spoke on the report of the Radcliffe Committee on the Working of the Monetary System. As he disarmingly opened his remarks, ‘it is hard to think of a less suitable subject for a maiden speech’ but because it dealt with ‘matters with which from time to time I have been concerned . . . I should feel something of a coward’ not to speak on it. He followed the Labour peer Lord Pethick-Lawrence who had moved the motion ‘to call attention’ to the report, and was immediately followed by Lord Pakenham, who told the House of their first meeting at New College (see Chapter 6). Whether Robbins was embarrassed by that, he was embarrassed by Pakenham’s pointing out that ‘although he [Robbins] wrapped it up in his usual courteous way, he thinks that this is a rotten Report’. He and Pakenham spoke again the next day on the agreement between London and Dublin over the Lane Bequest (HLDebs vol 219 cols 500–7, 515–16, 592–4). The Radcliffe Report had been published in August 1959. It provided a detailed account of the way in which the UK monetary system worked in the 1950s and of the problems that the large national debt left from the war and immediate postwar years still created for monetary control. Lionel commended this in his first comments on the report (1959b) and in his maiden speech. But the report is best known for its statements of the unimportance of the money supply compared to ‘the whole liquidity position’ – such as ‘spending is not limited by the amount of money in existence . . . [but] related to the amount of money people think they can get hold of’ – and its recommendation that the monetary authorities (the Treasury and the Bank of England) operate on ‘the structure of interest rates’ rather than the supply of money, whose control was ‘[found] to be no more than an important facet of debt management’ (Committee on the Working of the Monetary System 1959, paras 389–97 and 514). It is no wonder Lionel was critical. His criticisms began with ‘this curious repudiation of some alleged overemphasis somewhere on the supply of money which occurs like a leitmotiv throughout the argument as though some peculiarly discreditable

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connection were being repudiated’. He attacked this with vigour. ‘First, I do not know a single economist since the 17th century who has argued that the supply of money is the only factor determining the volume of spending and the level of employment and prices.’ It had only been highlighted because it was a factor which could be controlled. Second, ‘to argue thus . . . is not to argue that the control of money supply . . . should be the only control applied’, and he knew of very few economists who had thought so. However, his ‘chief worry’ about the report was its diagnosis of the supposedly weak effects of monetary policy. From this he concluded, as he succinctly put it, ‘They [the members of the committee] believe in monetary policy, but they do not believe it very much.’ His judgments of their use of evidence were harsh: he was surprised they had attached weight to businessmen’s claims that they paid little regard to interest rates, given the low nominal rates in inflationary times, and ignored the historical evidence of successful anti-inflationary monetary policies. He mentioned as examples the West German stabilization of 1948 and the UK crisis of 1957. Hence, ‘I will not say that the Committee have actually thrown the baby out with the bath water . . . but I do suggest that the poor child is left perched very precariously on the side of the bath.’ Robbins had given evidence to the committee in July 1958. His written evidence, on the objectives and methods of monetary policy (Committee on the Working of the Monetary System 1960a, 211–19), was uncharacteristically academic. He argued first that the primary aim of monetary policy should be price stability. He admitted there was a potential conflict between this objective and that of high employment, but it was possible to aim for price stability and high employment (as long as fiscal policy was also utilized) unless the latter was defined as full employment. He then argued, on his usual grounds, for fixed (but adjustable under IMF rules) rather than floating exchange rates. As for the means of monetary policy, ‘It follows almost from the definition of the subject that the ultimate instrument of monetary policy must be control of money supply. In the last analysis it must be in their capacity to vary the size of the credit base that the power of the monetary authorities must reside.’ He was what was later called a ‘monetarist’: along with his emphasis on the control of the money supply, he noted the long and variable lags in the effects of monetary policy and, more importantly, the distinction between nominal and real interest rates too often ignored in twentieth-century British economics. He did not share the currently fashionable scepticism about the effects of changes in (shortterm) interest rates, especially when their effects on international capital flows were considered.

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When he gave oral evidence, on 24 July 1958, he received some very unsympathetic questioning from Alec Cairncross (Committee on the Working of the Monetary System 1960b, paras 10191–227). Sayers was absent. Cairncross challenged him on his observations on Brazil, which he mentioned in response to the chairman’s opening question on the possible benefits of inflation, on his concentration on monetary policy in his memorandum and on the reactions of banks to monetary policy changes. Franks tried to interrupt but Cairncross continued his interrogation. To take only one example, he asked, ‘What variations in interest rates would you regard as likely to exercise real effects on demand?’, to which Lionel had to reply: ‘I find it difficult to quantify until I am told the other variables in the situation. To take a specific situation, I do not think that anything much less than 7 per cent. would have done the trick last September, taking account of all the extraordinarily various and volatile elements in the situation. But that does not mean that I think that 7 per cent. is to be regarded as daily bread rather than very occasional medicine. I am not stonewalling; I just do not think it possible to give a simple quantitative answer to a question of this sort.’ When Roy Harrod wrote on 22 November to compliment Lionel on his speech, he was concerned that perhaps they should both have laid even more stress on the effectiveness of monetary policy in their evidence to the committee, especially because they were known to have disagreed strongly about the appropriate measures in 1957. Lionel replied on 3 December (Economists Correspondence May 1958-December 1959, RP): ‘The thing was just as much a surprise to me as it must have been to you. I had no idea that our friends were going off on this tack and even now I do not really understand what they were after. They declared passionately that they sacrificed no conviction on matters of principle in order to get unanimity, but I certainly feel that what they had done is going to make it much more difficult for the next few years to maintain a sensible public opinion in regard to policy.’ Per Jacobsson, to whom Cairncross made such a declaration when Jacobsson tackled him after Jacobsson’s Stamp Memorial Lecture on 19 November, shared this fear (Jacobsson Diary). Viner, who thought the report made ‘a contribution to knowledge but not . . . to policy or to wisdom’, ‘liked everything’ Lionel had said and thought he had chosen the right things to talk about (27 December 1959, Economists Correspondence January 1960-September 1961, RP). Sayers was upset by the attack on his professional competence. After reading the report of Lionel’s speech he wrote to him on 17 November (Articles & Letters on Public Affairs, RP):

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(1) Why do you imply that we put too much weight on the evidence of industrialists? . . . Have you overlooked para 474 (where incidentally, the true leitmotif of the Report appears)? (2) What makes you suppose that we overlooked the effects of the high rates of late ’57? All our non-official evidence was taken in ’58 or ’59. . . . (3) I fondly imagined that you regarded both Alec & myself as moderately knowledgeable on the monetary history of this & other countries. Is your charge that we suppressed the knowledge, & deliberately allowed the Committee to fly in the face of it? Or is it that you think we are ignorant. In effect, is your charge immorality (in the sense of failing in clear duty) or ignorance?

He also wrote that while he was glad Robbins had not dismissed their theoretical differences as a matter of exposition (as he had in his first comments on the report), ‘If you write off Alec & myself as professionally incompetent (as you appear to do . . . ), there still remains the question, how did such men as Radcliffe, Franks, & John Henry [Woods], after studying closely for over two years, with real help from a variety of economists as well as many others, come to the same general conclusion?’ (A later generation of economists is still wondering about the last question. The answer is perhaps in paragraph 474: ‘There is need for greater effort to quantify the effects of monetary and other measures, and to overcome the formidable theoretical and practical obstacles that stand in the way of precise assessment.’) Sayers’s reaction does not seem to have affected his cordial relations with Robbins, but one suspects he had always been wary of his senior colleague. Lionel continued to criticize the report, amplifying and strengthening his criticisms in lectures such as those he gave when he went to Professor Papi’s seminar in Rome again in May 1960 and at Edinburgh in February 1961 (Robbins 1962b) – but he did add some comments more sympathetic to Sayers when he republished the talk (1963a, 222–6). Harold Salvesen came to the Edinburgh lecture and was very pleased ‘to find that lines of thought (e.g. quantity theory) which had seemed to me to be significant, when I ceased to teach over thirty years ago, still seemed to you both significant and relevant’. Lionel set Monetary Policy with special reference to the Radcliffe Report as the topic for his own seminar and invited Harrod and Hawtrey as well as Paish to open discussions in the Lent term 1960.4 The Michaelmas term 1959 had been ‘more than usually full of tiresome preoccupations preventing scholarly enjoyment – we are still reforming 4

Salvesen to LCR, 13 February 1961, Economists Correspondence January 1960-September 1961; LCR, Professor Robbins’ Seminar, 20.1.60, Seminar Papers II; LCR to Harrod and Hawtrey, 3 December 1959, Economists Correspondence May 1958-December 1959, RP.

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the degree and I seem to spend half my time writing memoranda on the subject’, as he commented to T.S. Ashton on 4 January (General Correspondence January 1960-September 1961, RP). He told his sister Caroline on 12 December that he was so busy with degree reform that he did not expect to speak in the Lords again before the spring. His teaching commitments remained Economic Analysis on Monday and Wednesday mornings, the seminar on Monday afternoons and his class for economics specialists on Friday afternoons. Other afternoons were taken up with committees in and outside the School. He had been elected again, in June 1959, to represent the Academic Board on the Court of Governors and rejoined the Standing Committee a year later. As early as October 1951 George Allen of UCL was arguing for a reduction in the number of papers in the two-year Part I of the new BSc(Econ) introduced in 1949; other members of the Board of Studies in Economics argued they should wait for the first Part II results. When a subcommittee on the working of the new degree was set up a year later, Lionel, who naturally chaired it, thought it ‘unwise so soon . . . to envisage sweeping changes’ and hoped it would be possible to reduce the possible burden of Part I without changing the structure of the new degree (BSE 10 October 1951 and 15 October 1952, AC8/17/1/2). Five years later the Board of Studies had agreed (on 29 April 1953) on little more than making statistics an optional subject in Part I. Allen and his colleagues at UCL were ‘all very dissatisfied’ and urging further modifications. The Board still could not agree on any specific suggestions and decided six months later it would have ‘to examine more fundamental problems’ (Allen to LCR, January 1957, BSE 30 January, 27 February, 8 May and 12 June 1957, AC8/17/1/4). Lionel admitted the new degree needed major revision, but his view of what this should involve differed from most of his colleagues. It also differed from what was eventually decided three years later. In his Presidential address to the Royal Economic Society (1955d) he had indicated his preference for a four-year undergraduate degree on the Scottish model widely adopted in North America. This was only partly because it provided a broad general education probably more suitable than the highly specialized English degree for the majority of undergraduates. In economics, while the best honours graduates had no difficulty in finding employment as economists: ‘What good does it do the student, who is capable only of a poor lower second, to spend long days and laborious nights poring over the arcana of utility theory or the geometry of the analysis of the firm? . . . The greater part of the important work of the world is done by those to whom refinements of this sort will always be a mystery.’ A general degree would

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be more interesting and more useful to those students. But the other reason for his preference was that the longer degree could preserve the high quality of the English honours degree. For two years all students could take a broad range of subjects; thereafter ‘those who had proved their capacity [would go] forward to honours specialisation, others continuing for their final year with further general courses’. As for that honours specialization, the experience with the new degree in London had shown that one year was not enough to master the subject: it was ‘too much of a scramble’ and students had no time ‘to sit back and meditate on the field as a whole’ before the final examinations were upon them. Hence, if the honours student were to have a proper general education as well as the necessary specialization, ‘The [only] solution is a four-year degree.’ In an address to Convocation in January 1957 he made this proposal explicitly for the BSc(Econ) (Robbins 1958c). The idea of a four-year undergraduate degree did not fly. The BSE discussions in 1957–9 proceeded on the assumption of a three-year degree. In June 1958 Lionel thought the time had come to make ‘yet another attempt to get things right’. He tried to focus the discussion (Sub-Committee on the Reform of the Degree, Note by the Chairman, 3 June 1958, AC8/17/1/4): Experience in the past suggests that we are unlikely to make progress unless we have definite schemes to consider. There are so many general educational problems involved that unless we have something to focus our attention it is possible for us to go on rotating – forlorn and purposeless sputniks – at stratospheric level almost ad infinitum. I therefore offer the following suggestions as a basis of discussion. . . . The leading complaints about the present state of affairs seem to be . . . (a) that it involves too much work; (b) that it permits insufficient time for part II specialisation; (c) . . . that there is no eliminating test at the end of the first year, so that a proportion of candidates who should never be allowed to proceed further are carried for two years without examination, after which it seems inhuman to turn them out without providing them with some sort of a degree.

As he had told Convocation he was inclined to reject (a) and still did not want the number of Part I subjects reduced. He took (b) and (c) more seriously. He proposed a scheme for a one-year Part I and a two-year Part II in which there was both some specialization and some continued study of the ‘basic disciplines’ (economics, history and politics). The scheme was ‘very sketchy and open to amendment in all sorts of details. The essential question at this stage, however, is do we think that the main principle involved – a one year Part I and a two-year Part II – is worth investigating further?’

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Three long subcommittee meetings during the summer of 1958 produced a document which proposed only moving three of the present Part I papers, economics, government and one other, to a separate examination to be held at the end of the first year (Note by the Chairman, 8 October 1958, AC8/17/1/4). Even this modest change took two meetings of the Board of Studies to obtain sufficient lukewarm approval for the Economics and Government Departments to be asked to draft revised syllabuses for their subjects, and two more to discuss William Robson’s suggestions that the third paper should be history and that all students should take the three subjects in Part II (BSE 22 October, 5 and 19 November 1958, 28 January and 25 February 1959, AC8/17/1/4). In May 1959 Lionel felt obliged to call a subcommittee meeting to get ‘all the proprietors of various ideas . . . together round a small table’ and to ask them ‘What is really under discussion? Is it the proposal . . . from Professor Robson[?] . . . can the political scientists and the historians agree, or must they think up some other plan?’ The Board did accept the Robson plan a few days later, perhaps out of ‘sheer exhaustion’ as Lionel later surmised, and circulated draft regulations during the summer of 1959 (Record of discussion of subcommittee meeting on 6 May 1959, AC8/17/4/12; BSE 13 May 1959, AC8/17/1/4; LCR as reported in Reform of the Degree Committee 18.11.59, AC8/17/4/12). The discontent these created, especially among the junior staff, came to a head on 21 October. A meeting of Part I teachers voted overwhelmingly against examinations every year and for a two-year Part II allowing specialization. One of the junior staff, a ‘quiet-young-man-made-angry’, circulated an anonymous memorandum to all members of the academic staff. He argued cogently that there were three ways ‘to escape the present wasteful and confused degree’: to create a genuine social science degree, ‘but this ideal must wait, of course, until some one can do it’; to go back to the old degree; to keep the BSc(Econ) for general students and have separate BA degrees for sociology, history, etc. He thought there was ‘a lot to be said’ for going back to the old degree but more to be said for a marriage of the last two alternatives. They should keep and extend the best thing in the present degree, which was departmental specialism, and restore the most useful thing in the old degree, the first year examination (To all members of the Academic Staff – paid for and distributed privately, The Question of Degree, AC8/17/4/12). Lionel responded immediately and positively to the ‘QYM’ – who revealed himself to be Bernard Crick–and in doing so undid the mistake he had made ten years earlier by opting for the Carr-Saunders proposal of a two-year Part I

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(A note on the memorandum by the quiet-young-man-made-angry henceforward to be referred to as the QYM, 22 October 1959, AC8/17/4/12). ‘I don’t think that any of us feel quite happy about the present proposals. . . . But if, in this form, they arouse such strong and sincerely felt antipathies on the part of members of the junior staff who, far more than professors and readers, have to do the day to day work of tuition, then obviously even at this late hour and after all the tedium and sweat, in my judgment we ought to think again.’ He agreed, in particular, that they should think again about a second year divided between work for Parts I and II, and he strongly supported the QYM’s desire to get back to a one-year Part I and a two-year Part II. At the same time the old degree had been criticized for giving economics a privileged position and for being specialized. Hence he proposed a one-year Part I with four papers, of which economics, political science and history ‘or alternative for statisticians, accountants etc’ would be compulsory, and a two-year Part II with nine papers, in which the same three subjects would be required of all students, who would take five papers in their special subject and one in another subject of their own choosing. As for annual examinations, ‘There remains the position of those who positively believe that some examination at the end of the second year is desirable in order to keep laggards up to the mark and let virtuous men know where they stand. In spite of the QYM and my own earlier self [as an undergraduate], I have a spot of sympathy with this attitude. But I think that the best way to achieve the end in view is by way of collections rather than by way of examinations which count for the degree.’ Crick, who read Robbins’s reply before it was circulated, thought his proposals met QYM ‘in one glad word: completely’ (Crick to LCR, 21 October 1959, AC8/17/4/12). It was harder to persuade the old guard. Lionel deferred discussion of the draft regulations by the Board of Studies and called the subcomittee together. It was a long and fractious meeting. George Allen had already agreed with Lionel’s response to Crick; others, notably Michael Wise, Professor of Geography, continued to insist on retaining the two-year Part I (Reform of the Degree Committee 18.11.59, Allen to LCR, 26 October, Wise to LCR, 16 November 1959, AC8/17/4/12). Lionel made many of his own views very clear. Somewhat disingenuously he claimed that he hoped nobody would regard his latest proposals as ‘anything more than a contribution to the debate’ and that ‘He did not know how to proceed. . . . He wanted economists to go on studying political science, as these two things are closely connected.’ Wise interrupted: ‘You, Mr Chairman, had argued in this room for a more specialised degree in Economics. You quite recently argued about producing economic technicians . . .

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Chairman Said he had never argued, to his knowledge, that case for the three year degree. He thought that [he had] argued it for the four year degree. He was one of those who, when the present degree was shaped, definitely watered down the amount of Economics.’ When Wise asked him what degree he wanted for economics, he admitted that the economists were not agreed, most of the younger and some of the older economists wanting more specialization. Robbins drafted yet another paper on 8 December (AC8/17/4/12). There were now four possibilities: (a) We can agree to call off the movement for reform and go on as we are. (b) We can adopt . . . the Draft Regulations – the upshot of our work over the last twelve months or so. (c) We can agree to dissolve the existing degree and let each set of specialists have a degree of their own devising. (d) We can make another attempt to plan a general envelope degree, taking note of the criticisms which have come to light since the Draft Regulations were circulated.

The first was to be ‘rejected as perpetuating a state of affairs . . . satisfactory neither to the students nor to the teachers’ and would be ‘a confession of complete defeat and intellectual and moral impotence’ and the second was excluded by the circulation of Crick’s memorandum. The third was a ‘near possibility. Some of the economists would like it. I know the statisticians are straining at the leash to be on their own. . . . [However] . . . To abandon the idea of a degree which gives a firm grounding both in economics and political science would be to give up what the London School of Economics at least has stood for since its foundation. Nor would we really escape from . . . [administrative] difficulties. . . . The one serious criticism I have heard is Michael Wise’s contention that you cannot teach a special subject properly if at the same time the students have to be preparing for non-specialist papers. To this I would reply that under the old regulations for twenty years we did, and did so very successfully.

He enlisted Robson’s help in drafting a paper for the next Board of Studies meeting (Report of Sub-Committee on the Reform of the Degree, 8 January 1960), telling George Allen on 6 January that he hoped ‘the U.C. contingent, which really initiated the idea of change, will use all its powerful debating skills to crush irrelevant opposition’ (AC8/17/4/12). At that crucial meeting, on 3 February, the Board agreed to everything except to the number of papers (nine) in the final examination. Allen argued in the subcommittee for eight papers and the Board voted for that ‘by a large majority’. Once

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the Board finally settled the details and the timing of the introduction of the revised degree (October 1961), Lionel gave up the chairmanship he had held since 1947 (BSE 3 February, 2 March, 23 March, 27 April, 25 May and 23 November 1960, AC8/17/1/5). Under the new regulations a first year BSc(Econ) student was required to study economics, British government and history, either economic or political, and to choose two from a long list of alternative subjects, the choice depending on the student’s choice of special subject for Part II. While all students had to take some economics in Part II, the amount taken and the amount of history and politics depended on the special subject. (Economics specialists, for instance, had to take five papers in economics in the final examinations; they had to take political thought but could choose between history and mathematics.) Although Robbins (1971a, 215–16) hoped this degree was ‘rather more of a success’ than the 1950s degree, there was more specialization than he would have liked. Specialization won in the end. Even in the 1960s, when two thirds of LSE undergraduates took the BSc(Econ), ‘One out of every five undergraduates read for the Bachelor of Laws or for a BA Honours degree in Sociology, Anthropology, History, Geography, or even – a recent innovation – the combined Philosophy and Economics BA’ (Dahrendorf 1995, 413). Robbins strongly supported the last innovation, first proposed in 1954, which could be seen as a variant on the Oxford PPE (BSE 9 June and 26 November 1954, 23 February 1955, AC8/17/1/3). As first envisaged it included the three core subjects for economics specialists in the BSc(Econ) (principles, applied economics and the history of economic thought), modern economic history, logic and methodology, moral philosophy, political philosophy and the history of modern philosophy. The subcommittee (including Robbins and Turvey) which drew up detailed proposals argued for the new degree on the grounds of the ‘natural affinity’ between the two disciplines, decided there was no need for a paper in Government as ‘already our proposals include the study of a considerable volume of factual material’ and added a paper in the philosophy of social sciences (later dropped when the total number of final examination papers was reduced to eight in line with the revised BSc(Econ)) (Minutes of Subcommittee on Joint Degree in Philosophy and Economics, AC8/17/4/11). But although the degree included Lionel’s desiderata of economics, history and politics, it was a highly specialized degree designed for the academically inclined undergraduate. Single and double subject specialized honours degrees survived (with separate BSc degrees in Economics, Econometrics, Economic History, etc) but the BSc(Econ) came to an end in 1995.

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Christmas 1959 at Lyme Regis had ‘passed like a dream – a pleasant one’. As Lionel told Caroline on 14 January, ‘We had a [house] party which on occasion was up to nine’ – when Richard and Wendy were there with their children, two friends of Richard’s the artists Nicholas Georgiadis and Heinz Inlander, and Kurt Klappholz from LSE – ‘But somehow or other we all fitted in – and in spite of all I was able to do more work than I have ever done in such vacations.’ He found time to read work of his colleagues and the latest version of his former student Bob Rauner’s manuscript on Samuel Bailey and to commence writing his recollections of John Anderson for Anderson’s biographer.5 Iris and Lionel returned to Lyme for the Easter vacation. Anne and Christopher, now with a second child, came over from Paris where Christopher was The Times correspondent until, as Lionel told Caroline on 8 April 1960, ‘The F.T. Paris correspondent was needed at home & hearing that I had a son-in-law on the spot, Drogheda asked if I had any objection to their trying to poach him. Needless to say I hadn’t.’ Meanwhile his father’s health was declining and Nancy had been home from India since Christmas to visit him. Caroline intended to come in the summer but had to cancel her plans when Joe had a serious heart attack. Their father’s generosity was undiminished: he asked Caroline if there was anything he could do to help; she said ‘“Send me Nancy”, and so he did’, paying her fare so that she could go to the States before she returned to India (information from Nancy Robbins). Lionel decided to visit Caroline and Joe in the summer despite his father’s poor health. Robbins received two honorary degrees in the spring of 1960, a doctorate of letters from the University of Exeter on 3 May and a doctorate of laws from Cambridge on 9 June (The Times, 5 May and 10 June 1960). In between Lionel and Iris went to Italy for a fortnight. He had agreed to present a paper in Professor Papi’s seminar again, to lecture to the Societa Italiana per la Organizzazione Internazionale, also in Rome, and to lecture again at the Johns Hopkins Bologna Center. On the second of these he had sought the advice of Jacques Kahane, who suggested the topic of international monetary institutions, but during the Easter vacation he realized he was ‘hideously out of date with the more minute details of the subject’ and decided on ‘a more general philosophical talk on Liberalism and Internationalism’; by the time he finished it he also thought it would fit very well into a collection of 5

LCR to Paish, 4 January 1960, Economics Department Correspondence 1.10.55–30/8/61; LCR to Rauner, 4 January 1960, Economists Correspondence January 1960-September 1961; LCR to Wheeler-Bennett, 8 December 1959, General Correspondence September 1959-May 1960, RP.

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his essays he was now thinking of publishing (1963a, 134–54). He also told Kahane on 22 April (Economists Correspondence January 1960-September 1961, RP) that he and Iris were going to have to forgo a visit to Naples because they could not get a suitable flight; his friend suggested that they fly to Rome and the four of them drive to Naples together for a long weekend. Iris and Lionel also stayed with the Kahanes for the rest of their stay in Rome. At Bologna they enjoyed an evening with Bob Mundell, talking of Ezra Pound’s poetry and the future of the world, but on Monday morning (16 May) Lionel, phoning Anne in Paris, learned that his closest friend and brother-in-law Clive had died suddenly the day before. He and Iris flew back to London immediately after his lecture (LCR to Mundell, 18 May 1960, General Correspondence September 1959-May 1960, RP). ‘Thus the holiday which had been so happy ended sadly. But that does not wipe out the memory of golden days in Naples, Rome and Orvieto, and all the kindness and hospitality’ they had received from the Kahanes (LCR to Kahane, 18 May 1960, Economists Correspondence January 1960-September 1961, RP). Clive was buried beside his father in the churchyard at Monks Risborough. Lionel’s own father died, aged eighty-seven, in August. Lionel had flown to the States to visit Caroline and Joe on 8 July, having arranged to attend two sessions at the Merrill Centre for Economics in Southampton on Long Island in order to finance the trip. As he told his son on 31 July, he would have enjoyed the discussions, which were ‘absorbingly interesting from a professional point of view’, had he not been anxious about his father. He later described the sessions to Philip Cortney (31 October 1966, Day Book September ’66-February ’67, RP): ‘The seminars at Southampton were composed of exceedingly eminent public servants and business men from different parts of the world. They lasted a fortnight at a time, morning and evening, and were focussed for each fortnight on one outstanding cluster of problems – the two I attended dealt with public utility regulation and problems of international economic relations.’ They were skilfully chaired by Willard Thorp, the former Assistant Secretary of State who was now a professor of economics at Amherst College. At Ithan he went with Caroline and Joe to visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art, reporting at length to his son Richard on its splendid collection of modern masters. The day after he got back to London on 8 August Lionel went to Eastbourne before joining the family at Lyme. He told his sister the next day that he did not think his father would last much longer ‘& as I sat holding his hand watching those sad kind eyes, I felt how gladly I would have closed them in their last long sleep.’ His father died ten days later. He was cremated as he had requested – ‘a very simple dignified affair[:] . . . The service for the dead was

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read by a C. of E. friend of Rowland’s’ – on a clear windy day at Eastbourne (LCR to ICR, 25 August 1960). His ashes were later interred in the plot at Harmondsworth where his wives and the sons who had died in infancy were buried. His oldest son ‘[thought] of him much every day & the world seems much emptier without him’. In what remained of the vacation Lionel worked on a review for Economica of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (1960), which he had commenced before he went to America.6 He took immense care, repeatedly sending the long suffering Miss Beven new drafts for typing; as he told her on 18 July (Economics Department Correspondence 1.10.55–30 August 1961, RP), ‘having regard to my one time relationship with Hayek, I am anxious to get it all as right as I can’. He had just learned that Hayek’s first wife had died suddenly in her sleep: ‘She was a lively friendly creature who once she had outlived the shock of her truly shameful treatment, took a keen interest in her friends & her family & we shall all miss her much.’ In the final version of the review (Robbins 1961b), attempting to write ‘as I should talk if we were having a friendly discussion in the staff seminar’, he did not minimize his differences with Hayek on political philosophy. He criticized Hayek’s disposition to lump the nineteenth-century English Utilitarians together with Continental Rationalists, defending the former as ‘offer[ing] simply a criterion by which particular solutions could be judged’, and Hayek’s inclination to blame them for promoting collectivism: ‘It is true that Bentham and his followers were not doctrinaire individualists, . . . They 6

He also replied on 30 August to an enquiry from Rubinstein, Nash & Co, lawyers for Penguin Books, whether he would be willing to testify at proceedings over Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He wrote: I am perfectly willing to appear in court and to declare that in my opinion D.H. Lawrence was an important writer and that since it is an integral part of his work, it is undesirable that the publication of this particular work should be banned. I should also be willing to say that in my opinion it would not have the effect of tending to deprave or corrupt persons who are likely to read it. I think I ought to say, however, that I do not think very highly of this work as literature and regard it as exhibiting a very distinct falling off from the standard of such works as Sons and Lovers and the travel books. And, so far as the book is ‘supposed to have a message’, I find it extremely muddled and confused. If I were cross-examined by Counsel on these points I should be bound to reveal this attitude. But, of course, the fact that I do not think that it is a particularly good book and that I do not agree with its slant does not shake in the least my belief that to suppress it would be an absurd violation of the liberty proper to civilized communities. If all the books which one did not think quite first-rate or with which one did not find oneself in a hundred per cent agreement were suppressed, the literary scene would be different from what it is to-day. Rubenstein replied that he would not ask him to appear ‘although with great regret’ (General Correspondence June-December 1960, RP).

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recognized that there were conditions of society when economic paternalism was justifiable. They recognized too that there were cases where, external economies or diseconomies being conspicuous, some form of collectivist control was sanctioned by the test of utility; and not believing themselves to be in complete possession of all relevant social knowledge, they were not opposed to all experiments in collectivist organization. But in this, surely, they were only talking good sense and good economic analysis.’ As for Hayek on the postwar welfare state, he ‘[could] not regard all that has happened with the degree of disquiet which it so obviously arouses in Professor Hayek’: ‘I cannot believe, even on a very long-run assessment of values, that, in what is perhaps a blundering way, we have not achieved a considerable positive good’, especially when he compared contemporary social conditions in Britain with those of his youth. He thought Hayek was ‘too apt to extrapolate his apprehensions of evil and to assume that deviations from his norm lead to cumulatively to disaster’; with respect to the warnings Hayek had given in The Road to Serfdom, ‘What worries me is not the contention that this sort of thing may happen but rather any assumption that it must.’ He thought that the ‘very strong arguments of this most sincere and important book’ were often weakened by this tendency. When Machlup read the review he wrote Hayek on 7 April that he thought the time had come for a reconciliation between his friends and that Hayek ought to write to Robbins. Hayek replied that they had already resumed contact, on Lionel’s initiative (Machlup 44–1). On 27 September, after an evening at the Reform Club, Lionel had written a note (Hayek 46–25): Dear Fritz, I was worried to discover from Jacques [Kahane] that the vaguely familiar but unidentified figure I passed in the club last night must have been you, & that therefore I may have given a wrong impression. That we have never met all these years has not been altogether undeliberate on my part – I always felt that anything arranged would be painful to us both. But I would not have you think that were I to meet you casually & recognize you, I would not want to grasp your hand & to wish you well – for I have never wished otherwise than that. I have read your book with deep interest & have spent the greater part of a disturbed vacation writing a long review article about it. I don’t agree with all your formulations or judgments & say so. But I hope you will find that the article as a whole is inspired by nothing but friendly feeling & – to quote the last sentence – ‘admiration for the moral ardour & intellectual power which inspired the book & made it possible’. Yours, Lionel

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Hayek wrote to Lionel about the review. ‘This’, Lionel told his sister on 16 April, ‘pleased me a lot, partly because it reassured me that I had said nothing to hurt him, partly because in spite of all that has happened I still feel a considerable bond of friendship & gratitude for intellectual enjoyments shared in common’. Fritz and Lionel met for the first time in eleven years at the wedding of Hayek’s son Laurence on 15 July 1961. Two years later Lionel commented to his sister (30 March 1963) that since the reconciliation ‘we get on very well again although intellectually our paths are somewhat further apart. . . . I have always missed very much his company: for his reading & range of speculation is probably closer to mine than that of anyone else I know.’ By 1963 Hayek had left the University of Chicago for a permanent position at the University of Freiburg. As he often came to England, usually staying at the Reform, the two men met frequently in London in the ensuing years. Lionel’s comments on Hayek’s inaugural lecture at Freiburg and Hayek’s reaction illustrate the divergence of their thought. Lionel wrote on 4 January (Economists Correspondence October 1961-April 1964, RP): The one point which I think if I had been listening to you I should have entered a certain reserve for further reflection was in connection with your praise of the absence of practical experience for the student of economics. I see your point, and I am only too acutely aware how corrupting an influence being drawn into practical administration either of business or of the public services may be. But I am myself a teacher oppressed by the difficulty of conveying to people who have never had practical experience a due sense of proportion and – perhaps because I am becoming old and lazy – I am horrified at the tendency of a good many of the younger generation who spend their time in pure abstractions with hardly any reference whatever to the workaday world. If there is a scylla of practical absorption there is also a charybdis of irrelevant abstraction; and if one is thinking of the utility of the subject I really don’t know that I think the former is the worst. Perhaps the ideal solution would be to insist that noone should be appointed as a teacher without having a period of practical experience and then thereafter he should be enjoined to be on his guard against over much connection with his former contacts.

Hayek responded on 13 January (Hayek 46–25): ‘I knew that my remarks about participation in policy making would not have your entire approval. But I realise that this is a difficult problem; I did not mean to question that a period of practical experience is desirable and if you mean by this experience predominantly in business, I entirely agree with what you say. But I should not wish more than a small fraction of the future academic teachers to have

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been in government service. As one of my American friends said: “No one acquires a love of liberty working for government.”’ Lionel was not tempted to rejoin the Mont Pelerin Society. Relations between the secretary Albert Hunold and other members of the society, especially the American and British contingents, had deteriorated to the extent of open conflict at meetings in Princeton in 1958 and again in Oxford in 1959. In 1960 Hayek refused to continue as president while Hunold was secretary; both relinquished their positions in September but since R¨opke became president with Hunold as vice-president this did not end the conflict. The Americans moved to expel Hunold; the result was that both R¨opke and Hunold resigned. Hunold then wrote a selfjustificatory pamphlet How the Mont Pelerin Society lost its Soul, in which he particularly attacked Hayek and Machlup (Hartwell 1995, chapter 5). So when Hunold next asked Lionel to speak again at his institute, Lionel curtly replied (25 February 1963, Mont Pelerin Society Box 13): ‘I think I should say to you explicitly that it would be distasteful for me to have any further relations with anyone who has spoken as you have spoken in a recent publication of some of my most intimate friends and academic colleagues.’ A long grovelling letter from Hunold elicited an even more dismissive response on 30 April (Mont Pelerin Society Box 13): ‘I have not the slightest desire to be involved in the complicated details of your relations with the Mont Pelerin Society with which, as you know, for many years I have had nothing to do. I only know that in the publication you referred to and, indeed, in this letter, you referred to friends of mine in terms which from my point of view completely preclude any further relations between us.’ Lionel’s relations with Hunold had been cool for some years. It was not only because he knew of Hunold’s activities in the Mont Pelerin Society from Jewkes and others but because the last time Hunold dined at Meadway Close he had enquired: ‘Would you let your daughter marry a Jew?’ According to Richard Robbins, who was at the dinner, his father went white, said ‘Of course’ and said nothing more for the rest of the evening; ‘later he said, “That man will never cross the door again.”’7 Lionel’s Principles manuscript remained in the same state as it had been in the summer of 1959. The first pair of the four chapters, ‘The nature of the 7

Information from Richard Robbins. The dinner must have been in the second half of 1958, when there is a letter from Hunold to LCR thanking him for dinner at Meadway Close; LCR’s letters in the sparse subsequent correspondence (Mont Pelerin Society Box 8) are brief.

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economic’ and ‘The nature of economic analysis’, discussed the definition and the methodology of economics. As Lionel admitted, the first covered, ‘roughly speaking’, the same field as chapters I and II of Nature and Significance, about which he had not changed his views, but he hoped he had put them ‘in more acceptable terms and in a more conciliatory spirit than perhaps animated the somewhat youthful author of that earlier work’. On methodology, however, he emphasized the need for ‘ideas, conceptions of problems to be solved and possible solutions’ and the ‘indispensability’ of facts, citing Popper (1957) on the general nature of scientific discovery as well as his own writings in the later 1930s (1935g, 1938b).8 The third chapter explained the meaning of ‘rational action’ (essentially consistency), noting that ‘no less an authority than Professor Popper states . . . its use is perhaps the most important difference between the method of the natural and social sciences’. But when he came to the use of these ideas in economic analysis, he only got as far as the derivation and use of individual indifference curves and production possibility curves (after outlining and criticizing Jevons’s formulation of the relation between individual effort and output) in his fourth chapter, ‘Effort and output’. It appears that he initially intended to begin the book with a brief history of economic analysis but in a handwritten outline he moved this to follow the discussion of the subject matter of economics. This outline – Introductory; forms of rational action; the pure exchange economy; production; prices interest & output; change and growth – and one he prepared for Principles lectures in 1964/5 are similar except that in the latter the last two parts have become one: macroeconomics. That last part was to cover the quantity theory of money, the concepts of savings and investment, classical versus liquidity preference theories of interest, the consumption function and the general Keynesian system (including ‘critiques a` la Modigliani & Patinkin’) before some consideration of growth, public finance and international trade. His reading list for his Principles lectures in 1958/9 and 1959/60 indicates the standpoint he was taking: Marshall’s Principles, Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, Fisher’s Rate of Interest, Wicksell’s Lectures, Hicks’s Value and Capital, Pigou’s Economics of Welfare, Keynes’s General Theory and Patinkin’s Money, Interest and Prices. In 1964/5 and 1965/6 he recommended Robertson’s Lectures on Economic Principles 8

First Chapters of projected Principles and Copies of Draft Chapters for 1960 Principles, RP. Since he wrote the chapters in 1958/9 Popper’s Logic of Scientific Method (1959) would not have yet been published. He read Conjectures and Refutations (1963) as soon as it appeared and suggested, not for the first time, that Popper should be knighted: LCR to Sir Robert Knox, 31 January 1963, General Correspondence March 1962-January 1963, RP.

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(1957–9), Friedman’s Price Theory (1961), Baumol’s Economic Theory and Operations Analysis (1961) and a recent macroeconomics textbook in place of Knight, Wicksell, Keynes and Patinkin.9 The Michaelmas term of Robbins’s last year in his Chair of Economics began on 5 October 1960. It was a sad beginning. That day he gave the address at the funeral of his former favourite student Honor Croome, at the request of her husband Lewis: ‘This I did but I have seldom worried so much about anything . . . In the event . . . I think it was O.K. All very sad & one less in the so rapidly diminishing circle.’ Ten days later he gave the address at a ceremony unveiling a memorial plaque to Eddie Rose in the churchyard at Bletchley (LCR to ICR, 10 and 15 October 1960; ‘Honor Croome, 1908–1960’, Biographical Papers; ‘Eddie Rose, 1897–1958’, 27.10.60, Biographical Notices (Duplicates), RP). His letters to Caroline this term were inevitably full of the business of winding up his father’s estate (which amounted to about £156,000 to be divided equally among the four children). They were full of opera: a complete Ring cycle at Covent Garden with Birgit Nilsson as ‘a wonderful Brunnhilde’; Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex; Strauss’s Rosenkavalier with Regine Crespin, ‘the best Marschallin since [Lotte] Lehman in my judgment’ and ‘an absolutely superb revival’ of John Cranko’s 1953 production of Peter Grimes (LCR to ICR, 11 September, 10, 29 October, 25 November 1960). They were also full of developments at the School and his own position there. In the spring Caine had written formally to enquire whether Lionel, who would reach the first retirement age of sixty-two later in the year, wished to stay on until sixty-seven. Lionel asked on 3 May for time to consider his reply (Director Correspondence January 1955-April 1963, RP). Before he replied he contacted Oliver Poole on 24 May (History of Past Employment, RP): ‘As you will suspect, the subject I want to discuss is the suggestion that you made last year that at some time I might take the chairmanship at the F.T.’ He sought more information on the terms and conditions. His ‘present frame of mind’ was that with suitable terms ‘I should certainly want to undertake the job.’ On 14 June Caine sent Lionel’s formal letter asking permission to take on the FT chairmanship to Bridges as chairman of the governors, as it ‘raises a further difficult problem of outside activity’. (A recent such problem had been that of Ronald Edwards, who had to resign his professorship to become chairman of the Electricity Council.) Robbins claimed in his letter 9

Ms outline ‘Principles of Economic Analysis’, First Chapters of projected Principles; ts ‘Tentative plan for a principles course of thirty lectures’, Analysis 1965, RP; LSE Calendars.

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on 13 June that the chairmanship was not fulltime and should involve only one and a half days a week; he would probably be paid £5000 a year and expected, therefore, a reduction in his LSE salary (LCR Personal File C, LSE). After he had talked to Bridges, Caine told Lionel it was unlikely the Standing Committee would grant permission. Lionel responded on 1 July that in that case he would not want to continue in his fulltime position after his first retirement date. He asked to be allowed to hold his chair until the end of the 1960/1 academic year (at a reduced salary) if that were necessary for the University to confer the title of professor emeritus. With respect to parttime teaching, he would like to continue the graduate seminar, to lecture on the history of economic thought, to supervise a few graduate students and possibly also to chair the Graduate School Committee (Director Correspondence January 1955-April 1963, RP). On 5 July the Standing Committee agreed ‘with very great regret’ that Caine should tell Robbins that ‘in the view of the Standing Committee the office of Chairman of the Boards of Directors of The Financial News Ltd. and the Financial Times was not such an office as they could permit to be held concurrently with his professorship’. Although he did not say so at the time Robbins was disappointed and deeply hurt by the decision. On 16 August Lionel wrote to Caine to resign his seat on the Court of Governors (Director Correspondence January 1955-April 1963, RP). He and Poole had agreed he would take over the FT chairmanship on 1 January 1961 for five years in the first instance (which Poole confirmed on 23 August: History of Past Employment, RP). On the first day of term Caine reported the Standing Committee’s decision to the Appointments Committee: as he told the Standing Committee on 1 November, ‘one or two members expressed some doubts about the view that it would be impossible for him to combine his full-time Chair with the outside appointments’ but the committee agreed to recommend that the University seek to fill the chair from 1 October 1961. When Caine then asked Lionel on 6 October to stay on the Standing Committee until he could be replaced on the Court in December, Lionel hid his feelings no longer. Caine and Bridges were understandably disturbed by his response the next day (LCR Personal File C): The Standing Committee – advised by you and Edward – has inflicted on me a great humiliation. In the course of the years since the war, I have turned down offer after offer of advantageous employment, on the ground that it would interfere with my work here. . . . But when eventually I find something whose duties are so light as, in my judgment, to involve no such interference, and I ask permission to do it, then, although in many universities it would have been conceded without question, it is

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turned down summarily on the ground (a) that – I am using your own words – it would be incompatible with the proper discharge of my duties as a professor, and (b) possible embarrassment to the School – with its Laskian associations and all that (my addendum). At no stage was enquiry made by anyone as to the nature of the duties attached to the job suggested, or the degree of involvement in anything but the maintenance of standards and public relations at a high level. Because I have a great disinclination to fight about favours for myself and because, so far as Edward is concerned, I have a debt of gratitude which all this leaves quite unliquidated, I have accepted this decision . . . Because I do not wish to lose intellectual contacts here and because I love teaching, especially at the graduate levels, I have screwed myself up to these negotiations about what you call the continuing association and conducted them in what I hope is a friendly and co-operative tone. And if they terminate in agreement I do not think that you will find me lacking in the proper discharge of whatever obligations are involved. But do not let us deceive ourselves with smooth words. The sense of being part of the School as an entity, which has been one of the chief inspirations of my life for nearly forty years, is dead and buried – deeper than plummet ever sounded.

At the same time his colleagues were becoming aware he was unhappy at the governors’ ruling and some of the younger economists worried what would happen to the Economics Department if he were no longer chairman. As he had commented to Caroline six months earlier (on 28 March), ‘there are . . . some pretty painful complications about staff. Arnold Plant, in his middle age, has turned sour & hostile & is a great nuisance to the rest of us in the department. . . . Trying to keep the resulting trouble within bounds is almost a whole time job – distasteful too.’ One day in the first week of term he dropped in on John Watkins in the Philosophy Department, who recalled (in conversation on 23 March 1993 and in Watkins to Dahrendorf, 19 November 1988): ‘I don’t think that he’d come especially to see me; walking down the corridor he saw my door open, and looked in. He was obviously deeply upset. He told me that he was sorry to be leaving the School after all these years. This shocked me; I was ignorant of the background, and asked him to explain. He said that he had been offered the chairmanship of the FT, that he had decided to accept, and that this decision was final. But the FT job would’t take up too much of his time. . . . However, the School, in the shape of the Standing Committee . . . was insisting that if he accepted it he must resign his professorship.’ Caine told Bridges on 7 October that he had begun to hear comments from members of the staff that they thought the Standing Committee had been wrong in its decision. Within days he received a petition to that effect which had been organized and drafted by John Watkins and signed by forty-six mainly senior members of staff, asking the Standing Committee

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to reconsider (12 October 1960, LCR Personal File C). As Watkins told Dahrendorf, ‘We had heard that the Standing Committee had been much influenced by someone remarking that Lionel was deceiving himself in believing that he could get through the FT work in one day a week. We felt that the committee should not have presumed to understand these things better than Lionel; maybe Lionel was deceiving himself, but that could be left for time to show. . . . Our gut feeling was that there must be something wrong with a School decision that so distressed a man to whom the School owed so much.’ Caine later outlined the ‘principles’ of the Standing Committee’s decision in a letter to Watkins on 18 November (LCR Personal File C). The earlier agreement to Lionel’s joining the FT board had been an exception to an old policy of not giving permission to a fulltime member of staff to accept membership of the board of a public company. With respect to the chairmanship, some members of the committee, ‘especially those who themselves have experience of the practice of substantial business concerns’, saw a ‘very real distinction’ between a directorship and a chairmanship, in that the latter required a greater commitment which could at times conflict with teaching obligations and availability to students. There was also the matter of the large salary Robbins would receive. The Standing Committee revisited its decision on 1 November. Caine reported the Appointments Committee’s initial reaction, the petition and his own discussions with some members of the staff. He also reported that Lionel had now been asked by the government to undertake ‘a further parttime appointment which might occupy him approximately one day each month.’ (This was a directorship of British Petroleum Company Limited.) Not surprisingly perhaps, the committee reaffirmed their decision. But Caine also suggested, and the committee agreed, ‘a possible modification’, namely to ask the University of London to convert Lionel’s chair into a parttime chair. This had the advantage, which the minutes do not mention, of shifting the burden of the decision off the School and onto the University. As Watkins commented to Dahrendorf, the Director’s Report on the School for 1960/1 and Robbins’s autobiography both give the impression that this was Lionel’s original proposal which it was not. He guessed that ‘it was only after our petition that [this] possibility . . . emerged as a compromise with which Lionel could fall in happily enough, and that thereafter there was a gentleman’s agreement to cover up the initial clash.’ The ‘solution’ had been reached at a meeting on 16 October between Robbins and Bridges, who asked to see Lionel after the petition arrived. The day before he met Bridges Lionel commented to his sister: ‘Of course

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what they should have done was to have asked me to keep my chair part time – which would have meant that I still had the effective ruling of the department – & it is this that the juniors, fearing Plant etc. [as head of the department], say should have happened. But what they can do now I don’t know.’ When he had seen Bridges he told her on 29 October that ‘the optimal solution – a part time chair with continuing headship of the graduate school etc. may be arrived at. But the end is not yet & I’m not counting chickens.’ After the Standing Committee meeting he was optimistic: ‘The L.S.E. business is coming out alright after all. I have today been told that subject to University consent, the School will henceforward regard my chair as being on a half time basis which is what I wanted all along.’ He also told Caroline on 16 November about the BP board: ‘a light but interesting job carrying with it distinct pecuniary advantages’ (to the tune of £3250 a year, as the Secretary informed him on 16 December [History of Past Employment, RP]). The School’s proposal went first to the University’s Professoriate Committee on 30 November. The committee, disliking the idea of parttime chairs, ‘found the matter somewhat difficult’ but decided by a majority to recommend approval to the Academic Council of the Senate. The Academic Council, by a majority of twelve votes to nine, ‘came to the conclusion that they were unable to endorse’ the Professoriate Committee’s recommendation on 5 December. Among those who spoke against parttime chairs at both meetings was the Principal of King’s College, Peter Noble (Professoriate Committee, AC12/4/4; Academic Council, AC1/1/57). The School had to decide what to do next: the Principal of the University, Douglas Logan, advised it to withdraw the application. The Court of Governors, however, ‘expressed their full support for the course being pursued by the School’ on 8 December: Caine told Lionel the next day that there was ‘an unusually vigorous discussion and no dissent among those who spoke’ and that unless Lionel had changed his mind he would ask the Collegiate Council to debate the Professoriate Committee’s favourable recommendation (Director Correspondence January 1955-April 1963, RP). Logan, who had been in the minority in the Academic Council, advised Caine on 19 December that it would be better to ask the Academic Council to reconsider its decision (LCR Personal File C). Caine spoke at the Academic Council’s next meeting on 16 January 1961 – to no avail (AC1/1/57). As Caine told the Provost of UCL, Sir Ifor Evans, another supporter of the proposal, on 19 January, ‘I attended the meeting . . . and was given the opportunity of asking them if they would reconsider their decision about Robbins. They declined to do so and their negative recommendation will accordingly be

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reported to the Senate at next week’s meeting. I propose then to move that that recommendation be referred back for further consideration.’ Evans promised to support him (LCR Personal File C). A few days after the first Academic Council discussion Evans told Lionel that the Professorial Board of UCL had recommended him for an honorary fellowship of the college. Having started his university life at UCL Lionel was delighted, especially coming at that time when, Lionel claimed on 14 December (General Correspondence January-May 1961, RP), ‘the Principal of King’s College, whom I have never met and whom I had never even heard of before last week, is pursuing with concentrated intensity his campaign to compel my dissociation from the University in which I have served so long.’ When he went to the inaugural ceremony for new honorary fellows, and proposed the toast of the College at the Fellows’ Annual Dinner, in April 1961, he wore his Cambridge doctoral robes (Miss Beven to Ede & Ravenscroft, 25 April 1961, General Correspondence January-May 1961, RP). At the Senate meeting on 25 January Caine moved, again unsuccessfully, that the Academic Council’s negative recommendation be referred back to the Council for further consideration (ST 2/2/89). This was almost certainly a foregone conclusion. As the most outspoken opponent of parttime chairs Peter Noble had written to Logan on 21 December (AC 12/3/29): I really thought . . . that the [first] decision of the Academic Council was decisive (subject, of course, to ratification by the Senate) . . . [and] In view of what appeared in the press on Friday . . . [when The Times reported Robbins was to be a director of BP as well as chairman of the FT] I would very much prefer it if the London School of Economics would now withdraw this proposal and let the matter drop. If they go on it is bound to lead to discussion which I think will be unfortunate for the University and the School.

Evans told Lionel on 26 February (History of Past Employment, RP) that ‘Caine made a really excellent speech, but one might as well be talking to loads of hay.’ Lionel himself had written to Evans on 20 December (General Correspondence June-December 1960, RP): You must not think that I have been unduly depressed by all this business. I will confess to you that while the attitude of the School was still ambiguous, I was worried. . . . But although it is heresy to say so, there is something so extraordinarily phoney about one’s relationship with Bloomsbury [ie the University of London], settled over one’s head by people the majority of whom one knows nothing about, that, although naturally I would like to preserve the association [ie his University Chair] and should regard the decision to terminate it as being uncalled for by the facts of the sitution, I do not fancy that there will be a very deep psychological wound if that happens.

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But he was bitter about losing his chair, henceforward directing his bitterness against Peter Noble (Robbins 1971a, 269). Five years later he described himself (to Bill Ekserdjian, 29 July 1966, Personal Correspondence 1966– 70 A-F, RP) as ‘persona ingratissima in the circles of Convocation and the External Council to such an extent that when L.S.E. applied to the University for my Chair to be placed on a part time basis . . . the two leading members of these circles, Messrs Gaster and Hume, joined with the Principal of Kings College, London, in a successful attempt to defeat the application, which had already been approved by the Professoriate Committee. If I had been proposing to become Chairman of a chain of brothels, the opposition could not have been more determined or condemnatory.’ At the time he told his sister (on 29 January 1961) he would probably refuse to accept the title of emeritus professor: ‘Does one really wish to accept any mark of distinction from people one wholeheartedly despises?’ He had been upset in November when the Observer newspaper published a story that he might have to give up his fulltime position at LSE in order to assume the FT chairmanship and wrote indignantly to its editor, twice, on the second occasion pointing out that publication might prejudice the outcome of the University’s deliberations (LCR to David Astor, 21 and 29 November 1960, General Correspondence June-December 1960, RP). He was also upset in February when the Evening Standard reported he was ‘Leaving L.S.E.’ The School issued a denial: while ‘Professor Lord Robbins will . . . retire from his professorship on 30 September next . . . [he] has agreed to continue to assist in the teaching and other work of the School, though without the formal status of Professor of the University of London.’10 At LSE the Standing Committee had decided on 13 December that, pending the Senate’s decision, Lionel’s salary would be halved as from 1 January 1961. The Appointments Committee asked that ‘whatever might be the status of the teaching appointment . . . [after the end of the current academic year] he should . . . continue to be one of their number’ for another five years. After the Senate defeat, Caine proposed that once Lionel officially retired on 30 September 1961 he would be asked to continue for five years as a parttime teacher at half his professorial salary of £3600 a year. The Standing Committee agreed on 14 February that the salary and other terms and conditions of appointment of Lord Robbins, as a parttime member of the teaching staff of the School from 1 October 1961 for five years, 10

The many press comments included: ‘Lord Robbins to Take Job in the City?’, The Observer, 20 November 1960, ‘Leaving L.S.E.’ Evening Standard, 1 February, ‘No formal status’, Evening Standard, 2 February, ‘Lord Robbins to give up Chair School of Economics’, The Times, 2 February, ‘Lord Robbins’s Professorship to be ended’, Daily Telegraph, 2 February, ‘Change of Chair’, The Guardian, 3 February 1961, Photos & Career Cuttings, RP.

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be in all respects that are under the control of the School identical with what they would have been if the School’s application to the Senate of the University . . . had been approved, and that he should continue, for all the internal purposes of the School, to have the status he at present has as a Professor, including membership of all committees and other bodies within the School of which he would as a Professor have been a member.

Lionel thus claimed to Poole on 30 January (History of Past Employment, RP): ‘As regards the School, . . . I shall be on a half-time basis as regards pay. But for the rest, my position is virtually unchanged. This is just what I wanted.’ In the Lent term 1961 he completed his lectures on Economic Analysis (for what he thought would be the last time) and ran his class for economics specialists as well as the seminar with Phillips. In October he returned to teaching the History of Economic Thought – which he continued to teach long after he reached his originally intended retirement date. In May 1961 Caine told the University that Robbins did not want the title of Emeritus Professor; Lionel told Caroline on 4 June that ‘since I may not hold my chair as was asked, nothing will induce me to accept the ersatz title. I shall have to get used to being called a lord.’ It was as Lord Robbins that he undertook his most famous role in public life, the chair of the Committee on Higher Education in 1961–3.

TWENTY-THREE

The Robbins Report

The Conservative government under Harold Macmillan had been reelected in October 1959 with an increased majority: a result Lionel Robbins had not expected, even though, as he commented to Caroline on 11 October, it was ‘a striking vindication of the maxim that you don’t shoot Santa Claus’. On 5 December he told her he had been unexpectedly summoned to see R.A. Butler, Home Secretary since 1955, and was even more surprised to be invited ‘to be head of a committee, which for technical reasons is not to be a Royal Commission but which in most respects will resemble one, which is to investigate the future of University Education & research in this country. This is a very big job – two years at least – and at first my instinct was to refuse.’ As he wrote (1971a, 273), he told Butler, ‘as politely as I could’, that he would prefer to devote time to his new position at the FT and to writing his book on the principles of economics. Butler urged him to talk to Tom Padmore, now Sir Thomas Padmore and second secretary of the Treasury. Padmore knew Lionel well: when they lunched together he deployed an argument Lionel could not counter: ‘he just asked me why I did not want to do this thing. I explained that . . . the next few years were probably my last opportunity of writing a book which I had been wanting to write most of my academic life. At this, with friendly directness, he asked if I thought that anything I had in mind to write was likely to be as important as trying to sort out the contemporary problems of the system of higher education in this country. . . . I could not honestly deny it.’ So, within forty-eight hours of Butler’s invitation, Lionel had accepted it (Butler to LCR, 1 December 1960, Career, RP), telling his sister he expected the task would mean ‘at least 1 day per week taking evidence, visiting the U.S. & the continent & eventually writing the main part of the report, so I shall clearly have my plate full for some time to come. But at least I shan’t be bored.’ 858

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The 1950s saw a considerable expansion in the numbers of university students in Great Britain. The undergraduate population had risen from 78,000 in 1949/50 to 90,000 in 1960/1 (compared with 47,000 before the Second World War). But the 1949/50 figure reflected the influx of ex-soldiers along with eighteen and nineteen year olds (so that the total fell in the mid1950s) and the 1960/1 figure represented only 4 per cent of the usual age group, a very low proportion although it was an improvement on less than 2 per cent in 1938 (Stewart 1989, 48). Including those in teacher training colleges and other further education institutions, the number of students in fulltime higher education was only 8 per cent of their age group (Committee on Higher Education 1963, 16). Most of this expansion occurred in the twenty-one existing universities and university colleges. The terms of reference for the University Grants Committee (UGC) had, however, included the possibility of new universities since 1946, after the Barlow Report on Scientific Manpower recommended an expansion of student places to at least 90,000 by 1955. One (Keele) was created (as the University College of North Staffordshire) in 1950 and seven others were in various stages of planning in 1960/1 (Sussex, York, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Warwick and Lancaster) (Stewart 1989, 46–56).1 Thus (ibid., 96), ‘The extension plans were all there by 1960 but not the bricks and mortar, the staff, or the places for the larger numbers coming from the sixth forms’, numbers increased by the postwar bulge in the birth rate and the consequences of the Butler Education Act of 1944 which brought in free secondary education. Furthermore, because the universities were funded, via the UGC, by the Treasury while schools and colleges came under the Ministry of Education, ‘It was nobody’s job . . . to try and co-ordinate policy for higher education as a whole.’ Hence the need for a committee to review higher education in Britain, and for a small committee rather than a cumbersome Royal Commission so that it could report quickly. Butler and his colleagues had decided on a committee of enquiry into fulltime higher education by July 1960. The terms of reference were comprehensive (Committee on Higher Education 1963, 1): to review the pattern of full-time higher education in Great Britain and in the light of national needs and resources to advise Her Majesty’s Government on what principles its long-term development should be based. In particular, to advise, in the light of these principles, whether there should be any changes in that pattern, 1

The increase in the number of universities funded by the UGC was larger as it rose when several university colleges teaching for external University of London degrees became independent universities (Southampton, Hull, Exeter, Leicester and Keele).

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whether any new types of institution are desirable and whether any modifications should be made in the present arrangements for planning and co-ordinating the development of the various types of institution.

The committee’s task was made manageable by the restriction to fulltime studies and concentration on the universities, teacher training colleges and other colleges such as the Colleges of Advanced Technology (CATs) which provided further education beyond the Advanced Level of the General Certificate of Education, the higher grade of the Scottish Certificate of Education and the Ordinary National Certificate. In a discussion with the Home Secretary of the composition of the committee on 2 November 1960, only one name for its chairman was put forward, Lord Robbins.2 The government did not decide on the other members until he had agreed to serve. It took several weeks: Butler commented on the provisional list drawn up by Padmore and other officials that ‘there is no Cambridge or indeed Oxford Man’; the Minister of Science was ‘adamant that Sir Patrick Linstead should be included and . . . against the inclusion of Sir David Anderson’; the Secretary of State for Scotland was insistent that Anderson should be included; officials worried that ‘Mr Shearman was the only person . . . of Left Wing views’; the Minister of Education thought there should be more than one woman; and so on. Robbins himself insisted the committee should not have more than twelve members including the chairman (Higher Education, Note of a meeting held at the Treasury . . . 5th January 1961). When Padmore told him it might have to be thirteen, to accommodate ministers’ conflicting demands, he was, Padmore noted on 12 January, ‘very sad at this news but of course being a sensible man he will not make a fuss’. (When the Prime Minister then minuted Butler that there ought to be fourteen members, Padmore warned Butler that if this happened Lionel would make a fuss.) In the event Robbins achieved his maximum of twelve when Sir Charles Snow, and then Sir Denys Page invited in his place, refused to serve. On 7 February Padmore told Stephens that Butler, ‘though disappointed, [was] in favour of leaving the membership as it stands. . . . Robbins himself is strongly in favour of this; and so are the rest of us – since we feel that there is a real danger that the addition of another “Oxbridge” member would make the Committee over-loaded with dons.’ The first list shown to Lionel by Padmore on 6 January comprised Robbins himself, Sir Philip Morris, Professor James Drever, Sir David Anderson, 2

The minutes of this and other meetings and correspondence on the composition of the ‘Robbins Committee’ are in ED116/11, TNA. The minutes of the committee itself are in ED116/1–9, its papers in ED117/1–30.

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Dame Kitty Anderson, H.C. Shearman, Basil Fletcher or Lionel Elvin, Sir Patrick Linstead, Sir Edward Herbert, Anthony Chenevix-Trench, R.B. Southall, and Sir Charles Snow or Sir Robert Shone (to keep the total to twelve). When it appeared there would be thirteen members, Lionel chose Dr Helen Gardner over Professor Denys Page, agreeing with the Minister of Education on the need for two women. Gardner, who is best known for her work on the poets John Donne and T.S. Eliot, was then a fellow of St Hilda’s College Oxford. Kitty Anderson was headmistress of the North London Collegiate School; she was also an old friend of Caroline Robbins, having been a fellow undergraduate at Royal Holloway College, and Lionel soon ‘conceived a considerable liking’ for her (LCR to ICR, 29 March 1961). Fletcher was Professor of Education at the University of Leeds, Elvin Director of the Institute of Education of London University. Elvin met the concern that Shearman would otherwise be the only member with leftwing views and he had both Cambridge and Oxford connections. He had been a scholar and a fellow of Trinity Hall Cambridge and Principal of Ruskin College Oxford; at Cambridge he had been the Labour candidate for the University seat in Parliament in 1935. Shearman, chairman of the Education Committee of the London County Council at the time of his appointment, had also been an unsuccessful Labour candidate (in the 1920s) and he had spent many years working for the WEA and the extramural department of London University. Morris was vice-chancellor of Bristol University, a former chairman of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of English universities and the wartime Director of Army Education among many other positions. John Carswell, a Treasury assessor to the Higher Education Committee, noted the contrast between Robbins and Morris (1985, 32–3): ‘one leonine, eloquent and affable, the other almost clerkly, precise, unobtrusive and hard as a diamond. On a first meeting Morris struck one as insignificant. He seemed below average height, his hair was plastered down, his style was demure. Yet he was probably the most powerful university man of that time [with] a power stretching far beyond the universities’ and he had a great influence on the Report. Linstead, the scientist on the committee, was another powerful university head, Rector of Imperial College London. Chenevix-Trench, headmaster of Bradfield school, became headmaster of Eton during the committee’s existence. Drever, ‘a mild, earnest, likeable Scot’ (ibid., 31), was then Professor of Psychology at Edinburgh and later the first Principal of the University of Dundee. The second Scottish university man was Sir David Anderson, director of the Royal College of Science and Technology Glasgow 1946–59, who along with R.B. Southall of BP,

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vice-president of the University College of Swansea, had little to say in the committee. Neither in the event did Sir Edward Herbert, a shipbuilder and bank director, who missed some of the early meetings, had a heart attack in 1962 and died in 1963 before the committee reported (Lady Herbert to LCR, 20 May 1962; obituary notice, The Times, 30 April 1963).3 Lionel had not met several of the members before. He went round to the Institute of Education to meet Elvin, who ‘took to him at once’ finding him ‘extrovert, handsome, a physical presence. . . . From the first I liked him’.4 On reading Robbins’s autobiography Elvin was surprised they had not met earlier as they had many mutual friends (Elvin to LCR, 23 April 1972, 1972 Correspondence, RP). Elvin thoroughly approved of Robbins’s insistence that the committee should be small to permit conversation and that none of its members should regard themselves as representatives of particular interests. Lionel’s appointment had been announced by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons on 20 December 1960. The committee’s membership was announced in February and the committee began to meet in March 1961. In between other activities Lionel began to read ‘dull books & pamphlets on education’ (LCR to ICR, 25 February 1961). One of the less dull books was Newman’s Idea of a University (1891), but although Lionel enjoyed the prose style, he did not find it helpful (ts ‘Charter Day Address – Berkeley, 26.3.65’, Miscellaneous Education, RP): ‘Indeed, in the end, I found much of it – its repudiation of utility, its hostility to research, its subordination of all disciplines to theology – positively repellent. . . . [I]t convinced me that to attempt to describe our [the committee’s] objectives in terms of any single aim must necessarily be invalid and misleading.’ The other activities not only included the chairmanship of the FT, which was ‘proving easier than I thought’ (as he commented to Jacques Kahane on 20 January: General Correspondence January–May 1961, RP), the BP board whose first meeting he found ‘very interesting but it will take months to get used to the intricacies of the business’ (his comment to his sister on 15 January) and the boards of the Royal Opera House and the National Gallery – to which he had returned in October 1960 – but also the creation of the new University of York, in which he had been involved since the spring of 1960. 3

4

Of those considered who did not serve, Shone was a businessman with an economics background, Snow the scientist and novelist who bridged the ‘two cultures’ of his 1959 Rede lectures at Cambridge, Page the Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge and Master of Jesus College. Linstead became a trustee of the National Gallery in 1962. I am greatly indebted to the late Lionel Elvin and to Lord Moser for very helpful conversations about the Higher Education Committee.

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York’s suitability as a site for a university had been recognized since the seventieth century. In 1947 a group of enthusiastic promoters, including J.B. Morrell, a longstanding director of the Joseph Rowntree Social Service Trust, and the new Dean of York Eric Milner-White had approached the UGC and received a kind but noncommittal reception, which the group took as a challenge rather than a rebuff. By December 1959, when a Promotion Committee of the York Academic Trust established in 1954 made a formal approach to the UGC, the case for York as a city of learning had been strengthened by the creation of the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research and the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies during the 1950s. ‘York’s case [also] had a degree of strength perhaps more apparent to the UGC than to the promoters: the imminence of a national crisis of student numbers’: by April 1960 the government had given its approval in principle to two new universities – East Anglia and York. As at Sussex the next step requested by the UGC was the appointment of an Academic Planning Board, ‘a small body composed of three or four persons of exceptional academic distinction, a vice-chancellor from another university, a lay representative of industry or the professions, and an eminent member of the local community’, which would draw up academic guidelines, recommend the first vice-chancellor, help to appoint the first professors and to prepare a charter. Robbins was asked to chair it, perhaps because of the emphasis in the discussions with the UGC on York as an appropriate place for the study of the social sciences (James 1966, 32–5; Storm-Clark 1981, 285–98). In the autumn and winter of 1960/1 he paid many visits to York to confer with members of the Promotion Committee, the Rowntree Trust, the Archbishop of York, the Lord Mayor and others. It was, he told Caroline on 25 November, ‘a fascinating job thinking out the basis of something which may last a thousand years. The main task of course is to get a suitable Vice Chancellor at an early stage.’ The Planning Board chose Lord James of Rusholme, the former High Master of Manchester Grammar School who had been created a peer at the same time as Lionel. Lionel did not know him well but he was very impressed with him at the interview in January 1961, and they became good friends. In the early spring he was writing the Planning Board’s report (University of York Academic Planning Board, Interim Report April 1961). When it was ready, and had been seen by the UGC, he announced it and the appointment of James as guest speaker at the annual Lycett Green dinner of the Friends of York Art Gallery. According to the reports in the Yorkshire Post and the Yorkshire Evening Press on 18 March (Photos & Career Cuttings, RP), he said he ‘felt very proud, almost conceited’ that James had been chosen: ‘I don’t think you could get a better

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Vice-Chancellor. . . . York at the present moment is, to me, an extraordinarly exciting centre. Something is happening here, here and now, which is going to affect this city, and may affect the history of the country, for the next thousand years.’ He told his sister on 12 March that he was ‘glad to have done this job’ which was good preparation for the Higher Education Committee. James (1966, 35) commented: ‘No account of the University of York would be complete that did not pay a tribute to the work of Lord Robbins . . . and his colleagues. However long the university exists it will always owe them a great debt.’ The report refrained from making detailed recommendations on the composition of degree courses but was more definite in its recommendations on the government and organization of the university. It suggested honours degrees in a range of major subjects, each of which could be studied with a subsidiary subject, a degree structure more similar to combined honours degrees than to the broader ‘schools of studies’ at Sussex and East Anglia. But ‘In practice, York did come quite close to the idea of a “school” . . . in one area: the social sciences.’ From 1963 (when the first students arrived) to 1968 the social science degree consisted of a Part I, taken over five terms, of economics, economic and social history, statistics, politics, sociology, logic and scientific method plus a supplementary subject, and a four-term Part II of specialization in one discipline, which is very close to one of the ways envisaged in the struggle to produce a suitably broad BSc(Econ) in London. Each subject or closely related group of subjects was to be administered by a Board of Studies, responsible to an elected General Board, with appointments and promotions the responsibility of a separate Professorial Board. This too has been seen as ‘an ingenious compromise, possibly derived from Lord Robbins’s experience at the London School of Economics’ (Storm-Clark 1981, 299–300). As the report put it, ‘Clearly, nothing but confusion and ill-feeling can result from arrangements which permit the discussion of appointments, promotion and suchlike matters by a “democratic” body. But against this, experience tends to show that there is a very positive gain to be derived from the full participation of all the members of the teaching body in the shaping of [other] matters of policy . . . [which] tends to produce a harmonious academic atmosphere.’ The report also recommended there should be postgraduate studies from the beginning, which would allow academic staff to teach at both graduate and undergraduate levels, as a partial solution to ‘the vexed question of specialisation’. To quote the report, ‘We bow to the alleged necessities of the present financial situation and agree that the length of the normal undergraduate course should be three years. We venture to suggest, however,

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that . . . some approach to the superior system of a four-year degree course might be made . . . and therefore recommend that students who at the end of three years are classified as firsts or upper seconds should be allowed to proceed forthwith to take a master’s degree by papers after one year’s further training.’ Among the earliest academic appointments was Lionel’s former junior colleague, Alan Peacock, whom Lionel persuaded to leave his chair of political economy at Edinburgh in order to set up the social sciences at York. One of his first achievements was to persuade the vice-chancellor to create a department of music (Peacock 1993, 18–21). The Academic Planning Board became an Academic Advisory Committee and remained in existence until 1968. The Planning Board recognized from the outset that York would have to be a residential university given the shortage of lodgings in a small city: the choice was halls of residence or colleges. It shared the preference of the York Academic Trust for colleges (the Oxbridge not the London variety, except that they would neither be responsible for admitting students nor self-governing) (James 1966, 35–40; Storm-Clark 1981, 300–8). It fell to James, who strongly supported the collegiate idea, to arrange for the translation of these recommendations into practice. His close collaboration with the architects ‘resulted in the best of the new universities visually and structurally’ (Pevsner 1972, 251–2), beginning with the first two colleges and a group of laboratories opened in September 1965 on a site at Heslington two miles from the centre of York. (The university opened in 1963 with 215 undergraduates and 13 graduate students in two much older buildings.) Lionel attended the official opening by HM The Queen and HRH The Duke of Edinburgh of the first new buildings and went back six weeks later for a meeting of the Academic Advisory Committee which he was still chairing. This was, he told his sister on 5 December, the first time I had had the opportunity of seeing the two first colleges in operation – the Queen’s opening six weeks ago was too short for one to see anything – and it did the heart good to see these splendid buildings filled with wholesome, lively young people and looked after by a staff at least ten years younger than the national average. The site was virgin only four years ago & as I looked out at the reflections of the many windows in the college lake, I felt a real Faustian moment. Goethe was surely right: there are few things more moving than the sight of buildings & civic works whose erection one has had something to do with.

In the summer of 1960 John Witt, who had succeeded Lionel as the chairman of the National Gallery trustees, recommended his reappointment as a trustee, in place of Lord Crawford who was retiring (Witt to Stephens,

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15 June 1960, NG26/120). Some of the issues Robbins had tackled as chairman in 1954–9 were still on the trustees’ agenda, including the Hampton site (see Chapter 21). When Witt told him the trustees were worried that the government was not making its intentions clear, Lionel immediately informed Frank Lee, now Joint Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, of the gallery’s worries. When Lee had ascertained the current state of play in the Treasury and Ministry of Works, he asked Lionel to ask Witt not to press for a written reply on the subject in the immediate future and agreed to talk to Witt himself. He told Witt he would tackle the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Selwyn Lloyd, on the matter and promised to warn him in advance if any decision adverse to the gallery was likely to be taken – giving the same assurance to Sir Geoffrey Keynes, the chairman of the National Portrait Gallery, as the long-term intention for the Hampton site was to use it for a new building for the NPG and to build the National Gallery extension on the NPG site. A fortnight later he raised the matter with the Chancellor. Selwyn Lloyd visited the two galleries and the Hampton site in January 1961; he decided it would indeed be a mistake to let the site for a commercial purpose for as long as twenty-five–thirty years.5 Other ministers including the Prime Minister had to be persuaded to accept the loss of revenue, but eventually the Minister of Works announced on 18 October that he would let the site on a short-term basis while plans for new buildings for the two galleries were being prepared. It was leased to National Car Parks for what turned out to be nearly thirty years (Amery 1991, 42). In 1960 Lionel had been worried about ‘the Richard problem’, the deteriorating state of his son’s marriage. Early in the new year it was resolved when he and Wendy separated and soon divorced. Lionel insisted that Richard’s sons should be adequately provided for and therefore worried about Richard’s setting up a new home with Brenda Roberts. But while he thought at first that Richard had been ‘a perfect idiot’, he increasingly sympathized with him, as Iris and Anne already did. He also noticed the striking improvement in Richard’s painting when the decision to part had been taken (LCR to ICR, 23 December 1960, 9 and 22 January 1961). He had met Brenda once, by embarrassing chance when he had taken Richard to Covent Garden: he had ‘talked to her at some length about nothing in particular & I must say,’ he told Caroline on 14 January, ‘she comported herself with great poise & dignity – a sensitive & intelligent type’. By 12 March, ‘Iris & I are now screwing ourselves up to asking them both in for 5

Lee to Sir Ronald Harris, The Hampton Site, 22 August, 5 and 8 September 1960, T227/1950; Lee to Harris, Hampton Site, 13 October, Lee to Hubback, 27 October and 17 January, Harris to Lee, 31 August 1961, T227/1951, TNA.

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a meal – which seems the only civilized thing to do.’ By 30 July, observing his son’s contentment, he was sure that the present state of affairs was a great improvement, even for the two children who spent weekends with their father (and Brenda) and often came down to Lyme with either Richard and Brenda or Wendy. One consequence of the announcement of the Committee on Higher Education was that Lionel started seeing Nathan Isaacs again, with his second wife Evelyn Lawrence. Susie had died in 1948. Evelyn Lawrence, who had been a contemporary of Lionel’s at LSE, had known the Isaacs since she was on the staff of their Malting House School in Cambridge in 1926–8; since 1943 she had been the director of the National Froebel Foundation. Nathan wrote to Lionel in February 1961 to draw his attention to the work of the foundation. They arranged to meet and Lionel and Iris dined in London with Nathan and Evelyn on 9 March (Isaacs to LCR, 11 February, LCR to Isaacs, 17 and 20 February and 6 March 1961, General Correspondence January–May 1961, RP). The Robbinses subsequently visited the Isaacs at their cottage looking out over Cader Idris in Wales. But in 1966 Nathan had a heart attack: when Lionel visited him he ‘hadn’t seen him for three years. But health apart he doesn’t change . . . he’s much the same Artillery recruit who when I marched the members of the Jewish race down to the Woolwich synagogue one Saturday in 1917, stepped forward and asked to be excused on the grounds that he was an atheist’ (LCR to ICR, 23 January 1966). Unfortunately he died a few weeks later. Richard and Brenda became part owners of the Isaacs cottage with friends. The Committee on Higher Education began meeting on Friday 10 March 1961 at Old County Hall, Spring Gardens, where it was given offices for its fifteen-strong secretariat and research staff (Carswell 1985, 28). Lionel immediately suggested that ‘in view of the arduous, though rewarding, task’ they had ahead of them, they should meet every Friday until July and then resume again in September. Later on they might have to meet for weekends, they would certainly have to take evidence in Scotland and perhaps Wales and visit other places in Britain, and because ‘first hand foreign experience was essential’ they would have to visit the USA, the Soviet Union and other countries (HE(61) Minutes 1). In the event they held 111 meetings over two and a half years, held sittings in Cardiff and Edinburgh and visited universities and colleges in Britain, and made visits to first Switzerland (July 1961), then Holland, France and Germany in January, February and March 1962, the US for three weeks in April and May, the USSR in June and finally Sweden in October 1962 (Committee on Higher Education 1963, 1, 302–3).

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The visit to the USSR had the added bonus for Lionel of the opportunity to visit the Hermitage museum in Leningrad (LCR to Vladimir Dyachenko, 9 March 1961, General Correspondence January–May 1961, RP). Other members enjoyed the bonus, which extended to visiting art galleries out of hours on all their trips. In Switzerland they were shown round the Oskar Reinhart collection at Winterthur by Reinhart himself. They also visited the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh and the National Gallery of Wales in Cardiff (information from Lionel Elvin). At the first meeting the committee discussed its terms of reference as well as its procedure. Because the terms were so broad the committee had to decide on the ‘principal issues to which they would give attention . . . [and] in due course . . . to consider the ends of education as well as its means’. According to one of those present (Claus Moser), Robbins spoke at some length as how he intended to operate: the committee’s report had to have an underlying philosophy, it had to be ‘idealistic but very practical’ and everything should be argued out in terms of evidence. Lionel tackled the committee’s task in a similar fashion to that of the Queen’s Hall Committee, when he had wanted an estimate of the demand for concerts as well as statistics on their supply (see Chapter 20). The new committee should not only acquire detailed and comprehensive data on higher education in Britain and other countries, but it should estimate the likely future demand for fulltime higher education and compare that with the current provision of higher education, in order to work out what extra provision would be needed in the next, say, twenty years. For this he needed help. Ten days after he told Butler he would chair the committee he had telephoned Claus Moser, a lecturer in statistics at LSE, who was working at home that day, and asked him to become the statistical adviser to the committee. Moser, for whom Robbins, in Moser’s early years at LSE, had been ‘one of the people in the SCR I was most frightened to meet’, had never been telephoned by Robbins before. Indeed they had not talked together at any length until the time of the Queen’s Hall Committee. Moser had been listening to Geoffrey Crowther giving the annual Oration at LSE on the future of schools and universities and had been excited by it. He accepted the offer with alacrity. The telephone call changed his life.6 Moser enlisted the help of Richard Layard, then a graduate student, whose later career also owed much to his work for the Robbins Committee. The Report was 6

After the Higher Education Committee Moser became successively head of a new Higher Education Research Unit at LSE, head of the CSO, and Warden of Wadham College Oxford. Thanks to Robbins, he joined the board of the ROH and became its chairman (see Chapter 27).

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to be remarkable for its use of statistical information (Carswell 1985, 29): ‘The figures spread through the Report and its appendices are built into an edifice with a comprehensiveness and consistency that can rarely have been equalled, and support the major recommendations in a way it is impossible to dislodge. The text of Robbins supplies the brass and wind: Moser’s figures the strings.’ The early meetings of the committee were devoted to discussions with officials: from the Ministry of Education and the Scottish Department of Education on 24 March, the UGC and the Office of the Minister of Science on 7 April and the Treasury on 14 April. Sir Keith Murray, chairman of the UGC since 1953, and Padmore from the Treasury were both informative on the reasons for setting up the committee, especially the increased demand for university places on the one hand and the increased government financial contribution to the universities on the other. Padmore felt obliged to add to the record of his interview that he would not wish the committee to think ‘a material factor leading to the establisment of the committee . . . was Treasury alarm at the increase in scale and importance of the expenditure by the Government on the universities’ and that the point he had been trying to make was rather that the size of the university sector as a whole was increasingly determined by government funding (Supplementary notes by Sir Thomas Padmore on the record of discussion of 14th April). Robbins asked Moser to present the research he had in mind at the fifth meeting: on 21 April the committee discussed the statistics they would need with Moser, Harry Campion of the CSO and Murray. Moser argued that they needed to estimate (1) the present flow of students through the educational system, taking account of losses before and during higher education, which might require a special survey: ‘Such an enquiry would incidentally shed light on the “pool” of unused ability’; (2) the future supply of students: the ‘pool of ability’, which meant not just estimating the numbers likely to be qualified by passing the relevant examinations but also the pool of unused ability, those who could have qualified if they had chosen to take the examinations, and the likely actual demand for higher education from those in the pool of ability. The committee decided that the major topics on which information was essential were ‘(a) the flow of students through the educational system, taking account of losses before and during higher education . . . (b) potential reserves of ability . . . [and] (c) the distribution of the stock of qualified manpower in the population’. The committee then resumed its weekly interviews of witnesses, who included (to mention only a few) Geoffrey Crowther (who had been a member of the Barlow Committee), Eric James, Douglas Logan, Charles Snow, Noel Annan (then

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Provost of King’s College Cambridge), Eric Ashby (the Master of Clare College Cambridge who had previously been vice-chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast) and several Americans on US higher education. By 9 June it was realized that the committee would have to meet more frequently in the autumn to get through all the evidence taking. Of these interviews Moser recalled that ‘Lionel had an ability to concentrate I never have seen equalled.’ When he was taking evidence he always had in hand a pencil which he used to point at the witnesses: ‘Well, now, Professor So and So . . . ’ He always came totally prepared, having read the papers and memorized them. Courtesy was his ‘overwhelming characteristic’ in his questioning, shown to all the witnesses, even when the rest of the committee were ‘bored to tears’. With his ‘total concentration and total courtesy’ he ‘asked questions that always went to the heart of the problem’ and after the witnesses left would in five minutes summarize their evidence in three points. Lionel himself told Caroline on 29 March 1961 that ‘a day’s crossexamining witnesses from the chair leaves me ready for nothing but entertainment.’ The Higher Education Committee made more difference to Lionel’s life than did his day and a half a week at the FT or the twice monthly meetings of the BP Board. Contrary to Machlup’s optimistic prognostication on 4 January 1961 (Economists Correspondence January 1960-September 1961, RP) – ‘True enough, the chairmanship of the Financial Times, the chairmanship of the committee on higher education, and the directorship of British Petroleum may be more than a normal human being could handle, but have they [press commentators] never heard of diminishing marginal cost? What is this to one who in his spare time can direct the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery, the Covent Garden Opera, a department at the London School of Economics, and lecture and do research and write books?’ – Lionel had just six months later to refuse a request to write a paper for the Princeton International Finance Series which Machlup edited (Machlup 61–1): Please do not think that this is due to pressure of non-academic work: the pressure on my time is not in the least due to my business duties but to the fact that . . . [the committee] absorbs at present most of my time outside academic lectures. You may ask why did you have to take this on, and I ask myself the same question, but the fact is that it is rather important. Higher Education arrangements here are in urgent need of revision and although I feel as though some catastrophe had befallen me – as though a piece of cliff had detached itself and crushed one of my limbs – I cannot say that if I were asked to go back to the day I was asked to do it I would give any answer other than the one I gave.

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Nonetheless in these early months of the Higher Education committee Lionel managed to make his annual visit to lecture at the Johns Hopkins Center at Bologna on 27 March, although he did not combine it with a visit to Rome because of the committee, instead seeing Jacques Kahane in London and Lyme Regis at the end of June (LCR to Mundell, 21 March 1961, General Correspondence January–May 1961; LCR to Kahane, 14 June 1961, Economists Correspondence January 1960-September 1961, RP). Back in London the day after his Bologna lecture he felt obliged to speak in a House of Lords debate on Bretton Woods and the world monetary situation. The motion, ‘calling attention to the lack of liquid reserves in the free world and its effect upon balance of payments problems, economic growth, and the volume of international trade’, had been put by Boothby who had urged Lionel to speak. Unlike Boothby Lionel did not think it was time for another international conference (Boothby to LCR, 11 January and 13 March 1961, General Correspondence January–May 1961, RP; HLDebs vol 230 cols 77–85). The same day he had to propose the toast to seventeen distinguished guests at the annual dinner of the British Academy (notes in British Academy Speeches, RP). He fitted in a lecture to the Bank of England course on central banking in June. He did, however, cut down his attendance in the Lords and declined to speak in the debate on the Licensing bill (LCR to Maurice Parsons, 6 June, LCR to Donald Johnson, 14 June 1961, General Correspondence January–May 1961, RP). Since he was asked to speak on what to do with the state-owned public houses in Carlisle (see Chapter 3) and a scheme for transferring them to a trust whose profits could be devoted to national arts and amenities, it would be interesting to know what he would have said. A year earlier he had accepted an invitation to lecture to the College de France, although he hoped he would not have to lecture in French (LCR to Helene Berger-Lieser, 13 June 1960, General Correspondence June– December 1960, RP). Because he did have to lecture in French, on 29 May 1961, he prepared his lecture in English and had it translated. Over the 1960 Christmas vacation he decided on a general topic, the relations between economics and politics. As he explained to Franc¸ois Perroux on 6 January (Economists Correspondence January 1960-September 1961, RP): The form of such a lecture would be partly historical, partly analytical. I should begin by citing the somewhat conservative verdict of Cournot on the functions of Economics side by side with the very optimistic claims of Keynes in his famous passage about the madmen who hear voices in the air. Then, after expounding the nature of the problem, I should proceed first to trace a little the historical intentions

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of various schools of economic thought in relation to politics. I should give special attention to attempts to derive from economic analysis either a complete theory of politics, as in the notion in some treatments of public finance of the club state, or the less ambitious developments of welfare economics; and, having argued what from my point of view is the breakdown of such constructions, I should turn back to history a little and outline in broad strokes the historic importance of various political ideas, having some economic basis, and then in a final section, setting forth my own view of the function of the economist seeking to play his part as a citizen, as well as a technical expert confronted with the bewildering problems of the modern world.

He wrote the paper at Lyme Regis over Easter and when it had been translated, took the translation with him to Moscow the week before the lecture so that he could practice reading it aloud (LCR to Perroux, 12 April 1961, Economists Correspondence January 1960-September 1961, RP). Robbins went on his first visit to Russia on behalf of the Financial Times, for the opening of a British trade fair. Drogheda (1978, 176–7) remembered the ceremony: ‘half an hour before . . . a message was received telling us to expect pretty well the entire Central Committee of the Party. And sure enough dead on time a convoy of cars drove up containing Krushchev, Mikoyan, Kosygin and others. . . . We all sat on the dais erected in the open in front of the first building; speeches of conventional politeness were made, while cold sleet drove in our faces; and then Krushchev commenced his tour, winning over all the exhibitors by his bluff and seemingly direct approach.’ Lionel told Per Jacobsson on 3 June (Jacobsson Diary) that the Russian leader ‘made an interesting speech saying that while the Americans had come to sell their way of life, the British had come to sell their goods’. He also told Caroline on 4 June: Moscow was absorbingly interesting. The Fair was an enormous success & my enquiries about the possibilities of an educational mission much more hopeful than I expected. But I was glad to get away. The massive drabness of things – no window display to speak of – no ads – appalling housing – & the contrast between overwhelming power on top & subjection & cheerless poverty below weighs on one & the sense of relief on getting free of the control & seated in one’s western aeroplane is extraordinary. The visit to Paris was another matter. Iris came with me & it was a great treat to see Anne & Christopher & their lovely children. There was a shadow of personal apprehension, however, for me, for on the Monday I had to lecture before the College de France in French & the prospect appalled me. In the event I don’t think it went off badly. I know it was a good lecture as regards content for I had worked on it much more than usual & was really pleased with the form. As for the accent I shall never be good. But I don’t think it jarred too much.

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Lionel had been thinking for some time of collecting some of his recent talks and papers into a book. Once he had written his lecture for Paris he began to put the contents together and wrote the first draft of a preface (LCR to ICR, 25 April 1961). By August Miss Beven was typing them up (Miss Beven to LCR, 31 August, Economics Department Correspondence 1.10.55–30 August 1961, RP). Still sore about the University’s decision, he dedicated the book to ‘those governors and teachers of the London School of Economics who, when the Senate of the University of London had refused to sanction the tenure of my Chair on a part-time basis, rallied to my support’. His Paris lecture gave it its title, Politics and Economics – at least once his children had persuaded him that his original idea, On the Relations between Politics and Economics, and Other Papers in Political Economy, was too much of a mouthful. He included his Brookings lecture ‘Freedom and order’ (1955a), ‘Equality as a social objective’ (1957c), ‘Art and the state’, his 1958 Bologna lecture on economic integration and his 1960 Rome lecture on liberalism and internationalism, his thoughts on the 1957 UK economic crisis (1958f) and his critique of the Radcliffe report, plus two review articles, one of Donald MacDougall, The World Dollar Problem (1958b), the other his ‘Hayek on liberty’ (1961b). Although Macmillan accepted it in January 1962, it was not published until March 1963, partly because Lionel took a long time in reading the proofs (Daniel Macmillan to LCR, 16 January, LCR to Macmillan & Co, 13 November 1962, Correspondence with Publishers 1.10.55-, RP). Then, as he told his sister on 17 March, ‘its appearance just now when I am so preoccupied with higher education that I haven’t any intellectual life of my own serve[d] a little to maintain [my] selfrespect.’ Before its first summer recess the Higher Education Committee held a ‘general discussion’ of the problems on 30 June. According to the minutes (HE(61) Minutes 15), these included: (a) Much of the apparent conflict of views among witnesses arose because they were seeking different objectives. It was dangerous to ask what was the purpose of education, since an empirical approach would reveal a multiplicity of purposes. It would probably be necessary to introduce the Committee’s report by differentiating between the many objects which courses might serve. (b) It would be important for the Committee to form a view on the likely demand for higher education from young people. They would have to make as good an estimate as possible of the specific demands for the products of higher education from employment. But their recommendations about the extent to which higher education should be provided would depend not only on their assessment of

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specific vocational needs or of the need for enlightened management of national and industrial affairs, but also on their view of the need to improve the general quality of life; but financial considerations must not be overlooked.

Since the demand for higher education depended on ‘regional and social factors’, the committee should also consider the extent to which the demand would grow as university students of the first generation became parents in their turn. It also had to consider whether students who now relied on parttime studies should be provided the opportunity for fulltime higher education. In the continuation of this discussion on 12 July Robbins kept the committee focussed on identifying the data they needed. A few days later the committee went on its first overseas visit, to Switzerland (Geneva, Bern and Zurich) for four days. Lionel’s summer began with marking examination papers, which he completed at Lyme at the beginning of July. After the Swiss visit he and Iris returned to Lyme for several weeks, but he paid some attention to his position on the board of British Petroleum. Iris launched a tanker, the 42,000 tons British Prestige, for the company on 28 July, and during August Lionel interrupted his stay at Lyme to inspect BP installations first in Wales and Scotland and then at Marseilles. He went to Dusseldorf for a few days in September. In between they enjoyed a visit from his sister Caroline (LCR to ICR, 30 July 1961; ‘Trials of the “British Prestige”’, BP Shield No 4, April 1962). When the Higher Education committee resumed meeting in the autumn they met on Wednesday mornings as well as Fridays to interview witnesses. The committee members gave themselves a break from thinking about education by not lunching together, although Lionel sometimes invited interesting witnesses to lunch with him at the Reform or the Athenaeum. Some of his fellow committee members he took to the opera.7 The interviews continued every week until March 1962; there were a few more in June. Fortunately Lionel was teaching at LSE only on Mondays in the Lent term 1962. In December 1961 the committee spent a week in Edinburgh taking evidence on Scottish education: with four days of interviews and a day at the University, it was ‘a more or less continuous performance and when we came to the University on Friday there was quite literally not one single minute to spare to turn aside to see a friend’ (LCR to W. Croft Dickinson, 18 December 1961, Economists Correspondence October 1961-April 1964, RP). In January there were four days at The Hague; in February a week in 7

Invitations in General Correspondence June 1961-February 1962 and March 1962-January 1963, RP.

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Paris, with a day trip to visit the University of Lille – in Lionel’s opinion, as reported to Caroline on 25 February, ‘Not I think to be imitated. But full of life & vigour at the top – a great example to us in this way.’ Conducting the sessions in French was ‘a great strain’ at first, but he found it easier as he got used to it, and he could visit Anne and Christopher almost every evening after the receptions and cocktail parties. March included a week in Germany, divided between Bonn, Munich and Cologne, a couple of days taking evidence in Cardiff and a short visit to the University of Manchester. The trip to Germany was particularly exhausting, indeed debilitating, as he caught something like influenza and had to carry on regardless – as he did when he got back to England and went to the Founders Feast at Nuffield College Oxford with Norman Chester on 23 March and the Annual Dinner of the British Academy on 27 March. After that and the Cardiff visit he spent a weekend in bed.8 Even before these visits he told Frank Knight on 8 January (Economists Correspondence October 1961-April 1964, RP): My own life at the moment is more like that of an animal in a treadmill than ever before. . . . The trouble arises entirely from this great enquiry into higher education in this country. The ministers who set it up assured me that it would be a very light business. I cannot say that I believed them so I cannot grumble that I let myself in for something, the magnitude of which I was unaware of. But, of course, it is one thing to grasp a thing intellectually. It is another thing to live through it. And the business of fitting into a 7-day week what is, roughly speaking, the equivalent of three or more days’ continuous work, in addition to what I have to do to keep the other jobs ticking over, is certainly proving quite a strain. I save myself up by doing little else, except occasionally going to the opera or the theatre in the evenings, and so far I have managed to keep tolerably fresh. But there is another year of it, including a severe drafting period, and travel in about half a dozen other countries, including the U.S., and I shall be very glad when it is over. Needless to say, the intrinsic interest of the enquiry is great. It seems to raise at least half the problems of social life on this planet, and I am learning a lot about matters with which I was unacquainted before. My only wish is that there were, so to speak, ten days in the week. Then everything would be lovely.

In that first year of the Higher Education Committee Moser and Layard reported regularly on the progress of the statistical research, both to formal meetings of the committee on 12 July and 20 October 1961, 9 February and 2 March 1962, and more frequently to Lionel himself. The research included six major sample surveys, of students in higher education, of university 8

LCR to ICR, 2 April 1962; LCR to Chester, 21 March 1962, General Correspondence March 1962-January 1963; LCR to Perroux, 8 February and 6 March 1962, Economists Correspondence October 1961-April 1964, RP.

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teachers and of twenty-one-year-olds, the last of which was intended to shed light on the pool of ability, and several other special enquiries. The most famous of the research studies is that on the pool of ability, which was published as the first of the six appendix volumes of the Report. According to Moser, ‘that really persuaded Lionel to fight for expansion. Once he was persuaded he persuaded the rest of the committee.’ The first of the ‘guiding principles’ of the report – which has become known as the Robbins principle – is that ‘we have assumed as an axiom that courses of higher education should be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so.’ The provisional results from the surveys began to become available in the summer of 1962. But first there were more travels to be endured. In April 1962 Lionel and some of his committee, including Kitty Anderson, Helen Gardner and Claus Moser, set off for the United States, flying to San Francisco for visits to Berkeley and Stanford and to UCLA and the Claremont Colleges. From there they went to Chicago and Washington and finally to Harvard, MIT and Columbia (LCR to ICR, 7 April 1962; Programme for visit to USA, ED116/10). Moser recalled that it was a ‘hellish schedule’ but never once did Lionel keep anyone waiting. When word got around that Lionel would be in the States, he received several invitations to lecture or give papers. On 9 November 1961 Harry Johnson wrote to him to address the faculty–graduate student seminar at the University of Chicago, on 18 December George Stigler to give a lecture on the Walgreen Foundation, on 16 March 1962 Abram Bergson to lecture at Harvard (Economists Correspondence October 1961-April 1964, RP). He declined the invitations, telling Stigler on 8 January 1962 that ‘These foreign trips of our Committee are virtually non-stop. And even if that were not the case, which I am trying to bring about so far as the U.S. is concerned, our labours over here [in London] are such that the possibility of preparing anything which I should have the face to deliver before one of the main headquarters of economics on this planet is negligible. . . . But I have told the Foreign Office chap in Washington that we are just not prepared to tolerate days and evenings without any let-up, and so far as Chicago is concerned I am determined to get an evening to spare somehow. I also intend to take a quarter of an hour off at least to look at [Seurat’s] La Grande Jatte [in the Art Institute].’ He spent the weekend of 5–7 May with Caroline and Joe at Ithan only by cancelling a couple of meetings, warning her beforehand on 15 April that she could expect him to arrive ‘as exhausted as Dennis [Robertson] & I were after Bretton Woods in 1944’. He saw Viner the previous weekend while

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he was in Boston as Viner was visiting at Harvard (LCR to Frances Viner, 2 April 1962, General Correspondence March 1962-January 1963, RP). There was another expedition to Paris in May which he did enjoy. He went, as chairman of the FT, to address an Assembly of the International Press Institute held in the palace at Versailles; he took Anne with him to the great banquet, hosted by the French Foreign Minister and the Minister of Cultural Affairs (Andr´e Malraux), which followed (E.J.B. Rose, International Press Institute, to LCR, 27 March, LCR to Rose, 9 April 1962, General Correspondence March 1962-January 1963; ms Economic position of the Press, Paris 5/62, Addresses on Finance & Economics, RP). ‘The conference had the Palace to itself & the fountains were playing in the gardens. We dined in the Great Hall of Battles & after dinner at midnight the state rooms including the Hall of Mirrors were lit up & we were free to wander round. The decorations & the ceilings show up much better with artificial light than by day & the effect was quite magical.’ As he also told Caroline on 20 May, he especially enjoyed his daughter’s company: ‘It was lovely to see how she blossomed forth with all her wit & charm among the hardfaced editors and publishers.’ The Higher Education committee’s visit to Russia ‘proved contrary to all expectations’. Lionel was far more impressed with the Soviet universities than he had expected to be. During the fortnight in Moscow he was reported in The Times on 13 June as having ‘“tremendous respect” for the way in which the Russians had combined quality with quantity in education’. He told Caroline on 17 June: ‘I must say that I was very impressed with the educational system there. I say nothing of the ideological side which must surely remain distasteful. But the way in which outside the ideological field they have managed to preserve high quality while carrying through this colossal expansion is something which is very admirable. And the industry & seriousmindedness of all concerned . . . ’ In Moscow, ‘sun rise on the gilded onion spires of the Kremlin [was] memorable’ and there were several visits to the opera and ballet: ‘Ulanova has a successor, Plisetskaya, who to my way of thinking is nearly as good – which is to put her at least as high as Fonteyn. Eugene Onegin, performed at the Bolshoi, was also a good experience’ (LCR to Perroux, 20 September 1962, Economists Correspondence October 1961April 1964, RP). As for Leningrad, he later told Toby Weaver (10 October 1966, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 S-Z, RP): ‘We found the University, Polytechnic and the Pedagogic Institute almost equally interesting so far as conversations with the staff were concerned; and there was a certain absence of restraint which in some ways made things more agreeable than they were

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in Moscow. . . . Moreover, there is of course the Hermitage at Leningrad which is one of the great experiences of life.’ Lionel retired to Lyme Regis for the summer of 1962 to write the first draft of his committee’s report. The secretary, Philip Ross from the Treasury, was unhappy at not being given the task, but Lionel always intended to write the report himself. As Nathan Isaacs commented on reading the final report in January 1964, ‘I recognise the structure-of-the-whole as being very much your work – and the same thing struck me as I kept on reading (time and again)’ (Special Letters, RP). Before Dorset there were two long meetings of the committee with representatives of the Ministry of Education and the Treasury on 2 and 4 July and then a long weekend meeting in an attempt to settle the committee’s position on major issues. At the four gruelling meetings on 6, 7 and 8 July at the University of Bristol his suggested outlines of parts of the report were, according to Moser, ‘absolutely pulled to pieces’ by the other members of the committee. There had been a brief discussion of the ‘possible outline’ on 9 February. According to the minutes (HE(62) Minutes 50), The main document should be short, dealing only with the principal issues on which recommendations were to be made; there would also be a number of appendices on statistical and other matters to put the recommendations in context. The Report, after discussing the general aims to be sought in higher education, would describe the present situation, drawing attention to recent trends and the likely effect of present plans. It would assess the adequacy of current provision both in quantity and in quality and would proceed to recommend changes needed to remedy any defects. The Report would continue with an assessment of the financial implications of the proposals and their economic effect, and conclude with proposals for reorganising the machinery of government so as to provide for continual review of the whole field. A special chapter on emergency action might well be needed.

The agenda Robbins produced for the Bristol meetings listed all the topics on which the report would have to say something. The first essentially focussed on what the committee would like higher education to be (including, therefore, the last stage of secondary education and standards of entry into higher education, the content of first degrees, methods of teaching); the second the assessment of existing institutions; the third economic and financial questions; the fourth machinery of government (Agenda 62, Agenda 63, Agenda 64 and Agenda 65, ED116/7). On the evidence of the minutes (HE(62) Minutes 62–5) the discussions at Bristol were wide ranging and the differing views of the committee members openly expressed. In the first session on Friday afternoon the well-known defects of the British university system – such as the deleterious

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effect of highly specialized undergraduate degrees on teaching in schools – were raised, but when the committee moved on to the content of first degree courses there seems to have been little desire to move away from the three-year honours degree. In the discussion of honours versus general degrees the administrative difficulties of the latter received most of the committee’s attention. Robbins and one or two others must have indicated their preference for a four-year degree, for the minutes record: ‘It was desirable that there should be a flexible system whereby a fourth year leading to M.A. or M.Sc. by examination, and possibly dissertation, was available for a proportion of students in addition to those who wished to embark on a longer course for a higher degree. Such a fourth year should not, however, become accepted as a necessary extension of the three-year course for able students or represent merely a spill-over of the content of the first degree course.’ At the second meeting the next morning, when the discussion shifted to other higher education institutions, there was more agreement that improvements could and should be made – for instance, the upgrading of some of the Colleges of Advanced Technology to degree-granting institutions and increased provision for potential schoolteachers to obtain degrees as well as teacher training, perhaps by associating the teacher training colleges more closely with the universities. At the third Bristol session most of the economic and financial questions were left to be discussed after Lionel had produced his first draft. But the committee did discuss university fees and student loans. It saw the advantages of higher fees – they ‘would lessen the opportunities for ministerial or political interference, would simplify the task of grants committees, would bring home to students the size of the money spent on them and would reveal more the extent of the subsidy now given to overseas students’ – but shied away from recommending them because of the possible adverse public reaction. Similarly it acknowledged ‘there was a prima facie case for expecting students to assume responsibility for part of the cost of their maintenance if not their fees’ but ‘agreed that these arguments should be set out in the first draft which should also deal with the manifest difficulties involved, such as the risk that poor children and, perhaps a more serious risk, women might be deterred from higher education. The draft would also have to take account of the fact that such a proposal would be in direct opposition to all recent trends and it was for careful consideration whether it would be advisable to do more than deploy the arguments.’ The divergent views of committee members over ministerial responsibility for higher education are clear from the minutes of the Sunday morning meeting. To the existing unsatisfactory arrangement, whereby the UGC

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reported to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and all other sectors of education came under the Ministry of Education, there were two alternatives: a secretary of state for all education, which the Ministry of Education favoured, and a separate ministry of higher education. The minutes record, at almost equal length, the arguments in favour of both positions. At Lyme in August there were many visitors. Anne Bohm came for the first week. Her great friend Reg Bassett, Lionel’s former student at Oxford, had died in July: ‘She looked after him during the week but he never married her because of a fear of offending his good mother, with whom he lived at the weekends – a good example of how parents can mess up children’s lives. And now she is left as it were a widow’ (LCR to ICR, 22 July 1962). She was followed by Anne and Christopher, Richard and Brenda and the four grandchildren. In the crowded house Lionel was allowed complete isolation during the day in his study overlooking the sea, where he worked in the mornings from 9 to 1 and in the afternoons from 4.30 to 7. After two weeks, ‘The report goes slowly. But it begins to take shape. I calculate that, with luck, at the present rate I shall have a draft by the end of September. This doesn’t sound too long. But from day to day it seems an almost infinite distance away & I should dearly like to be able to forget it for a bit. Still it’s like bathing in not very good weather, once you’re in you enjoy it . . . ’ Two weeks later, with ‘Huge seas dashing on the shingle outside & the sky grey with fast driven low clouds’, he was watching his son and son-in-law swimming in the rain and ‘grinding out my draft paragraphs and understanding more than ever the feelings which inspired the old scholars when they added thanks to Heaven at the end of their painful manuscripts’; he hoped to have finished nine (of a planned twelve) chapters by the end of the month (LCR to ICR, 15 and 26 August 1962). In the event he completed the tenth, after ‘the hardest spell of concentration . . . since I was a student’ (LCR to Ted Goodman, 3 September 1962, General Correspondence March 1962-January 1963, RP), before he and Iris took a week in Belgium and Holland to look at paintings in Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, Rotterdam, The Hague, Haarlem and Amsterdam: the ‘gallery crawl was very agreable if perhaps a trifle breathless’ and, as intended, it left no time for thinking about higher education (LCR to ICR, 2 and 17 September 1962). By the beginning of term Lionel had written another chapter. When the committee resumed meeting on 19 October he had to admit the draft was not quite complete and he had to rewrite parts of the earlier chapters in the light of the statistics now becoming available. He still hoped that the committee’s deliberations would be over by the spring and the report out in June 1963, but, as he told Ifor Evans on 12 November (General Correspondence March

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1962-January 1963), he was not counting on it. The first draft, still lacking a chapter on the machinery of government, was circulated in November. It would be appropriate at this point to describe the contents of the draft and to compare them with the final Report. But the draft chapters do not survive in the National Archives – only a covering note and a table of contents (HE(62)208). This reflects the problems Lionel had with the secretary of the committee. He was, as Moser put it, a ‘rather brilliant secretary but a flawed individual’ who became ‘totally unreliable’. He made changes to Lionel’s drafts and then destroyed the manuscripts and the first typescripts (Ross to LCR, 6 May, LCR to Ross, 7 May 1963, Committee on Higher Education Correspondence with Mr Clarke about Mr Ross, RP). According to the table of contents, nine chapters, after the introduction with terms of reference etc, covered the British system of higher education; international comparisons; criteria of analysis and prescription; the problem of numbers: the demand for places; the problem of numbers: the supply of places; problems of content and standards; problems of educational method; institutional problems: universities and other senior institutions; institutional problems: technical colleges teacher training etc. In the published report the first half a dozen chapters followed Robbins’s pattern except that ‘Aims and principles’ precede the descriptive chapters, but after the demand for places chapter there were a dozen chapters covering higher education and the schools; university courses; teacher training colleges; technological institutions; the future pattern of higher education; staffing; teachers and students; financial and economic matters; the internal government of higher education institutions; academic freedom; the machinery of government; and the short-term emergency. As Robbins intended the last major chapter (XVII) was on the controversial issue of the machinery of government. The committee began to discuss his draft in earnest at a long weekend meeting on 14–16 December. On 7 December it had agreed the draft was ‘a useful basis for discussion’ and that detailed discussion would start from chapter V (the problem of numbers), move through the draft and then return to chapters I–IV. A subcommittee on projections looked further at the numbers and reported to the weekend meeting. At that meeting (HE(62) Minutes 72–4) the committee discussed the future size of higher educational institutions, agreeing that ‘the reasons adduced in the draft for greater size were, in general, sound. Moreover, large size gave greater freedom in the allocation of periods of sabbatical leave, etc. for research.’ Over Christmas the secretariat would prepare a list of the ‘vital issues for decision’ in preparation for the next weekend meeting in mid-January.

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The Robbinses were at Lyme for Christmas as usual, where Lionel again spent much of his time in his study working on his draft report. First of all, however, because he had been working almost nonstop since February 1961, ‘for the first time since our week in Belgium & Holland, I have done nothing and enjoyed it more than I can say’, especially on the first day when he wrote to his sister, ‘a mild day of cloudless blue, so bland that R & I lay out on the shingle . . . while the boys threw stones into the sea & hardly realized that it was mid December.’ But there had already been frost and snow and a severe fog for several days in London. It was the worst winter since 1947. In his next letter to Caroline, on 27 January, he reported: ‘Then [on Boxing Day] came the blizzard & cut the west country off from elsewhere as it has not been cut off in living memory. After a week I managed to get through to Axminster & after a terrible journey up which landed me up to Waterloo at 1.30 am on New Years day (thus compelling me to spend the night at LSE), remained thereafter up here.’ Iris and Anne and the children were stranded in Lyme for another week. ‘Since then we have lived together amid power cuts coal shortage deficient gas pressure & snow conditions in the Close [Meadway Close] worse than anything I have ever known. My faithful chauffeur [provided by the Financial Times] comes up for me every day. But the days I have to come back without him involve real discomfort & exhaustion. Today there is a thaw. But to counterbalance that the power system which heats most of the house has given out & we are all clustered round what in the coal shortage may easily be our last fire for some time.’ A couple of days later Iris fell on an ice-covered snowbank and broke her right wrist. As she was on her way to pick up Richard’s sons from school, she drove to their school with her fractured wrist and then on to Brenda who took her to hospital (information from Iris Robbins). The first months of the new year were very difficult. Not only did Iris’s fracture take weeks to heal but she went down with influenza and bronchitis in February, from which Lionel himself suffered, although not so seriously, in March. Brenda, of whom Lionel had by now long been a great admirer, was ‘an angel’ who came over every day to keep the Robbins household going and to keep Iris company ‘as if she had been a member of the family from the beginning’. As he also told Caroline on 17 March, Lionel found life ‘not . . . at all easy & indeed somewhat dispiriting’ and ‘it hard to get up steam for the very necessary redrafting’. The Higher Education committee’s meetings were interrupted in January by the severe weather but soon resumed, continuing – with weekend meetings once or twice every month – until July. In January and February the committee was thrashing out ‘fundamental issues’ and by April poring over the second draft, on which Robbins had spent his

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weekends at Lyme during the Easter vacation (LCR to ICR, 30 March and 7 April 1963). During that vacation Lionel learned that Dennis Robertson had died, quite suddenly, on 18 April. He had not known he was ill. Although ‘I don’t think in recent years he got much pleasure out of life so I cannot grieve on his account’, Lionel was going to miss him (LCR to ICR, 24 April 1963): ‘it is very sad to think that there will be no more talk with him & no more works from that gentle, penetrating and courageous pen. Professionally there was no one from whom I learnt more except perhaps Jack [Viner] & when I wrote technical stuff it always had half an eye on how it would appeal to him.’ Lionel Robbins had been elected President of the British Academy in July 1962. As President for the next five years he had to reply to the toasts to the Academy at its annual banquets in the spring and to give the Presidential Address at the annual general meetings in the summer. The first such occasion was ‘a very grand banquet’ at the Royal Academy on 26 March 1963, with the guest of honour HM The Queen Mother and ‘a battery of celebrities from Frank Lee to Peggy Ashcroft as other guests’. Lionel had persuaded Lee, now retired from the civil service and Master of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, to give the main speech. In his reply to the toast he took the opportunity to express appreciation of the government’s decision in July 1962 to provide funds for academic research in the humanities through the agency of the British Academy (as he did again in his first presidential address on 10 July 1963). He pointed out that the Academy had received eligible applications of very high quality amounting to about £80,000 for the £25,000 it had to distribute, adding ‘I cannot help thinking that ministers who get such meagre thanks for the immense generosity with which they spend hundreds of millions on pigs and poultry, unprofitable transport and dubious subsidies abroad might well feel some satisfaction that here at least there is likely to be tangible and lasting return for their investment, and that here there is real gratitude for what they have done.’ He was delighted when ‘at a very late hour a high Treasury official said to me “are we really giving you enough?” – which was just the response I had hoped to evoke.’ (LCR to ICR, 30 March 1963; ms ‘Your Majesty . . . 63’, British Academy Speeches, RP) It was particularly satisfying for Lionel to be president when a group of former refugees from Nazi persecution raised a ‘Thank-You to Britain’ fund of over £90,000 which, at Isaiah Berlin’s suggestion, they gave to the British Academy in 1965. Lionel accepted the gift at what was for him ‘a very moving occasion’ on 8 November (ms notes in British Academy Speeches,

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RP). Berlin was the obvious choice for the first speaker in the lecture series funded by the gift. When he declined, Lionel gave it instead of his usual Presidential Address on 6 July 1966 (LCR to Berlin, 27 January 1966, Day Book Sept 65-March 66, RP: Robbins 1966e). He spoke on academic freedom – a topic which also concerned the Higher Education Committee. Lionel’s first draft of the Higher Education report had been criticized for many reasons – for not arguing fully some major issues, for insufficient attention to higher education outside the universities, for lack of an introduction ‘to capture the attention and imagination of the general reader’, for making insufficient use of the evidence on the pool of ability, for its comments on the relation between higher education and the schools, for overstating the case against specialized first degree courses and dealing too briefly both with the possibility of a fourth year and with graduate studies – but his fellow committee members were at the same time generous with detailed constructive suggestions for the necessary additions.9 The ‘fundamental issues’ debated in January and February 1963 covered many topics: whether Colleges of Advanced Technology should evolve into degree-granting technological universities; the internal government of universities; the position of Oxford and Cambridge in relation to other British universities; the content and the length of university first degree courses; the future pattern of institutions, which included inter alia the desirability or otherwise of establishing liberal arts colleges (only two members were in favour) and the complex of questions relating to teacher training; fees and student loans (on both of which views were very mixed); and (in March) the increasingly vexed question of ministerial responsibility for higher education (HE(63) Minutes 75–85). On the suitability of present first degree courses, the committee agreed on 10 February (HE(63) Minutes 79) that ‘the report should refer with approval to the experiments being made by a number of universities to offer a greater variety of courses, and in particular combined or joint honours courses, and should note that new institutions would be particularly well placed to initiate further experiments of this kind.’ As for the length of undergraduate courses, ‘It was agreed that a first degree course could more easily be completed in three years in some subjects than in others. . . . Nevertheless the extension of the undergraduate course to four years was unnecessary over the greater part of the spectrum of university study.’ There was instead a need for more postgraduate 9

Minutes 71 Discussion of the Draft Report Additional Notes for the Chairman, Minutes 72 Additional Notes for Chairman Chapter V, Minutes 73 and 74 Additional notes for the Chairman Chapter VI, ED 116/7.

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training and research. This last became one of the committee’s strongest recommendations. At the end of April the committee agreed to continue meeting until early July. Lionel hoped ‘a final bout of drafting’ on his part would mean ‘the rest should consist chiefly of minor alterations & insertions’ (LCR to ICR, 24 April 1963). Morris and Linstead both suspected the committee would need more time but were also sure that the committee must finish this summer if its report was to be effective; at their suggestion further meetings in July were arranged in order to produce an almost final draft which could be tidied up during August and the final version signed in September. Linstead suggested it would be ‘necessary for us to restrain ourselves more at meetings and for you to restrain those unable to restrain themselves’ and proposed only written comments on matters of style and no verbal comments on matters of substance without previous notice in writing; then it might be possible to finish by the end of July as long as the ‘offstage’ work could keep pace with the committee. Robbins was obliged to explain to Linstead and Morris his problems with the committee’s secretary. Fortunately he persuaded Ross to see his doctor and go on sick leave. He also alerted the Treasury, whose medical adviser arranged that Ross was ‘put in the hands of a specialist in Cambridge who has been charged with the task of stopping me [Ross] worrying about the Committee’s progress while I sit in the sun.’ A few weeks later Ross was recalled to the Treasury.10 Meanwhile his deputy, Brian Gerrard, ‘one of the ablest Principals of his generation at the Ministry of Education’ (Carswell 1985, 29), had taken over as secretary. Lionel enjoyed working with him: after his early death he wrote that ‘he was as unlike the stage conception of a bureaucrat as it is easy to conceive – a youthful figure, of sturdy northern stock, with a sympathetic, if restrained, manner, and gentle perceptive eyes – intensely serious in his work, fanciful and occasionally even boisterous in his humour. . . . He flung himself into his work with a dogged dedication’ (The Times, 27 May 1965). The committee managed to keep to its revised timetable. Questioned by the Prime Minister and other ministers on 19 June on the committee’s progress, Robbins promised the report would be formally submitted towards the end of September. John Boyd-Carpenter, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, announced in a House of Commons debate on higher education on 17 July that it would probably be published in October (The Times, 20 June and 10

Morris to LCR, 7, 13 and 15 May, Linstead to LCR, 14 May 1963, LCR to Morris and LCR to Linstead, 15 May, Ross to LCR, 27 May 1963, R.W.B. Clarke to LCR, 21 June, and LCR to Clarke, 22 June 1963, Committee on Higher Education Correspondence with Mr Clarke about Mr Ross, RP.

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18 July 1963). At the last weekend meeting at the end of July (HE(63) Minutes 106–9) ‘the third draft was discussed chapter by chapter. It was agreed that . . . the Report should now proceed to the fourth draft, which would take into account the written comments submitted by members and the points raised in discussion.’ Several members were instructed to provide redrafts on specific points; Helen Gardner offered to read the whole thing for style and presentation. Hence although some parts of the whole were drafted by others – for instance Elvin wrote the first draft of the part on teacher training – the published report was, as Elvin put it, ‘Robbins revised by Gardner’. Lionel had cut his other engagements to the bare minimum. While he was drafting, he told Ronald Meek on 27 June, ‘all other intellectual activities have stopped, including reading. When I am exhausted, I just look at pictures or listen to music.’ He told Stanley Dennison on 10 July that he did not think he had ‘ever worked harder at any time in my career, even in the most intense days of ’40-’41’ (Economists Correspondence October 1961April 1964, RP). As in those intense days he had been reading Shakespeare’s Tragedies in bed. In August he ‘retreated to the country [ie Lyme Regis] with a bag of papers to complete the last lap’ and did not return, except for occasional days, until late in September (LCR to Eric Roll, 1 August 1963, General Correspondence February-September 1963, RP). One of the stronger critiques of the Report begins (Carswell 1985, 38): ‘The Robbins report . . . is one of the great state papers of this [the twentieth] century, and possibly the last of its line. Only the Beveridge Report of 1943 [sic] and the Poor Law Report of 1909 can compete with it for copiousness, cogency, coherence and historial influence. It contains memorable passages and is informed by a consistent intellectual attitude.’ The first substantive chapter (II) of the Report explained its attitude to the aims and objectives of higher education in general and the principles behind its recommendations on higher education in Britain. Higher education was not just a means, the acquisition of ‘skills suitable to play a part in the general division of labour’, though that was important and often undervalued; it should ‘promote the general powers of the mind . . . [and] produce not mere specialists but rather cultivated men and women’. It should also promote the advancement of learning and help to transmit ‘a common culture and common standards of citizenship. . . . This function, important at all times, is perhaps especially important in an age that has set for itself the ideal of equality of opportunity.’ The first of the guiding principles, the Robbins principle already mentioned, could be vindicated, both as a means (to economic growth and higher cultural standards) and because ‘education ministers

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ultimately to ultimate ends, in developing man’s capacity to understand, to contemplate and to create. . . . The good society desires equality of opportunity for its citizens to become not merely good producers but also good men and women.’ Other guiding principles included ‘equal academic awards for equal performance’ (a good honours degree from one university should be as well regarded as one from another), academic autonomy and the maintenance of standards: ‘We began our discussion of principles by emphasising the claims of numbers. It is only fitting, therefore, that we should close it by emphasising the claims of achievement and quality.’ The discussion of the pool of ability and the statistical data relevant to ascertaining its size (chapter VI) concluded (54): ‘In short we think there is no risk that within the next twenty years the growth in the proportion of young people with qualifications and aptitude suitable for entry to higher education will be restrained by a shortage of potential ability. . . . If there is to be talk of a pool of ability, it must be of a pool which surpasses the widow’s cruse in the Old Testament, in that when more is taken for higher education in one generation more will tend to be available in the next.’ The chapter went on to give the projections of the likely demand for places in higher education, and hence on the Robbins principle the number of places needed, for the next seventeen years, with provisional estimates for five years more. This involved several estimates: the size of the relevant age group; the proportion of the age group likely to become qualified for entry to higher education; the proportion of the qualified likely to enter higher education; and the future length of study. The increase in the number of home students for whom places would be needed in fulltime higher education was ‘startling’: from 195,000 in 1962/3 to 507,000 in 1980/1 and possibly 632,000 in 1985/6. (Adding overseas students produced an increase from 216,000 in 1962/3 to 558,000 in 1980/1 and 697,000 in 1985/6.) In the event it was also an underestimate (Layard, King and Moser 1969, chapter 3). I shall mention only a few of the many recommendations which followed these estimates. With respect to university courses (chapter VIII), the response to the criticism of the highly specialized nature of English first degrees was to commend the introduction of combined or joint honours courses, to recommend an increase in the availability of more broad, general degrees on the Scottish model or at least the postponement of specialization until after a broad first year, and strongly to recommend the expansion of (and increased funding for) postgraduate education (all of which was in line with Lionel’s own views as they had developed over the 1950s) (see Chapters 20 and 22). The teacher training colleges (chapter IX), which in

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general should be increased in size, should offer more four-year courses allowing their students to acquire degrees along with professional qualifications, should be renamed colleges of education and become associated with universities. Some of the most ambitious recommendations were intended to bring about a considerable increase in scientific and technological education and research. As well as recommending more postgraduate work, it recommended that a number of university institutions should be selected for rapid development as ‘Special Institutions for Scientific and Technological Education and Research’ (SISTERs, which the committee was inclined to call TIGERs given the existence of CATs): these would include Imperial College London and the Colleges of Science and Technology at Manchester and Glasgow and two new Special Institutions, one developed from an existing College of Advanced Technology. The other CATs should be designated technological universities and financed like other universities – as should the Royal College of Art (Committee on Higher Education 1963, chapter X; Robbins 1966a, 25). The overall expansion of higher education called for should be provided partly in existing institutions, specifically 346,000 of the 558,000 total places needed by 1980/1 should be university places. Although the report argued for what were then thought to be large universities, on grounds of economies of scale, it also thought there was an upper limit of 8000 to 10,000 students for multi-faculty universities. Hence it recommended the creation of six new universities, of which one should be in Scotland (paras 465–78). Because the committee regarded teaching and research as complementary, advanced research should not be removed from the universities to separate research institutes. The committee was ‘in total disagreement with [this] view . . . [and] confident that the experience of the world is against such a separation’, citing evidence in the Soviet Union (para 554). On the basis of empirical evidence it also commented (para 558) that in UK universities in 1961/2 ‘the cases where research is carried too far at the expense of teaching are considerably fewer than those where teaching time might well be lessened to permit more time for research.’ The chapter on finance (XIV) estimated the cost of its recommendations: an increase in public expenditure on fulltime higher education from £206m in 1962/3 to £742m in 1980/1 at constant prices; this estimate included additional capital expenditure, including increased provision for student residences, which totalled £1420m over the period to 1980/1. Although Robbins introduced the economists’ concepts of education as an investment and the private and social returns to education, he emphasized the difficulties of measuring the rates of return, concluding nonetheless (para

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630) that ‘Even if we cannot produce detailed computations . . . there is a strong probability that the country would have to go a good deal beyond what is contemplated in our recommendations before the return in terms of social net product could be said to suggest general over-investment in this sector.’ The committee had finally come to some agreement on the question of whether the increased cost of higher education should be partly borne by loans to students. According to the minutes for 1–2 June 1963 (HE(63) Minutes 98–9), ‘Loans to students would at present act as a disincentive for young people entering higher education, but the climate of opinion might make such a concept acceptable in about ten years’ time.’ Accordingly the report noted (para 647): We find opposing arguments very evenly balanced, and there were differences of view amongst us on their relative importance. . . . But we were able to reach a conclusion as to policy in present circumstances. . . . At a time when many parents are only just beginning to acquire the habit of contemplating higher education for such of their children, especially girls, as are capable of benefiting by it, we think it probable that it would have undesirable disincentive effects. But if, as time goes on, the habit is more firmly established, the arguments of justice in distribution and of the advantage of increasing individual responsibility may come to weigh more heavily and lead to some experiment in this direction.

This may have been a sensible although ultimately expensive decision at a time when the government had recently committed itself to providing maintenance grants to students (Carswell 1985, 23–5). Lionel himself was attracted by student loans: as he admitted publicly a few months later (Robbins 1966a, 30), ‘Some of us were greatly impressed by the general arguments for the loan system, both in regard to equity and incentive – I personally think them to be ultimately very difficult to resist.’ Some years later he was definitely in favour, as long as graduates did not have to repay the loans while on low incomes (1980b, 34–7). But the report argued in favour of higher student fees to students, in order to reduce the direct subsidy to higher education, to at least 20 per cent of current institutional expenditure (paras 649–54). ‘Some of us would prefer to see the proportion greater.’ Lionel was one of the ‘some’ (Robbins 1966a, 31–2). The Report devoted a chapter (XVI) to the nature and necessity of academic freedom, especially for institutions financed by government. It concluded that the requirement for both autonomy and accountability was met by the principle of the UGC, which was composed mainly of academics and had the twofold responsibility of advising the Treasury on the size of the total grant to universities and of distributing the sum received among the

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universities.11 Hence the recommendation in the machinery of government chapter (XVII) of a single Grants Commission for all autonomous institutions of higher education in Great Britain, in other words a bigger UGC covering the universities, the CATs and the Colleges of Education (through associated universities), and the (majority) recommendation that the commission be the responsibility of neither the Chancellor of the Exchequer nor the Secretary of State for Education but of a new Minister of Arts and Science. The new Ministry should also be responsible for the research councils, museums and galleries and the Arts Council. Robbins explained to the Tate board on 21 November 1963 (TAM 72/38, Tate Archive), The Treasury . . . was supposed to be the national economic ministry and the keeper of the public purse, but in the course of the last fifty years it had accumulated certain duties which fell into the category of poaching rather than gamekeeping. Most conspicuous was looking after the universities. . . . The National Gallery and the Tate, and in recent years the Arts Council, dealt directly with the Treasury, but although they were dependent on public funds they were insulated from politics. The disadvantage of this arrangement was that there had never been anyone in the Cabinet to speak for galleries or museums.

The committee met for the last time and agreed the last, the fourth, draft of its report on 6 and 7 September 1963 (HE(63) Minutes 110–11). Shearman put in a note of reservation about the proposal for a Ministry of Arts and Science. At the conclusion of the meeting Morris said that he and his fellow members ‘wanted to express their sincere appreciation of the way in which he [Robbins] had guided their discussions and of the great consideration he had shown to each member at every stage of the Committee’s work. The Report would establish him as a central figure in the educational history of the century. The future could alone be judge of the merits of the Report; but whatever its judgement might be, he had in his fellow-members true and lasting friends.’ This was echoed in letters from other members of the committee and by Antony Part, the assessor from the Ministry of Education on 10 October (Special Letters, RP): ‘Whatever may happen you will always be an internationally famous figure in British educational history, and generations to come will have continuing cause to be grateful to you. Philip Morris’s words . . . were admirably chosen. . . . Looking forward to seeing you at Covent Garden.’ 11

The five components of institutional academic freedom were (paras 710–22): freedom of appointment, freedom to determine curricula and standards, freedom of admissions, freedom to determine the balance between teaching and research and freedom to determine the shape of development.

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Part, writing shortly before the report was published on 23 October, also commented: ‘The battle about machinery of government will be intense and some of the heavy artillery is now being wheeled into line. I only hope that it will not overshadow the rest of the Report in these politically sensitive days. And if you win, may the new Minister and his senior civil servants be among those who believe in the importance of two things – the urgent need to bring the universities and the rest of the educational system closer together and the almost overriding national requirement to bring technology into greater prominence and to stimulate applied research.’ But, at the same time, ‘it is not every chairman of a Committee who finds a Deputy Prime Minister accepting one of his recommendations in public even before the Report has been published!’ The Conservative government, even while in the process of resolving the political crisis that led Macmillan to resign in favour of Alec Douglas-Home, issued a white paper accepting the committee’s main assumptions and recommendations. It would take the estimates of the number of qualified students for whom places in higher education should be provided as its objectives in expanding the higher education system over the next ten years, and provide both plans and funds for this huge expansion. It would accept the recommendations that the Royal College of Art, the CATs and some other institutions should be given university status and consider the proposals for six new universities, most immediately one in Scotland (Higher Education, Cmnd 2165, 24 October 1963). As Lionel commented to his sister on 26 October, this and the generally favourable press comment was ‘All very gratifying’ although he recognized that ‘most of it is due to the entirely fortuitous circumstance that we have appeared just at the moment when the two political parties are competing against one another for an appearance of maximum educational respectability.’ On the day of publication Lionel gave a press conference and a broadcast on television. Those who saw him on television thought it went very well (ms notes H.E. Press Conference, Elvin to LCR, 28 October 1963, Higher Education, RP). At the press conference he first helpfully pointed out how to read the report in a hurry: ‘Summary – then Chapters II [Aims and principles] & XIX [Conclusion]. Then recommendations.’ He summarized the recommendations under three heads: ‘1 Numbers 2 Institutions & patterns thereof 3 Coordination’, emphasizing under the first the intention to maintain quality – ‘please realize that no lowering of standards. More [means] worse? Difficult to believe after statistics. But not in our projections.’ Under the second he put technological education before teacher training and the universities; to the third he ‘attach[ed] great importance’, mentioning the

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idea of an expanded grants committee and the need to move ministerial responsibility from the Treasury. The next day he gave the address at the Commemoration Day ceremony of Linstead’s college, Imperial, speaking on technology and economics and their relation to public policy, emphasizing their limitations as well as their utility (Robbins 1963b).12 The following week he gave a large party for the committee. In between, at Lyme for the weekend, where he wrote to his sister, he found ‘Grey skies, grey seas, and grey birds swooping as I look out – and for me an unbelievable sense of freedom after nearly three years imprisonment.’ Inevitably Higher Education continued to take up much of his time for the rest of the year. On 18 November he and Harold Shearman lunched with the director of LSE to discuss ‘our hopes and fears for the future of this institution in the larger context of general plans for the development of Central London’ (LCR to Shearman, 1 and 4 November 1963, General Correspondence October-December 1963, RP). In December the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals naturally devoted its annual Home Universities Conference to the Robbins Report. Lionel gave the only speech, instead of the usual two, at the opening session on ‘Universities and the future pattern of higher education’ on Friday 13 December. The following morning Moser was one of two speakers on university expansion in the short term. Lionel told the chairman of the committee that he would therefore confine his remarks to the long term and to ‘the general philosophy of the organization of higher education’, warning that he would have quite a lot to say about ministerial responsibility because he was worried that the case for a Ministry of Arts and Science was going by default. Apart from defending that recommendation, he focussed on some of the challenges expansion would pose for the universities, such as the need for larger departments in most disciplines, for less specialized first degree courses, for more staff and for improved methods of selecting students for admission (Home Universities Conference 1963 Report of Proceedings, Speeches on Education, RP). Robbins had spent the previous two afternoons and evenings listening to the debate on the Robbins Report in the House of Lords. He had spoken after the first two hours, following Lords Taylor and McNair, the Earl of Bessborough and the Archbishop of Canterbury (HLDebs vol 253 cols 1253– 60; Robbins 1966a, 40–56). He opened with a counterattack on the criticism 12

He did not wear academic dress, explaining to Linstead on 7 October that ‘After my dispute with the Senate, I would naturally wear the gown of one of the other universities with which I am connected, and that, I think, would strike a rather jarring note’ (General Correspondence October-December 1963, RP).

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that, in the words of the hero of Kingsley Amis’s novel, Lucky Jim, ‘more means worse’, which had been made repeatedly, especially in The Times on 24 October and 4, 5 and 6 December. The committee’s projections of future demand for places in higher education was made explicitly on the assumption of current entry requirements. Thus ‘if the leader writer in The Times and those who think with him have their way, henceforward we shall be progressively turning away ever larger numbers of young people who on present entry standards would have got in.’ If the projections were valid, any deterioration of standards would come not from weaker students but from poorer performance of their teachers. He acknowledged the risk but pointed out it was not inevitable or even probable. In the previous sixty years the university population had risen from 20,000 to 118,000. ‘I do not think it can be seriously be maintained that standards have suffered – that the quality of teaching has deteriorated or that there has been a falling away in standards of scholarship or scientific discovery. The Times leader writer . . . may detect some subtle deterioration in the quality of talk over nuts and wine. . . . it is not obvious in the learned journals and the output of scholarly works.’ But, as there would be a need for more teachers for the extra students, he attacked the government for its complacency in, for instance, announcing it would not review the availability of grants for postgraduate students until the spring. Thereafter he concentrated on the matter of the machinery of government. In defending the majority recommendation of the Robbins Report he could evenhandedly attack critics on both sides of the House. He gleefully pointed out that the Soviet Union had separate ministries for higher and technological education and for schools. To his former student, Lord Eccles, who had warned him on 27 October that he agreed with Shearman’s minority view and would ‘campaign therefor in & out of Parliament’ (Special Letters, RP), he could respond that the creation of a single comprehensive education ministry in order to safeguard the possibility of late developers entering higher education was taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut. More seriously, he argued there was a difference between universities and schools in that the former were committed to research and the advancement of learning as well as teaching. This provided the real rationale for a separate ministry for higher education which would look after all the institutions concerned with scientific research, scholarship and the arts. There had previously been no minister to voice their claims in the Cabinet and ‘It was with this sort of consideration in mind that we felt that the idea of a Ministry of Arts and Science, working through a properly co-ordinated range of buffer committees, could give the advancement of art and learning an opportunity

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it had never had before in this country and bequeath to a future age almost limitless prospects of improvement.’ The Conservative government was defeated in the general election of October 1964 and it was a Labour government under Harold Wilson which made the major decisions affecting the pattern of higher education in the UK for the next two decades. Neither government created the Ministry of Arts and Science recommended by the majority of the Robbins committee. The Conservative government followed rather the minority recommendation of Harold Shearman and established the Department of Education and Science, which incorporated the old Ministry of Education and the institutions for which the Treasury was previously responsible (universities, research councils, museums and galleries and the Arts Council). It made a bow in the direction of the majority recommendation by giving the new department two permanent secretaries, one for the existing Ministry of Education functions, the other for the new responsibilities. When the DES came officially into existence in April 1964 it also had two ministers: Quintin Hogg (the former Lord Hailsham) and Sir Edward Boyle. Their Labour successors were Michael Stewart and Lord Bowden, but in January 1965 Stewart moved to the Foreign Office. Anthony Crosland, ‘who was perhaps better fitted for the post than any of his successors’, succeeded him (Carswell 1985, 52–67). The Labour government’s new Ministry of Technology took much of the ‘science’ work with it, and when one of the two permanent secretaries moved to another ministry early in 1965 the DES was united under one permanent secretary. The only concession to the Robbins point of view was Wilson’s designation of Jennie Lee as ‘Minister for the Arts’ as well as the junior minister in charge of planning the Open University. Crosland disappointed many of his admirers, especially because of his determined effort to abolish the publicly funded grammar schools, which had for many years given the finest education to bright children from lower middle class backgrounds.13 In higher education the Labour government, having already rejected the Robbins Report’s recommendation that teacher training colleges be associated with universities, announced in February 1965 that it would not create six new universities or establish special institutions of scientific and technological education and research. The recommendation had been based on the estimated capacity for expansion in the existing universities, but the universities had reacted to the report with plans for expansion in excess of the Robbins estimate. Only one new university 13

LCR was one of the disappointed admirers: not only was he severely critical of the ‘binary philosophy’ (see Chapter 24 and Robbins 1980b, 99–103) but he disliked Crosland’s attempt to get rid of grammar schools (Robbins 1968a, 82).

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was created in response to Robbins, Stirling in Scotland. Crosland made his notorious speech at Woolwich Polytechnic on 27 April 1965 announcing the preservation, and indeed reinforcement, of the binary system. Whereas the Robbins Report had argued that technical colleges could and should be gradually upgraded, the new doctrine divided the ‘autonomous’ universities from the ‘public sector’ of technical colleges and colleges of education. In the latter some thirty ‘polytechnics’ were to be created from existing technical colleges. The universities (plus the CATs) were to continue to enjoy the benefits of funding through the UGC; the rest were to be funded directly by the DES (Carswell 1985, 70–7). For another three decades the polytechnics remained the poor relations of the universities. The Robbins Report had some unintended consequences for Robbins himself. From the time of its publication he began receiving passionate love letters from an anonymous lady, whom he guessed was a middle-aged schoolteacher. From her own allusion to the heroine of Henry Fielding’s novel, he and his family referred to her as Amelia until she revealed her name on trying to telephone him and her address in a couple of her letters. Having then consulted the School psychiatrist, who advised him to do nothing, he did nothing until, after two and a half years of receiving twice weekly letters sent to the Athenaeum, she tried to see him at Lyme (LCR to ICR, 25 April 1966). Then he wrote, asking her to desist, which she did – for a couple of weeks. After another year he took legal advice from John Witt. An enquiry agent first claimed that she was a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence but this turned out to be a mistaken identification as the real ‘Amelia’ had changed her address. On Witt’s advice Lionel wrote again, which again stopped the letters for only a few weeks. They continued to the end of the decade.14 By this time Lionel had resigned from the Athenaeum Club. Since the publication of the Higher Education Report he had been ‘conscious of a not inconsiderable degree of hostility from some of the senior members of that body’. One evening he heard himself being described in most uncomplimentary terms. When he revealed his identity he received a written apology, but he still felt uncomfortable at the club. So in September he had resigned and rejoined the more congenial Reform Club (after an eight-year gap) where he still had many friends (LCR to William Robson, 24 November, LCR to A.C. Matthews, 24 September 1969, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 M-R, RP). He was ‘needless to say’ in favour of admitting women as full members of the Reform and supported John Vaizey’s attempt to introduce 14

The correspondence with Witt is in Personal Correspondence 1966–70 S-Z, RP.

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this in 1972 (1972 CORRESPONDENCE, RP). He told the chairman of the Club committee on 19 July that ‘discrimination against women in a society such as the Reform Club seems to me quite out of touch with the spirit of the age and entirely unjustified’. He warned Vaizey on 22 June that he would not succeed immediately: ‘There are many dinosaurs about. But keep at it and eventually you will win.’ Women members were admitted from 1981. The ‘expansionist’ Robbins Report made Lionel more popular among those on the left of British politics than he had been for a long time (LCR to ICR, 26 October 1963). Nicky Kaldor wrote on 17 December (from Sydney where he was visiting the Reserve Bank of Australia) (Special Letters, RP) that after reading the letters attacking the report in The Times and Lionel’s House of Lords speech defending it, he ‘[felt] impelled to write to say what a pleasure it is to find myself so much in agreement with you – after so many years in which we seem to have been on different sides over so many issues – it feels like the old days when I listened to you admiringly as an undergraduate!’

TWENTY-FOUR

The Sixties

The chairmanship of the Financial Times gave Lionel Robbins an opportunity to participate in business rather than just comment on it as an economist. He found for a while that he enjoyed it. ‘My business preoccupations grow more & more complicated’, he told Caroline on 2 June 1967, ‘but they are not interesting to those not immediately concerned. I enjoy the life; and although it restricts the time available for reading & writing, I am always thankful that after a long life in which I have thought & taught about society & its business from an academic point of view, I have actually been able to participate at a high level in the practical side of things. It has meant a new world of friends too.’ This chapter discusses Robbins’s work for the FT and its related companies – but only those aspects he thought interesting enough to mention to his sister – as well as his remaining academic activities in the 1960s. He had other commitments, especially in the arts. I turn to these in the next chapter. In January 1961 Robbins expected to spend all day on Tuesdays at Bracken House and at least another three or four hours each week there (LCR to Adam Maitland, 20 December 1960, General Correspondence September 1959-May 1960, RP). He lectured at LSE on Monday mornings, lunching in the Senior Common Room and holding his seminar, jointly with Phillips, in the afternoon, followed, while he was head of the department, by his Economics Department tea. In 1960/1 he was also lecturing on Wednesday mornings but for the next two years he lectured only on Mondays at noon on the history of economic thought (LSE Calendars). Wednesday afternoons were devoted to School meetings. The BP and National Gallery boards met on Thursday afternoons: when they clashed the latter often won; Robbins also missed several BP board meetings because of the overseas visits of the Higher Education Committee. The ROH board, to which Drogheda and Robbins could proceed together from Bracken House, met at 4 p.m. on 897

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Tuesdays. Its ballet subcommittee also usually met on Tuesdays at 4. The dates and times of the finance subcommittee were variable but usually held in the late afternoon, mostly on Thursdays. Otherwise Thursdays could be available for FT business. As chairman of the FT Lionel initially received £4000 in fees and £1000 in expenses; after a couple of years, because he also received directors’ fees from subsidiary companies, his salary was rounded up to £5000 a year (plus the £1000 expenses) (Poole to LCR, 1 September 1960 and 22 November 1962, History of Past Employment, RP). He was provided with a car and a chauffeur: his LSE colleague Robert Orr remembers seeing them waiting outside the School at the end of the day, when he had gone in to see Anne Bohm on Graduate School business and to give her a lift home. His appointment as a government director of The British Petroleum Company Limited, BP Tanker Company Limited, The Tanker Insurance Company and BP Clyde Tanker Company Limited also took effect from 1 January 1961. At first the BP position made little more call on his time than the two Thursday afternoon meetings a month. He had hoped that during the Higher Education Committee’s first summer break he might be able to inspect BP oil installations in Canada and that later on he could visit the Middle East (LCR to ICR, 25 April 1961), but he only managed trips to refineries in Britain and France (see Chapter 23). The FT had moved in the spring of 1959 into Bracken House, its new purpose-built headquarters on the south side of Cannon Street. At Lionel’s first board meeting on 24 March 1959, the last to be held at 72 Coleman Street, the directors discussed the purchase of paintings for the new building.1 On a one-acre bomb site, that ‘puzzling building . . . [of] small bricks and red sandstone, a composition as if it had been designed some time about 1910 or 1920’ (Pevsner 1973, 223), was also designed to house the printers, the St Clements Press, which moved from Portugal Street next to LSE. Tuesdays, the day of the monthly board meetings, were also the day of the weekly chairman’s lunch, to which an outside guest was usually invited, a tradition started by Brendan Bracken when he was chairman. Poole and then Robbins, ‘proud of his position of his chairman continued the tradition . . . although with no Bracken [who had dominated the conversation] their character changed drastically’ (Newton 1997, 58 and 76). The lunches were held in the sixth floor dining room with its incomparable view of St Paul’s Cathedral. In Lionel’s time, according to the editor 1

I am very grateful to the Financial Times for allowing me access to the Financial Times Limited Minute Books for the years LCR was chairman.

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Gordon Newton (1997, 76–7), ‘Oliver Poole, who was chairman of the Conservative Party, . . . was always there. So, too, was Pat Gibson. Another regular attendant was Bobby Allan, later Lord Allan of Kilmahew. He . . . [had been] manager of our weekly investment magazine, the Investors Chronicle, . . . [and] became the MP for South Paddington in 1951’. He was also Treasurer of the Conservative Party 1960–5. With Drogheda and Robbins on the board of Covent Garden, Gibson on the board of the Glyndebourne Opera company and Poole on that of the Old Vic theatre, our Tuesday gatherings were heavily weighted in favour of arts and politics. . . . [An] invitation to be there would be very seldom rejected. Indeed in the next few years almost everyone who was anyone, including the Queen and then the Duke of Edinburgh, came as our guest. We were catholic in our choice; besides the usual cabinet ministers, bankers et cetera, we invited trade union leaders, including the redoubtable Frank Cousins. . . . It is remarkable how people, whatever their position in life, relax after a good lunch in good company, and when they are relaxed they like to talk. We had a rule that everything said in that room was regarded as confidential and our guests knew that, but information, even if it stays at the back of one’s head, is always important. . . . Those lunches were very seldom a waste of time.

Her Majesty The Queen lunched at the FT on 27 November 1962, with Lionel, Drogheda, Poole, Gibson, John Smith (another board member who became a Conservative MP), Allan, the general manager Jim Hunter, Newton and Harold Wincott (FT Board Minutes 27 November 1962). Wincott, the former editor of the Investors Chronicle, had been writing a much admired weekly column for the FT since 1950. Lionel was one of his admirers, especially of the ‘humanity and candour’ of Wincott’s writing on economic, financial and social matters (Wincott 1968, xi). After Wincott’s unexpected death in 1969, Lionel helped with others to set up a charitable trust, the Wincott Foundation, to fund annual Wincott Memorial Lectures and awards for financial journalism. HRH The Duke of Edinburgh came on 23 December 1965. Other guests that year included the President of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, and the new leader of the Conservative Party Edward Heath, who made ‘a good impression . . . he has a strong clear head & knows where he is going’, as well as the Governor of the Bank of England Lord Cromer and the head of the Treasury William Armstrong (LCR to ICR, 28 December, 27 June and 21 September 1965). When Drogheda wanted to discuss the arts in London with Roland Freeman of the Greater London Council, Lionel asked him to lunch at the FT: ‘I could not promise you immunity from searching questions . . . since that is my colleague’s nature. But I think I could promise you good cheer and friendly

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company.’ When Freeman came to lunch, he ‘greatly enjoyed’ it, especially ‘meeting Lord Drogheda and hearing his views on the help – or lack of it – which the GLC gives to opera in London.’ (LCR to Freeman, 3 December 1968, Freeman to LCR, 16 January 1969, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 A-F, RP). The editor of the Financial Times enjoyed complete editorial independence. Bracken refused even to give advice to Newton (1997, 66). In spite of Newton’s fears when Pearsons bought the newspaper, Poole continued the policy of non-interference – as did Robbins. As far as Newton was concerned (ibid., 97) ‘my freedom seemed to be even greater than under Bracken’. Lionel saw himself (1971a, 290) as the type of chairman who ‘believes that . . . you leave him [the editor] to do the job as you would an academic, subject only to the overriding interest of the paper as a continuing entity and the property of its shareholders’, and he had inherited the outstanding editor of the day. When the FT engaged the discerning and frequently devastating opera critic Andrew Porter, Drogheda and Robbins were often upset by his reviews of Covent Garden productions (Newton 1997, 95–6): Drogheda would bombard the editor of the arts page with notes, ‘but he – John Higgins – was tough and there was no need to worry about him’. Newton ‘would receive the backlash, usually at our Tuesday lunch, where the atmosphere might be further thickened by a hurt look on the face of Lionel Robbins, who disliked some remark made by our art critic, Denys Sutton, about the National Gallery. . . . Yet none of that really worried [Newton]. They both wanted us to have an arts page and they both liked it. They had to take the rough with the smooth.’ When Lionel reviewed Drogheda’s memoirs (1978e), he commented that the book ‘reveal[ed] the character well known to his friends, audacious, percipient, quick in action, dedicated and essentially self-deprecatory’. By his own admission Drogheda (1978, 131) was temperamentally more inclined to interfere than Lionel ever was and his relationship with Newton had its ups and downs over the twenty years they worked together. If he thought the newspaper should develop in a particular direction he would press for action. But ‘his [Newton’s] skill at resisting my goading was brilliant . . . and fortunately we managed far more often than not to see eye to eye’ in the end. Kynaston (1988, 278–9) conjectured that Poole had chosen Robbins ‘to “referee” the sometimes temperamental Drogheda’ and the potentially awkward situation never arose partly because of their friendship and partly because Lionel acknowledged Drogheda’s greater knowledge of the newspaper business. As Drogheda (1978, 167) put it: ‘Lionel was always most assiduous in his attendance at the office, and was constantly ready with

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advice, although he left to me the basic responsibility for the day-to-day running of the paper.’ The chairman’s duties according to Robbins (1971a, 291) ‘lay on the business side of our affairs, presiding over the central board and the other boards of our subsidiary companies, watching our external interests and assisting in the main decisions relating to investment and contracts’. An early example is his joining discussions with Roy Thomson when the FT was attempting (unsuccessfully) to interest Thomson in jointly acquiring the Financial Times of Montreal in September 1961 (FT Board 26 September and 24 October 1961; LCR to Sir Keith Murray, 26 September 1961, General Correspondence June 1961-February 1962, RP). In July 1961 he was one of the seven-man team which gave evidence to the Royal Commission on the Press chaired by Lord Shawcross. Much of the evidence taken by the commission, and most of its report, dwelt on the British newspapers’ excessively high labour costs and their managements’ weakness in the face of the powerful print unions, problems from which the FT was by no means immune (FT Board 28 March and 2 June 1961; Kynaston 1988, 289–98). Shawcross asked him to give evidence in a personal capacity but he declined on 7 November (General Correspondence June 1961-February 1962, RP) as he was too busy with the Higher Education Committee. The FT board frequently found itself discussing such questions as to whether to raise the selling price of the newspaper or the salaries of the editorial staff. In 1961 it decided to increase only the latter, in order to ensure their best journalists were not attracted to other newspapers, in light of the FT’s substantial profits (FT Board 24 January and 6 June 1961). In 1962, when the rise in profits had fallen off, on 23 October ‘Lord Robbins raised the question of increasing the sale price of the Financial Times. He said bearing in mind the increase in costs which were evident and the increased level of incomes, there seemed every justification for doing this.’ It was agreed to raise the price by 1d (to 5d) from 1 January 1963. By 25 February 1964 Drogheda thought the price should be raised another penny, but Newton was against; Robbins backed the editor. On 26 May the board agreed the increase would take place once the current round of negotiations between the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association and the print unions was concluded. When the Financial News Limited bought the controlling interest in the Financial Times Limited in 1945, and the two newspapers became one, printed on the distinctive pink paper of the Financial Times, the Financial News Limited remained the holding company. It continued to have a half interest in The Economist and responsibility for the Investors Chronicle, The

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Banker and The Practitioner (a medical monthly) and it acquired another monthly magazine, History Today, and St Clements Press along with the Financial Times (Kynaston 1988, 143–4). When Robbins became chairman of the FT he was appointed to the board of The Economist. As Drogheda commented (1978, 163), Lionel ‘derived particular pleasure from the fact that because of the group’s 50 per cent interest in The Economist he became its deputy chairman and thus was able to witness a particularly interesting period in its development’ The Pearson group acquired several other publishing interests in the 1960s and in the summer of 1962 formed a new company, Bracken House Publications Limited, of which Robbins became chairman, to look after its medical and educational publishing interests. The new acquisitions included the art magazine, Apollo, another medical magazine, Medical News, and the Edinburgh educational publishers Oliver & Boyd. Lionel was particularly involved in the last acquisition (FT Board 22 May, 26 June, 24 July and 25 September 1962; LCR to ICR, 22 July and 13 October 1962). He became chairman of its board and once the Higher Education Committee was behind him went up to Edinburgh at least once a month. The pressing concern at The Economist in 1963–4 was the editorship. Donald Tyerman had succeeded Crowther in 1956. Crowther became deputy chairman while Walter Layton was chairman until they changed places in June 1963 (Edwards 1993, 949). As Lionel later commented (Donald Tyerman 1908–81, Biographical Papers, RP), ‘Donald’s courage and independence showed itself almost at once . . . by The Economist being one of the first to query the wisdom of the fatal Suez policy; and, throughout, the clarity of his style and the fairness and forcefulness of his exposition fully sustained the tradition he valued so much.’ Tyerman, whose legs had been paralyzed by polio and who had to heave himself about on two sticks, was a convivial as well as a courageous man. By the early 1960s he had a serious drinking problem, as Crowther reported to Layton on 14 March 1963. It was ‘a matter of relative urgency’ to persuade Tyerman to appoint a managing editor who could succeed him. Crowther thought Tyerman could be persuaded if the appointment went to the senior assistant editor Norman Macrae, but Crowther had ‘grave doubts’ and ‘Lionel Robbins [was] strongly against’.2 Macrae was ‘the paper’s leading maverick’ who was better suited to being ‘a brilliant deputy and promoter of intellectual ferment’ than 2

I am very grateful to David Crowther for allowing me to quote from this letter and his father’s subsequent correspondence with LCR and others (Change of Editor 1963, Crowther Papers).

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editor. In May 1963 Crowther told Tyerman, ‘on the basis of Lionel’s veto’, that Macrae could not succeed him as editor (Edwards 1993, 858–60, 913). Crowther liked Macrae’s suggestion of Roy Jenkins, the Labour MP and biographer, who was then writing on Asquith, as he told Lionel on 8 July. ‘Roy is within the right age-group (42). He has a first-class academic (lst in PPE) and personal (i.e. military) record. He is a very nice chap . . . [and] writes very well. . . . In fact, I would have thought he was a very strong candidate indeed – if he were not a Socialist Member of Parliament.’ Crowther was not sure his politics were an obstacle: ‘Is not the right wing of the Labour Party – the young, sensible, forward-looking right wing, not the old trade unionists – where The Economist’s point d’appui should be sought in the 1960s?’ Lionel was not immediately dismissive of the idea, but he was not keen. He told Crowther on 14 August that the view of the FT directors was that although Jenkins’s having been an MP was not in itself an problem, they would not want an editor who might advocate widespread nationalization or attack the City as an institution. He conceded that Jenkins was unlikely to do this, but claimed that until he met him ‘I must necessarily remain in a state of suspended judgment.’ Crowther had already dined with Jenkins at the end of July. When he replied to Lionel on 23 August he told him that Jenkins had been interested but uncertain: the offer of the editorship would be very tempting if his political prospects were no more than a backbencher or a junior government minister; if there were any chance of becoming a senior minister he would not want to forgo that chance. While he did not rate his chances very highly, given that he voted against Harold Wilson in the Labour leadership contest which followed the sudden death of Gaitskell in January 1963, he was reluctant to resign his seat in the House of Commons. He agreed to dine with Crowther again on 17 September, when Crowther hoped Lionel could join them. Lionel did not join them. Crowther reported to him that Jenkins was still uncertain and had talked to Wilson. ‘Wilson had received him cordially and had said that their past disagreements would not stand in the way of his being offered an office. As to the office, he implied that it would be either just inside the Cabinet, or just outside (say a Minister of State). This, of course, merely intensifies the uncertainty in R.J.’s mind.’ (As Jenkins commented (1991, 151), ‘It was a masterly performance, made the more impressive by the fact that he [Wilson] promised less than he delivered a year later’, when he made Jenkins Home Secretary.) If Jenkins had to give a final answer immediately he would have to say no, but Wilson had

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said there was still a possibility of an autumn general election. Crowther therefore told Jenkins that he ‘proposed therefore to continue to regard him as a potential candidate, and . . . would, in particular, invite him to dinner to meet L.C.R. so that the latter could form a judgment’ in case they had to make a decision quickly after an election (Notes of Conversation, 17.ix.63, R.J.-G.C., Crowther Papers). Jenkins (1991, 151) thought Crowther was ‘cooling’ by this time because of Robbins’s doubts. On 6 November, however, Crowther told Lionel that he was ‘reluctant to conclude that J. is impossible’ and wanted to arrange a dinner of himself, Jenkins and Robbins as soon as possible. Lionel dragged his feet. On 8 November he feared the appointment of a Labour politician would be ‘misinterpreted’, especially in the United States, and claimed other members of the FT board had similar reservations. On 17 December he told Crowther to make it plain to Jenkins before their dinner a` trois, at the Dorchester on 13 January, that ‘I represent a point of view which has the most serious reserves about the principle involved in such an appointment.’ Crowther did not think much of Lionel’s reservations, as he told him on 31 December, nor did he like the implied veto by the FT. Layton told Crowther on 4 January that he suspected Lionel’s attitudes reflected those of the FT editorial staff. Jenkins and Robbins both enjoyed the dinner. Lionel’s impression of Jenkins was ‘all that you [Crowther] would have wished. I do entirely agree with you that he is able, likeable and candid, and a man of real stature.’ But he still thought he was too involved with the Labour Party and likely to be offered government office (Jenkins to Crowther, 16 January, LCR to Crowther, 17 January 1964). Crowther said he would tell Jenkins to forget about the possible offer; when he did, the next day, he pointed out that ‘coming from the Chairman of the company that owns 50% of the company’s shares, I must accept it’ and also that he was sure ‘it is a completely honest opinion, without a shadow of either personal or political prejudice in it.’ In the summer Crowther offered the editorship to Alastair Burnet, who joined The Economist in January 1965 and took over from Tyerman in April (Edwards 1993, 921–3). Jenkins became the great reforming Home Secretary of the twentieth century, whose first term of office saw the legalization of abortion and the decriminalization of private homosexual acts between consenting adults in 1967. In 1961 Lionel was still head of the Economics Department at LSE. As one of the younger economists ruefully commented in December 1960, ‘It appears likely now that Lionel will stay on part time, so I suppose

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the reorganisation and power transfer will be long drawn out matters’ (Chris Archibald to Harry Johnson, 3.12.60, Letters A-C, Box 31, Johnson Papers). Robbins had, however, taken some steps to devolve responsibilities onto other colleagues. He gave up the chair of the Board of Studies in Economics (see Chapter 22) and he delegated the task of planning economics teaching under the new degree regulations to Dick Lipsey and Bernard Corry, also arranging for Lipsey to give the main economics lectures in the new Part I of the BSc(Econ) (LCR to Lipsey, 29 March, LCR to Members of the Economics Department, 12 October 1960, Economics Department Correspondence 1.10.55–30/8/61, RP). Lipsey, along with Kelvin Lancaster, had been appointed a reader at the beginning of 1960. The two had been in competition for a readership in economic theory, which Lionel had expected Lancaster, with his longer list of publications, to get. But, Lionel told Caine on 1 December 1959 (Staff III, RP), ‘By common consent, Lipsey walked away with the interview; and I myself in recent months have come to think that his potentialities are perhaps greater even than those of his rival.’ Caine agreed with Lionel and suggested that they both be promoted. The Standing Committee agreed on 19 January. Lionel also recommended Rex Allen of Macmillan to consider publishing Lipsey’s textbook, An Introduction to Positive Economics: he expected (correctly) that it would be a bestseller, ‘one of the best textbooks since the war’ (7 July 1960, Economics Department Correspondence 1.10.55–30/8/61, RP). A year later the professors of economics decided Lipsey deserved further promotion and Corry promotion to lecturer (LCR to Caine, 3 February 1961, Staff III, RP). The Appointments Committee successfully recommended that the School ask the University to confer the title of professor on Lipsey, as from 1 October 1961 when Robbins relinquished his chair (Standing Committee 23 May 1961). The professors of economics ‘had in mind inter alia that Professor Robbins himself would still be giving a great deal of help to the School in the general field of economics teaching and that as his Chair has come to be regarded, although without formal justification, as the senior economics Chair at the School, the immediate filling of it might give rise to misapprehension about the status of any new appointee. They have concluded that it would be best that no steps should be taken at present to fill the established Chair’, but because Robbins would not be fulltime ‘there should nonetheless be a strengthening of the economics staff at the professorial level’ by promoting Lipsey (Report from the Professors of Economics, 10 May 1961, Staff IV May 1961-July 1962, RP). (The Appointments Committee also recommended that it was time to ask the University to abolish Cannan’s old Chair of Political Economy vacant since 1929.) But

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two years later Lipsey resigned, persuaded by the charismatic Alfred Sloman to help create the new University of Essex as founding professor of economics and Dean of the School of Social Studies (Lipsey 1997). Lancaster had already left: while he was on leave as a visiting professor at Brown in 1961/2 he accepted a chair at Johns Hopkins. When Chris Archibald told Lionel on 8 July 1963 he had decided to apply for a readership at Essex, Lionel wrote a strong reference for him (24 July 1963, Testimonials January 1961-February 1964, RP); passing Archibald’s letter on to Devons he noted ‘I’m quite sure we oughtn’t to try to stop him. But it suggests that we should do our best to prevent Dick [Lipsey] – or Tom [Wilson at Glasgow] taking Corry’ (Economics Department Correspondence 1.9.61-, RP). By this time Devons had replaced Lionel as the head of the Economics Department. Caine had seen a need for more formal departmental organization to ensure consultation beyond the professoriate and in the summer of 1961 had asked for information on the way each department was run (Caine to LCR, 2 June 1961, Director Correspondence January 1955-April 1963, RP). In March 1962 he put forward a set of suggestions for changes in the procedure of the Appointments Committee, which now comprised nearly thirty professors (plus Lord Robbins). A subcommittee of professors, including Phelps Brown, Devons, Lipsey and Yamey, agreed with Caine that while there had to be a head of department his title should be Convenor, sharing the view that ‘it is important to avoid any implication that any person is appointed Convenor of a department for life . . . ’ They also agreed there should be a standing subcommittee of the Appointments Committee which was now too big a body for interviewing candidates and, more tentatively, that there should be changes in the way the Economics Department decided appointments and promotions. In June 1962 the Appointments Committe approved the new arrangements: there would be departmental convenors, a standing subcommittee of the Appointments Committee, special subcommittees to consider professorships, and, except in the Economics Department, appointments and promotion subcommittees composed of the director, two professors from the department, one from a related department and one from another department (Agenda for Standing Committee 9 October 1962). At this point Lionel resigned as chairman and Devons succeeded him as ‘convenor’ of the economists (Devons to Director, 11 July 1962, Staff IV, RP). According to Ben Roberts, Professor of Industrial Relations, Phelps Brown, with his interest in industrial relations, suggested the term; as Basil Yamey commented, a convenorship would be ‘a rotating chore’: ‘No individual could leave his stamp as Lionel had.’

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Devons had considerable administrative experience – as well as his wartime service in the Ministry of Aircraft Production a decade as Dean of the Faculty of Economic and Social Studies at Manchester – and Lionel may have hoped that he, rather than any other of the senior professors, would take over. On 24 June 1962 he told Caroline that ‘my policy of devolution is beginning to pay off: it is really a great relief to see the younger professors doing things I have had to do for the last thirty years. Arnold [Plant] of course continues to be an infernal nuisance. . . . But he matters less & less.’ Unfortunately Devons became seriously ill in September 1965 and died in December 1967. Yamey succeeded him as convenor. Devons achieved a great deal in his short tenure of the convenorship. One of the fiercest critics of the LSE Economics Department, Harry Johnson, who knew Devons as a colleague at Manchester and LSE, wrote (Cairncross 1970, 14): he inevitably became Convener of the Economics Department, and in that capacity did much to reform and democratise the Department’s decision-taking structure, as well as to improve the Administration of the School generally. He had the capacity, extremely rare among economists or academics at large, to think and plan in terms of the institution as a whole and its relation to the outside world, rather than in terms of the department within the institution. . . . As Convener, he was also largely responsible for the institution of the M.Sc. degrees in Economics and Econometrics, an innovation whose success he helped to ensure by initiating a campaign to raise money for graduate fellowships from private sources; but perhaps his greatest contribution was to inspire his colleagues, and especially those recently appointed to professorships from outside the School, with his own vision of the potentialities of the School as an international centre for economics teaching and research.

Lionel tried not to interfere with Devons’s running the department – not always successfully. He remained a member of the Appointments Committee, although he seems to have ceased serving on its promotion or selection committees. He participated in some, but not all, of the discussions in 1963/4 over the future of the department, the new one-year MSc and graduate studentships as well as post-Robbins Report expansion. While not dissenting from the general departmental view, presented to the director on 13 November 1963, that the expansion should be mainly at the graduate level, he objected strongly to Devons’s suggestion that the department take no more students without an improvement in working conditions (Devons, Unanimous Views of the Economics Department on the Development of that Department and the School in the period to 1967–1968, LCR to Devons, 15 November 1963, Economics Department Correspondence 1.9.61-, RP).

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He was not reluctant to declare his differences with Devons (or other senior colleagues) – and they were not inclined to hide theirs. On graduate studentships Devons had proposed an appeal to British firms for funds for such studentships. Lionel had supported this – and even claimed he had the idea first, a claim which did not tally with his colleagues’ recollections – but in the summer of 1963, and again in the autumn, he argued against making the appeal on the ground that his Higher Education Committee was recommending greatly increased government grants for graduate studies. In November he lost this argument and concurred in his colleagues’ recommendation to the director to go ahead (LCR, Graduate Studentships, 4 December, Phillips to the Professors of Economics, 5 December, Devons, Graduate Studentships, 9 December 1963, Economics Department Correspondence 1.9.61-, RP). He was not against the new MSc in principle but his conception of a one-year master’s was coloured by his hankering for a four-year undergraduate degree. While younger colleagues were envisaging a degree which would cover the core of modern economics by requiring all students to sit papers in economic theory and statistical and econometric methods and allow them only one optional subject, Robbins was arguing that ‘The grand conception of the proposed degree is essentially that it provides for a fourth year’s study for people who have shown themselves capable of benefiting by it’ and that this fourth year should be ‘a more, rather than a less, specialised course of study’. Students should acquire the knowledge of the core ‘not at the M.Sc. stage, but rather in the last stages of the first degree’, which should be redesigned, and then concentrate on their chosen specialism in their MSc year (The “One-Year M.Sc.”, 12.2.64, Economics Department Correspondence 1.9.61-, RP). Lipsey was a strong proponent of a taught master’s degree and had been discouraged by lack of support before he left LSE; the discussions continued after he left and became acrimonious. In a 29 February 1964 letter to Edith Penrose given to the author, Robbins accused his colleagues of ‘railroading and hole and corner machination’ and ‘over-riding of [his] intellectual opposition’. When the MSc was introduced later that year, students in economics were required to take two compulsory papers and two in their chosen field; the regulations were soon changed to three compulsory papers and only one optional (LSE Calendars 1964–5 and 1968–9). On 16 May 1963, having learned in a casual conversation that the professors of economics were discussing the future layout of the department without him, Lionel wrote to Devons (Economics Department Correspondence 1.9.61-, RP). Since in Lipsey’s absence he would be organizing the teaching for the economics specialists, ‘I hope you will forgive me for emphasizing

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that that side of the School is facing an immediate crisis as regards Public Finance. Jack Wiseman is now certain to go and, if Turvey leaves, this will mean that there is no person on the staff’ in this field. Wiseman was going to the new University of York. Lionel was also well aware that Turvey, currently on secondment to the Economic Section of the Treasury, had applied for chairs at other universities; he had written him a strong reference for the chair of economics at the new University of Sussex in March 1962 (Testimonials January 1961-February 1964, RP) and told the director on 17 May 1962 (Staff IV, RP) that ‘I do believe that he is one of the people we should try to keep.’ He was even more concerned on 30 September 1963 when he had heard that some of the professors were going to meet with the director ‘to discuss the form of the recommendation which is going to be made about Mr. Turvey and Mr. Day’ (Economics Department Correspondence 1.9.61-, RP). He challenged Devons: ‘Has this matter been referred at any time to the Committee of the Professors of Economics? . . . I should have thought that those of us who were going to be here discharging our usual functions for the next three years, at least ought to know the grounds on which action is being taken.’ In May 1963 the Appointments Committee had recommended the School ask the University to confer the title of professor on Turvey ‘and, in due course, Day’. Lionel was asked to write a brief statement in support of Turvey, which he did on 17 July (Testimonials January 1961-February 1964, RP). But in December the committee recommended conferment of the title of professor on Day (Agenda for Standing Committee 10 December 1963). This is an occasion on which Lionel made a snap judgment. Anne Bohm recalled that he asked for her opinion and she told him Turvey was a poor graduate supervisor. He had previously put Turvey above Day, for instance when he had been asked for possible candidates for a chair at Edinburgh. Then he had commented on Day (LCR to Sir Edward Appleton, 15 January 1962, Testimonials January 1961-February 1964, RP): ‘He has two or three books to his credit which are well thought of, and some at least of my colleagues would, I think, push him quite strongly for a Chair [at LSE] if there were a vacancy. I personally have this speck of reserve that I think that in recent years he has been rather more inclined to devote himself to publicistic activities, writing for the press, broadcasting, and so on, and rather less to the research of which he is undoubtedly capable. But I can quite believe that others who think that this is just a passing phase and that he is so brilliant that even in spite of it he should be chaired, might persuade me to the contrary.’ Turvey did not return to LSE. In April 1964 he resigned on his appointment as Chief Economist to the Electricity Council.

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The appointment of Lionel’s successor in the Chair of Economics was made in the summer of 1964. Before he ceased to be head of the department, the professors of economics met to consider their requests for the next quinquennium. They decided it was time to fill his vacant chair and they would also like a new chair in mathematical economics or econometrics and four lecturers of senior standing. Devons reiterated these requests to the director on 11 July 1962 and indicated that the first priority for 1963/4 was to fill Robbins’s chair, telling him that the professors thought there were ‘two eminent economists who might be interested’ in coming to the School (Staff IV, RP). During the autumn of 1963, if not before, Devons began to sound out Harry Johnson, who had been at the University of Chicago since 1959. Johnson had been uncertain but had come to the School to give a series of five lectures in January and February 1964 (Moggridge 2008, 209). On 23 June Caine reported to the Standing Committee: The Appointments Committee have been giving careful consideration to impending changes in the Professoriate in the Economics Department. Professor Lipsey leaves us this September [having been on leave at Berkeley in 1963/4]. Professors Paish and Plant will retire in 1965. The present arrangement with Lord Robbins is due to terminate in 1966. The vacancy left by Professor Sir Ronald Edwards remains unfilled. Professor Lipsey’s place will be filled from 1 October 1964 by the advancement of Mr A.C.L. Day, Reader in Economics, to the Professoriate and the filling of a readership by Dr Corry. It is the view of the department that one of its greatest needs is for the appointment of an eminent economic theorist, but until very recently they have seen very little hope of satisfying this requirement. They have, however, now ascertained that Professor Harry Johnson, of the University of Chicago, who has a world-wide reputation as an economic theorist, would be willing to accept a Chair at the School in 1966.

He asked the Standing Committee to approve the request to the University to make a formal offer to Johnson as soon as possible. At the next regular Standing Committee meeting on 13 October four professorial appointments were reported: F.G. Foster (computational methods), A.H. John (economic history), H.G. Johnson (economics, from 1 October 1966) and J.D. Sargan (econometrics). After the Committee on Higher Education Lionel had to consider what to do next as far as his own research and writing were concerned. At LSE he returned to teaching two days a week, in 1963/4 giving his lectures on the history of economic thought and, with Bernard Corry, a new course on the Development of Economic Analysis for the economics specialists in the new Part II of the BSc(Econ): this concentrated on the changes in economic theory since 1870 which had resulted in modern economics (LSE Calendar

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1963/4). On 6 November 1963 he told Rex Allen of Macmillan he might like to republish, with new material, some of the essays in The Economist in the Twentieth Century (which was going out of print), but he was thinking first of a volume of his essays in the history of economic thought (Correspondence with Publishers 1.10.55-, RP). As for future writing plans, ‘I do not think I have anything very much in my head to reveal. I was well into an Introduction to Economic Analysis before the Committee on Higher Education came along. But at the moment I am not yet in the mood to take it up and, in any case, I may come to the conclusion that others have done the work sufficiently well.’ As he had told Sir David Anderson on 5 June, he knew he had been ‘losing touch with my subject and . . . failing to be as much use to my graduate students as I should be’. He had admitted to James Leontiades on 14 February that only ‘an unsigned telegram reminding me that the sender was still alive . . . [and] asking what were the prospects of an oral examination in the spring’ had forced him to read his dissertation on capital theory (General Correspondence February-September 1963, RP). (The examination was held, with George Shackle as the external examiner, in the summer.) He therefore refused almost all invitations to speak, including some he would usually have gladly accepted, such as the Marshall Society at Cambridge and the Ashley Society at Birmingham (LCR to M.S. Wright, 27 November, LCR to Gilbert Walker, 17 December 1963, General Correspondence October-December 1963, RP). Lionel accepted the invitation from the Dean of the Graduate School of Public Administration to give the annual Gustav Pollak Lecture at Harvard (1965a). Since Gottfried Haberler wanted to be present, the lecture was arranged for 18 March 1964 (Don K. Price to LCR, 30 October, LCR to Price, 15 and 29 November, Price to LCR, 17 December 1963, General Correspondence October-December 1963, RP). Lionel agreed to speak on the Robbins Report and intended to take the opportunity to see Caroline and the Viners in Princeton. But he turned down Caroline’s invitation to lecture at Bryn Mawr, because with all his commitments in London, ‘L.S.E., F.T., B.P., N.G., C.G. etc it is very difficult, save in the depths of the summer to find a period when I can be away for more than three or four days without missing meetings’ (LCR to ICR, 24 November and 27 December 1963). When he and Iris went to the States, she stayed on with the Viners in Princeton while he went to Chicago, invited by George Stigler, and to Harvard, giving the same lecture – outlining the main arguments of the report and the fate of its recommendations – in both places. They then spent a weekend with Caroline and Joe, for the last time in their big house at Ithan, before flying home. As he told her on 28 March, he ‘left Ithan with

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real sadness’ given the many happy days he had spent there since his first visit in 1943. At Princeton he met Oskar Morgenstern for the first time in many years, which ‘brought back recollections of many happy days of the world before the flood’ (LCR to R.A. Lester, 28 February, LCR to Stigler, 17 January, LCR to Morgenstern, 27 April 1964, Economists Correspondence October 1961-April 1964, RP). In April Lionel crossed the Atlantic again on his own. Having given little time to his directorship of British Petroleum during the Higher Education Committee, he committed himself to travel to Canada for three weeks on their behalf during the Easter vacation. He ‘more or less covered the whole area of BP activities in Canada’, from filling stations in southern Ontario to the oil fields of Alberta, and also managed to visit the major Canadian universities (LCR to ICR, 3 May 1964). He reported his impressions in his letters to Iris, first from Toronto on 13 and 14 April. He found the look of the city ‘more American than at Montreal & still more at Quebec’. From Quebec City he was taken out to the Laurentian mountains and found ‘the landscape with its old worn hills & the ubiquitous purple of the trees & distant soil . . . something in [his] experience quite unique to Canada’. He was glad to see Niagara Falls: although the surroundings were ‘squalid – factories and a litter of poor restaurants & indifferent houses’, ‘the movement of water is grand – remorseless cruel & fantastical. It reminds you of da Vinci’s drawings of universal inundation & has quite an hypnotic effect as you watch. I can easily understand it inducing suicide if you are at all in that mood. [The day] was grey & desolate & the contrast between the waste of waters & those elemental forces & the vulgar surroundings gave it all the quality of a surrealist nightmare.’ But Lake Ontario, which he could see from his seventeenth floor room in the Royal York Hotel, was ‘nothing special – simply a sea . . . without salt & the eternal motion. It makes me long for Lyme [Regis].’ On his last day in Toronto he visited the University – ‘a splendid place justifying Jack [Viner]’s very high praise’ – and the Art Gallery, which has a sizeable collection of Henry Moore statues, before flying to Winnipeg where he immediately dined with the vice-president and some of the economists at the University of Manitoba, returning there the next day to talk mainly about the Robbins Report (LCR to IER, 15 and 16 April). In Calgary he had ‘a day of serious instruction in the economics of oil production. . . . In the morning I sat and listened to statements by the Chairman & the managers. In the afternoon I drove to see a natural gas field & a sulphur factory. . . . In between was a lunch with Calgary notables: & again in the evening the Chairman gave me an intimate dinner at his house for me to meet more

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local people.’ The next day was ‘truly memorable’ when he was taken into the Rockies, to Banff and the Jasper National Park. There was an almost equally memorable train ride through the Rockies, followed by a couple of days in Vancouver, whose ‘setting . . . is as beautiful as common report has it – a splendid inland harbour surrounded by mountains – not as sensational as Rio, but nearly as fine. The view from the University [of British Columbia] over the bay towards the northern heights must be one of the loveliest vistas in the world’ (LCR to IER, 17 and 21 April 1964). From Vancouver he took the ferry to Vancouver Island and flew to Seattle to make the transatlantic flight home. From Calgary he also reported to Iris on 16 April a letter from his bete noire ‘NOBLE’, now Sir Peter Noble and vice-chancellor of the University of London, enquiring whether he would accept an honorary doctorate. Douglas Logan had warned him on 26 March (Special Letters, RP) this would be coming and he decided to accept, albeit with mixed feelings. Six months later he was offered an honorary degree from the University of Victoria, which he declined as he thought he would be too busy to attend the ceremony (LCR to Malcolm G. Taylor, 23 September 1964, General Correspondence July 1964-, RP). On his return from Canada he had discovered the Economics Department at LSE was so short of senior staff that he would be lecturing on Economic Principles once more. He had not entirely given up hope of writing his book on economic theory and told his sister on 3 May that he thought he might spend the next two years writing the lectures up as a book. Corry would take over the lectures on the Development of Economic Analysis; he had already taken over the first-year Elements of Economics when Lipsey went on leave. Lionel had forgone his annual lecture on international economics to the Johns Hopkins Center at Bologna in 1962 because of the Higher Education Committee. In 1963 he had paid the briefest visit, too brief even to spend a day in Mantua looking at the fifteenth-century frescoes by Mantegna in the Ducal Palace (LCR to Martin Davies, 6 May 1963, NG26/86). In 1964 he could go for longer and take Iris with him, visiting Verona, Mantua and Modena on the way and Milan on the way back. He told his sister on 17 May: ‘Bologna was as friendly & enjoyable as ever. The Center . . . now has a building to itself & on the roof they have a penthouse with two flats for visiting lecturers. We arrived on Saturday afternoon late & that evening & Sunday we had the place to ourselves, Iris reading & sitting in the sun & I putting the last touches to my Monday lecture, from time to time going out to our favourite restaurants for food or for little excursions to pictures or sculpture.’ Lionel always enjoyed the parties at the Center:

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Basil Yamey remembered that he would sit on the floor and start talking, and the students would sit and listen, as his talk ranged widely, mostly on the history of economic thought, also on Italian opera. As at parties elsewhere, ‘Iris would sit on the side as she always did and when Lionel said something outrageous she would say, “Oh Lionel, it didn’t happen quite like that.” He was terrific at telling stories about Bretton Woods etc.’ The topics of his lectures were determined by the Center. In the late 1950s he spoke on European economic integration; in 1963 he spoke on the world trend towards regionalism and thereafter usually on the Atlantic community – although he did speak one year (1969) on international aspects of student unrest (ms notes in Bologna Lectures, RP). In spite of his latest resolution not to accept invitations to speak, May, June and July 1964 found him spending weekends at Lyme writing lectures and addresses, beginning with a talk on higher education in Bonn a week after the Italian trip (ms Bonn 23.5.64, Speeches on Education, RP). The most notable was an address to the Assembly of Faculties of UCL on 16 June, when he spoke on ‘Bentham in the Twentieth Century’ (Robbins 1965b, reported in The Times on 19 June as ‘Bentham’s belief in birth control’). As he told his sister on 20 June, he ‘wound up with an attack on the [Roman] Catholic attitude to birth control. . . . I was applauded to the echo & congratulated by I don’t know how many women afterwards. It was one of my better efforts.’ Having asked the question to what extent Bentham’s ideas had a bearing on present day problems and answered that Bentham’s method, of breaking up problems into constituent parts, and working rule, the greatest happiness principle, were still ‘supremely relevant’, he chose two illustrations: penal law and the population explosion. Bentham would have regarded the existing law relating to homosexual activities as ‘smacking of pure barbarism’ and as for rapid population growth, ‘the reaction of anyone inspired by Benthamite principles is unequivocally determined. . . . He [Bentham] would have regarded it as a moral duty to facilitate the knowledge of such [contraceptive] methods; and he would have deemed it, as I do, a discredit to any religion or creed that there should be found among its priests and high dignitaries those who would withhold from suffering humanity the means of preventing the misery and disasters with which it is threatened.’ On 8 July he gave his annual Presidential Address to the British Academy (1965c), two days later the Convocation Address at the Royal College of Art for which the Robbins Report had recommended university status (Robbins 1966a, 108–17). He spent the first fortnight of August at Lyme writing the opening address to a conference of European rectors and vice-chancellors

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at the University of G¨ottingen on 2 September. After the trip to Germany he returned to Lyme and started preparing his latest set of Principles lectures (but now with some doubts as to whether he would make them into a book). There were relaxations in additions to those of the seaside. He had treated himself to an expensive record player from which he derived ‘endless pleasure’ listening to string quartets (LCR to ICR, 26 July 1964). As guests of the Federal Government Iris and Lionel were taken to Bayreuth, as well as to Munich, Wurzburg, Nuremberg, Berlin, Hanover and Kassel for visiting galleries and museums and other sightseeing (itineraries in General Correspondence July 1964-, RP). As Lionel told Caroline on 14 September, their visit began with G¨otterd¨ammerung on the last night of the season. When they reached G¨ottingen they found it was a lovely unspoilt, unbombed university city – reminiscent of Princeton which was founded a little earlier. The weather was lovely & the procession through the little town with all its inhabitants on the side walks was very moving. As one looked at the earnest respectful faces, one realized that more than 70 per cent of them had been born later than any date at which they could be held responsible for the horrors of our time. My oration went well. It had taken much time needed for other work to prepare it. But I doubt if I have ever done anything in that line nearly so successful. I really said what I thought universities ought to do in the modern age & the Rectors & Vice Chancellors took it bravely.

In his address (1966a, 1–16) Robbins discussed the recent increase in public interest in the role of universities, attributing it to both increased numbers of young people wishing to attend university and increased expectations of what universities had to offer – their contribution to ‘the progress and texture of civilization . . . not only as centres of training, but also as centres of thought and learning’. After repeating some of the arguments which appear in the Robbins Report against the separation of research from teaching, in favour of large universities, increased postgraduate studies and broader first degrees, he gave his own view on what universities could and should achieve by way of inculcating the ‘intellectual and moral habits’ suitable for adult membership in civilized and free societies. Three habits were particularly important: critical objectivity; social judgment in terms of consequences rather than categories (the Benthamite rule again); and acknowledgment of the impersonality of knowledge and the transcendence of values. ‘Above all, we should set our forces against the intrustion into science and learning of the anti-social forces of nationalism. . . . We need – Britons, Frenchmen, Germans, all of us – to return to the outlook and values of the Aufkl¨arungzeit, to that Enlightenment which stressed the unity of humanity, rather than its differences.’ As he told Baumol on 17 September

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(Baumol Papers), ‘It was a piquant experience laying down the law to the massed rectors and vice-chancellors of Europe under a bust of George the II, one of whose few good deeds was the founding of that university.’ Lionel had been a member of the ‘Bentham National Committee’ and its editorial subcommittee since it was formed in 1959 to oversee the preparation and publication of a definitive edition of Bentham’s works. The Bowring edition of 1843, long out of print, was seriously incomplete. At UCL, which holds Bentham’s voluminous papers, the philosopher A.J. Ayer had apparently ‘shamed the Provost . . . into taking action by suggesting that if the College was not going to do anything with the papers, it might as well sell them to the highest (American) bidder’; he had also obtained grants to finance a first volume of Bentham’s correspondence. Two years later, by which time the subcommittee had made plans for the edition and the Rockefeller Foundation had agreed to provide funding, J.H. Burns, reader in the history of political thought at UCL, became the general editor and ‘with the support of the energetic Ayer and Lord Robbins, the plans began to take shape’ (Lacey 2004, 300; Minutes of first meeting of Bentham National Committee 23 October 1959 and Agenda for second meeting on 26 June 1961, Bentham Committee Correspondence, RP).3 Robbins intervened decisively in persuading the editorial committee not to include Werner Stark’s ‘very unsatisfactory’ (1952–4) compilation of Bentham’s economic writings commissioned by the RES in 1941 (LCR to Robinson, 23 March 1962, RES10/5/1; Schofield 2009). In January 1966 Lionel took over the chairmanship of the Bentham Committee. One of his first tasks was to obtain more funding: he approached Lord Kilmaine of the Pilgrim Trust, which made a grant of £1000 a year for five years, a useful addition to funds from UCL and the British Academy. As usual he had not beaten about the bush when he saw Kilmaine but admitted the committee would really like £5000 a year. He approached the Cultural Attach´e at the Soviet Embassy in London about finding Bentham material in Russian archives – Bentham’s brother Samuel having been an engineer in the service of Catherine the Great (LCR to Kilmaine, 21 February, LCR to Vladimir Kouznetsov, 11 February 1966, and subsequent correspondence in Bentham Committee Correspondence, RP). His other obligations included negotiating, with Noel Annan (who succeeded Ifor Evans as Provost of UCL), terms with the publisher, the Athlone Press 3

The editorial committee, which met more frequently, included Ayer, the Provost and R.A. Humphreys from UCL, Charles Everett of Columbia University, the legal philosopher Herbert Hart from Oxford and Piero Sraffa from Cambridge.

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of the University of London; in this he obtained the help of his old ally the Principal of the University, Douglas Logan. He also weighed in on the related matters of royalties and remuneration of editors (Bentham Committee 8 December 1966, 12 June and 1 November 1967, Bentham Committee Minutes & Agenda; correspondence with Athlone Press and Logan in Bentham Committee Correspondence, RP). It was a long-term project: the editorial subcommittee had estimated it would require twenty-five to thirty volumes and take twenty years to complete; by 1965 Lionel thought it might run to forty volumes and take twenty-five years (LCR to C. Furth, 10 December 1965, Bentham Committee Correspondence, RP). While Robbins was in Toronto he was plied with questions about the UK political situation. In October 1963 Harold Macmillan had resigned in favour of his Foreign Secretary, Earl Home, who renounced his title to stand for the Commons as Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Lionel had commented to his sister on 26 October: ‘The political situation is very piquant: Hume [sic] has already confounded all his critics by proving to be an absolutely splendid broadcaster – far better than [Harold] Wilson. . . . Wilson crossexamined by (socialist) interviewers the other night on television, got seriously rattled & complained of unfair treatment; while Hume, faced with the taunt that he is the 14th Earl, merely remarked reflectively “Well come to think of it Mr Wilson may be the 14th Mr Wilson.”’ When Lionel wrote his sister on 11 October 1964 it looked as though Labour would win the forthcoming general election. He did not relish the prospect: although he had ‘no great affection for the Conservatives’, he feared Labour’s social and economic policies would ‘make life more difficult for the exceptional & the industrious’ and he ‘thoroughly distrust[ed] their foreign policy. They hate the U.S. & Europe & would you believe it have made the consolidation of the Commonwealth – that almost nonexistent entity – one of their rallying cries.’ Moreover he suspected there was ‘a major economic crisis ahead which the Conservatives deny & their opponents propose to avert by measures which will make it worse’. It was a close election, which Labour won only by 317 seats to 304 Conservatives and 9 Liberals, giving it a majority of just four. When Lionel met Wilson for the first time after he became Prime Minister, he was amused – he told his sister on 5 December 1965 – that his ‘accent has been deliberately thickened. The young man in our office [the Cabinet Offices in 1940] had not these strong northern overtones.’ The Wilson government responded immediately to the sizeable balanceof-payments deficit with a 15 per cent surcharge on imports of manufactured goods announced on 26 October. On 11 November the Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan, introduced an autumn budget, which raised

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some taxes and gave notice of more increases in the spring budget, at the same time increasing pensions and other benefits. The resulting speculation against sterling, fixed at US$2.80 since the 1949 devaluation, was stopped only by the Bank of England borrowing from other central banks (Blackaby ed 1978, 31–2, 311–12). Since Wilson was determined not to be the third Labour Prime Minister who devalued the pound, this was merely the first of several crises in the next three years. Making speeches and preparing reports distracted Lionel from more productive intellectual pursuits, especially now that he was giving his Principles lectures as well as working for the FT and BP. In November 1964 he gave written and oral evidence to the Franks Commission of Inquiry into the University of Oxford. The Robbins Report had received so much criticism from Oxford academics that, as he told his sister on 8 November, ‘it would be cowardly not to accept’ the invitation and he spent considerable time writing a fairly lengthy document. The Robbins Report had been critical of Oxford (and Cambridge) (Committee on Higher Education 1963, para 687): ‘the number of times when it is necessary to except Oxford and Cambridge from general statements about British universities, the difficulty both institutions have in reaching rapid decisions on matters of policy with their present constitutional arrangements, and the general obscurity in which so many of their administrative and financial arrangements are shrouded are not compatible with a situation in which they, like other universities, are largely dependent on public funds.’ Continuance of such anomalies might endanger the whole university system. ‘We recommend that, if Oxford and Cambridge are unable satisfactorily to solve these problems within a reasonable time, they should be the subject of independent inquiry.’ Oxford academics fought back, one of their strongest points being that the Robbins Report had failed to mention its standing as one of the great universities in the world. Robert Blake (1964, 2) claimed the ‘greatest defect’ of the Report was that ‘A sort of sour Benthamite egalitarianism pervades it whenever Oxford or Cambridge is mentioned. . . . What does it matter if Oxford and Cambridge do have to be excepted “from general statements about British universities”? London has to be excepted from general statements about British cities, and possibly Lord Robbins has sometimes to be excepted from general statements about British economists. He is, for example, more distinguished than most of them, and a peer.’ (Blake subsequently apologized to Lionel (9 November 1964, Letters from Old Friends, RP) for other criticisms of the report, such as implying a lowering of admissions standards, and ‘for allowing my

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dissent on certain points of the Report, notably those relating to Oxford and Cambridge, to have let run away with my pen to the point of misrepresenting the point about entries’.) The University of Oxford headed off an independent enquiry. Hebdomadal Council asked a committee of three men to review the Robbins criticisms of Oxford and decide whether they should be investigated. The three – Oliver Franks, who had been Provost of Worcester College since 1962, Kenneth Wheare Rector of Exeter College, and Sir Lindor Brown, a fellow of Magdalene College and Waynflete Professor of Physiology – quickly recommended a full-scale commission, ‘to inquire into and report upon the part which Oxford plays now and should play in the future in the system of higher education in the United Kingdom, having regard to its position as both a national and an international University’. Council appointed Franks chairman of a six-man Commission of Inquiry in March 1964 (Halsey 1992, 152–4; Harrison ed 1994, 722–5). The commission interviewed witnesses twice a week throughout the academic year 1964/5 and reported in March 1966. Franks’s biographer commented (Danchev 1993, 162–4): All of these hearings were held in public, a procedure regarded as bold in some quarters and quite scandalous in others, but a determination made by the chairman before ever he met his fellow commissioners. . . . The actual evidence was secondary. It was the process that mattered. . . . Apart from any consequent reforms, the commission was important for its very existence, and for the way in which it conducted itself. . . . The suspicion lingers that Franks enjoyed taking oral evidence.

Robbins organized his written evidence (1966a, 57–100) around two sets of problems: those arising from the position of Oxford and Cambridge relative to other UK universities; and those relating to Oxford’s internal administration. As in the Robbins Report he thought the former could be addressed by increasing the quality and hence the attractiveness to students of the other universities, old and new. But he thought undergraduate scholarships should be abolished in favour of awards for graduate students, or at least awarded only after the first undergraduate year rather than on admission. He particularly criticized Oxford for obscurantism, for using the colleges as an excuse for providing inadequate information, and Oxford and Cambridge for their complete self-government: ‘They are syndicalist organizations – pure examples of producer’s democracy.’ He concluded by suggesting both ancient universities build on their strengths by greatly increasing their proportions of graduate students, although they should not become wholly graduate institutions. His questioning by the commissioners, and his answers to them, largely focussed on his practical proposals.

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The report of the Franks Commission – ‘perhaps the best sociological account of the working of a single university in this [the twentieth] century’ (Halsey 1992, 155) – recommended improvements in the admissions system and changes in Oxford’s obscure administrative arrangements in order to provide greater university control over the colleges and to make decision making more effective. But (ibid., 162–7) ‘Oxford dons were jealous of their ancient and established forms of democratic academic government.’ Although there were changes in the university’s statutes, the Franks proposals were seen as too radical and watered down. ‘There was no Franks revolution.’ The British Petroleum Company had been founded as the Anglo-Persian Oil company (renamed Anglo-Iranian in 1935) in 1909 to exploit the giant oil field at Masjid-i-Suleiman in Southern Persia. It held the sole concession to explore for and produce petroleum in Iran until May 1951, when the Iranian government under Muhammad Musaddiq nationalized its operations there. The British government had been the majority shareholder since 1914 and thereafter appointed two non-executive directors with the right to veto board resolutions; it had promised not to use this power ‘except in regard to matters of general policy’ (Bamberg 2000, 2–10; copy of John Bradbury to Anglo-Persian Oil Company Ltd, 20 May 1914, History of Past Employment, RP). In the 1960s the government directors (and the Treasury) regarded ‘their duties and responsibilities . . . [to be] the normal duties and responsibilities of a director of any joint stock company’, with primary duty to all the stockholders of BP, and ‘Subject to that . . . as [also] having the responsibility of ensuring that the general policy of the Company should conform, so far as possible, with the general interests of those whom they represent . . . H.M.G. as a stockholder’ (Frederic Harmer to William Armstrong, 21 May 1965, Correspondence (General) up to 1970, RP). After 1951 the company increased its output of crude and refined products from other Middle East oil fields (Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar) in which it shared the concession with other Western companies and from new refineries in Aden, Australia, Britain, Belgium and Germany, as well as negotiating an agreement with the Iran government which allowed it to resume operations in Iran in 1954 – when it was renamed British Petroleum (Bamberg 2000, 20–30, 42–4). The 1960s saw further geographical (and product) diversification and vertical integration; it also saw the rise of OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) which strengthened the bargaining power of the oil producing countries, although OPEC did not fully exploit its power until the 1970s. BP’s great burst of exploration, especially outside the

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Middle East, in the 1950s also did not produce significant results until the later 1960s. When Lionel joined the board in 1961, the other government director was his friend Frederic Harmer. The chairman was the ‘well connected and extremely able’ Hon Maurice Bridgeman, who had been with the company since 1926 and whom Lionel had also known since their wartime goverment service (including the Anglo-American loan negotiations) (Bamberg 2000, 50–1, 56–7). Harmer, ‘never a natural civil servant’, had left the Treasury in 1946 and joined the New Zealand Shipping Company, becoming chairman of its board in 1953 and a member of the board of P&0 in 1955. He was also a governor of LSE. It is easy to understand why he and Lionel were good friends: according to King’s College Cambridge Annual Report 1995 (57–8), ‘Freddie curiously combined a capacity for the most affectionate friendship (his eyes lit up when he saw an old friend) with an innovative, impatient, even combative intelligence. One seldom met him without its being a joy, and at the same time being instantly plunged into an argument.’ According to Bamberg (2000, 316), ‘Under Bridgeman from 1961 to 1969, the board enjoyed a period of calm stability, in which a collegiate atmosphere prevailed, untroubled by rivalries and contests for the leadership. As one director put it, commenting privately on BP’s management: “The only reason it works is that there are seven friendly gentlemen at the top – one self-seeker and the system would fall down.” . . . And . . . another: “We know each other and work well together. . . . It’s very rewarding to work for BP, first of all to belong to a marvellous club . . . ”’ This was very congenial to Lionel. Apart from attending board meetings at the company’s head office in Britannic House (the old Britannic House in Finsbury Circus designed by Lutyens until the move to a new custombuilt skyscraper in 1967), his role as a non-executive director included travelling for the company, to show the interest of head office in the company’s far flung operations as well as to learn about those operations in order to participate usefully in board discussions. Hence his trips to the refineries at Llandarcy (Wales), Grangemouth (Scotland), Lavera (France) and Dinslaken (Germany) in 1961 and his travels in Canada in 1964. He toured the docks and BP oil refinery at Antwerp in 1966 and inspected the spectacular new refinery at Rotterdam in 1968 (LCR to ICR, 7 August 1966 and 13 July 1968). What particularly impressed him about the oil industry was that it was a truly international industry, whose operations were nonetheless heavily affected by national policies in the form of tax laws and exploitation agreements, and that it was ‘an essentially modern industry’ (ms Toast of the Oil Industries

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Club 18/11/66, Addresses on Finance & Economics 1955-, RP): he was fascinated by, for instance, ‘watching oil being turned into food & [receiving] tutorials from [the] young men who were doing it. . . . A thrilling intellectual experience.’4 When Lionel was invited to Delhi to talk with members of the Indian Education Commission, he visited BP’s refineries at Kuwait on the way there and at Abadan and Kirmanshah in Iran on the way back (itinerary in General Correspondence July 1964-, RP). He left London on 15 December 1964 and returned on 3 January 1965, while Iris spent Christmas with Anne and Christopher and their children at Lyme. The contrasts between the three countries were striking (LCR to ICR, 10 January 1965): ‘Kuwait a sociological case study with its population of pearl fishers & merchants suddenly raised to the position of one of the wealthiest communities in the world; India a world in itself at once enchanting & tragical, with the population explosion – 100 million in the next ten years – threatening to defeat the best efforts of policy & accumulation; and Iran with its marvellous mountains & sophisticated, age old civilization & the flavour of adventure & discovery in the beautifully situated oil fields.’ The high point of the trip was New Delhi, where he was continuously feted by his former students and other ex-LSE men. He enjoyed the city: ‘It is a lovely place too with lovely climate at this time of year, in layout & feeling much resembling Washington – I never dreamt that [the architect] Lutyens had so much in him.’ On Christmas Day J.S. Lal drove him out to see the Taj Mahal at Agra and to visit Panchayat nearby: ‘a poverty stricken village which my friend who is one of the chief planners was particularly anxious for me to see as evidence of what they are up against’. Here he presented a gift to the village president, which was used by the Youth Club to buy books of English and Hindi literature for the local library (Divan Singh to LCR, 22 January 1965, Special Letters, RP). He told his sister on 10 January that he was even more impressed by the village than by the Taj. On Boxing Day he gave a lecture on the same themes as his G¨ottingen address (ms notes in Speeches on Education, RP). While he was in Delhi he wanted to see A.K. Dasgupta, now Professor of International Economics at the Indian School of International Studies (Sen 1994); Dasgupta invited him to lunch and Lionel met for the first time Dasgupta’s wife whom he had had to leave behind when he studied at LSE in 1934–6 (information from Partha Dasgupta). As he told Caroline on 14 December, Lionel’s one regret of the trip was that he 4

BP had pilot plants for the production of protein at Lavera and Grangemouth (Bamberg 2000, 424–34).

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did not see their younger sister Nancy: he offered to pay her fare so she could fly up from Donavhur to see him, but she was too busy at that time of the year, and he did not have time to visit South India given his commitments to BP. Lionel arrived back to find a ‘great row’ about an article in the Financial Times by Harold Wincott and a letter to himself from the Chancellor of the Exchequer protesting about it. Wincott in his regular Tuesday column had written an ‘Open Letter to the Chancellor’ attacking the government’s proposed capital gains and corporation taxes and claiming they represented a ‘fiscal putsch’ by Nicholas Kaldor, one of the Labour government’s economic advisers, adding ‘there really hasn’t been anything like it since Hitler wrote “Mein Kampf”’ (Kynaston 1988, 323–4). Lionel wrote immediately to Nicky on 5 January: ‘As I am sure you must know, members of our Board . . . do not interfere in the day to day running of the papers, nor are they consulted about particular articles. Needless to say, if Harold Wincott had run into me and asked my opinion about his comparison, I should have advised him to cut it out; and I was very glad indeed to see that when its implications had been pointed out to him he expressed regret.’ (Wincott retracted his comparison in his next column after the offending one.) Lionel told Callaghan the same day that he thought Wincott would never have made the remark if he had realized Kaldor was Jewish. He also pointed out, however, that he was not sure Callaghan was right in stating that Kaldor was now a civil servant who could not defend himself against personal attacks. He thought it arguable that Kaldor’s parttime position was analogous to Keynes’s wartime position rather than to ‘the foot-slogging temporaries during the war’ (Kaldor NK/3/16/2/215). Winston Churchill – to Lionel ‘the greatest man we shall ever know’ – died on 23 January 1965. As he told his sister the next day, when Lionel saw the flags flying at halfmast on his way to the National Gallery on Sunday morning he immediately thought of Cleopatra’s lament on the death of Antony: . . . the odds is gone, And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon.

Three weeks later he and Iris attended the memorial service in St Paul’s Cathedral (LCR to ICR, 10 February 1965). ‘It was a week of appallingly unattractive weather. Yet the crowds lined up & stood for hours in the

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bleak winds waiting to file past in Westminster Hall. . . . Iris & I went to the Cathedral. . . . The service was simple & expressive although with just a touch too much resurrection of the dead about part for me – and I don’t like the last verse of the Battle Hymn of the Republic – don’t understand what it means to say that “In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea” – not historical or warranted by the New Testament or by any mythology known to me. The most moving feature was the last post . . . hardly a dry eye after that.’ In the Lent term 1965 Lionel wondered whether he should leave LSE a year early: ‘what with one thing and another there is a great deal to do & not too much time to think or write.’ He was spending far too much time preparing speeches. I had to open an extension of Southall Grammar School last week &, just before that, give the chief guests speech at a University College Students Society [the Jevons Society, on 16 February]. And now this weekend [27–28 February] I am stewing over a speech at the Manchester College of Technology, where, on the 11th [March], I am to be made an Hon[orary] Fellow [1966a, 101–17] . . . and then only a fortnight after that there is Berkeley, with its enormous audience and honorarium, for which at the moment I havent an ounce of proper inspiration. Rather silly to let oneself for all this. But I must have turned down at least a hundred other invitations this last twelve months – and in each case of these I accepted there were strong sentimental or practical reasons for not saying no.

He turned down Caroline’s suggestion of spending an academic year in the States, for he did not want to give up his business interests – not only because of the large salary but because he was finding them particularly interesting (LCR to ICR, 24 January, 27 February and 20 March 1965). The trip to Berkeley was to give the Charter Day Address on 26 March. In it he combined factual remarks about the Robbins Report recommendations with his own views on the aims of university education (ts Charter Day Address – Berkeley 26.3.65, University & School Occasions, RP). No sooner had he and Iris returned from this (and from seeing the Viners and Caroline and Joe) than he was writing another lecture for a conference on Management in a Developing Economy in Teheran in April (LCR to ICR, 20 March and 10 April 1965). He talked in general terms about the factors influencing economic development: natural resources, population, education, technical knowledge and, of course, management, public or private (1966a, 118–37). In May he spoke at an Investors Chronicle conference and in June at the annual prizegiving day at the Leys School in Cambridge, of which Frank Lee was chairman of the governors (‘I.C. Conference, 28.5.65’, Addresses on Finance & Economics 1955-; ‘Leys School 19.6.65’, University

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& School Occasions, RP). Since Lee suffered a serious heart attack in 1961 before he left the Treasury, Lionel, as he told his sister on 20 June, thought his move to Cambridge was ‘a godsend – I am pretty sure that, had he been in Whitehall the last few months of anxiety & muddle would have killed him.’ It was not until the summer of 1965, after writing a long speech on the UK financial and economic situation for a House of Lords debate – his first speech in that place since the Higher Education debate in December 1963 – that Lionel returned to academic work. It was a wet summer but at Lyme ‘bad weather is no great trouble – one simply retreats to the study & grey and stormy seas from there are almost as attractive as bright ones’. A holiday at Pontresina in Switzerland afforded better weather, good walking and satisfying reading – Henry James’s novels, which Lionel had recently discovered, and John Watkins’s book on Hobbes (LCR to ICR, 1, 9 and 15 August 1965; Watkins to LCR, 24 August 1965, Special Letters, RP). Back at Lyme he read more Henry James, a good deal for his next year’s seminar – it would be his last and he ‘want[ed] if possible to go out with something of a bang’ – and, for two long reviews in Economica (1965d, 1966b), the first four volumes of the University of Toronto edition of the collected works of John Stuart Mill (two volumes of early letters and two volumes of Principles of Political Economy). He found the edition ‘an admirable work of scholarship’ and was very pleased to be asked a few months later to write the introduction to two further volumes containing Mill’s essays on economics and society (LCR to ICR, 24 and 29 August, 5 September 1965; Ron Schoeffel to LCR, 28 January, LCR to F.E.L. Priestley, 4 February 1966, Introduction to Mill, RP; Robbins 1967a). He reviewed ten more volumes of the edition as they appeared over the next fifteen years (Robbins 1970d, 1974b, 1976b, 1979b, 1980c). He sent his first two Mill reviews, followed by a long outstanding one of Ronald Meek’s Economics of Physiocracy (1966c), to Yamey on 10 September (Day Book Sep 65-March 66, RP). It had been a very successful vacation. As he described it to Caroline on 29 August, ‘In the mornings I read for my next year’s seminar; and, on most days, sometime in the middle of the morning, I sit to Richard for my portrait, which the women think is becoming very like. In the afternoon sleep or excursions. In the evening reading again – rather more miscellaneous especially after supper. The whole day punctuated from time to time by walks to the Cobb.’ The grandchildren were all staying in the house: they were, he told Caroline on 5 September, ‘a glorious crew, very noisy & turbulent but a treat to look at and watch developing’. The house was not, however, quite as crowded as in previous years as Richard

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and Brenda had rented another house in Lyme, where they and Brenda’s sons spent the summer. (Four years later they bought their own cottage in Lyme.) Early in the year Lionel had thought that the political scene in Britain was ‘at a very low ebb. Wilson & Co are really a squalid spectacle. But the opposition is feeble & its leadership uninspiring.’ By the spring of 1965, although he criticized the April budget as bad for investors, he was more charitable towards the Labour government. ‘Wilson apart, whose harsh aggressiveness I dislike, the Labour people have made a better showing than might have been expected. They are making a terrible hash of taxation & housing. But as regards the financial crisis they have shown more courage than I would have thought likely; & the Conservative attempt to disclaim responsibility has been pitiful. I am more glad than ever for the shelter of the crossbenches.’ He thought a devaluation of the pound was still likely. Judging the odds against as ‘less than even’, he suggested Caroline consider transferring the money she had inherited from their father into US dollars – adding ‘Please don’t tell anyone I have said this. That’s the drawback of being chairman of an internationally influential newspaper.’ In June he instructed Cazenoves on her behalf to sell her shares and transfer the funds to her in the US (LCR to ICR, 27 February, 17 April, 23 and 30 May, 14 June 1965). When Lionel spoke in the Lords debate on the Finance bill on 4 August (HLDebs vol 269 cols 320–9), he was not afraid to mention the unmentionable, readily admitting that he was ‘not one of those . . . opposed to devaluation in any circumstances’: ‘I still believe firmly that, if an economy finds itself in what the statutes of the International Monetary Fund describe as a “fundamental disequilibrium”, then, rather than inflict on itself catastrophic deflation in order to maintain existing exchange rates, it is better for it to cut its losses and, with due consultation with other centres, adjust to a new parity.’ First, however, he addressed the causes of the rapid domestic inflation and the declining external reserves: the excessive aggregate expenditure of the last three years. The former Conservative government could not escape blame for its expansionary policies and he praised the Labour government’s efforts to restrain aggregate demand: ‘I think we should admire the empiricism with which the Government has tackled the difficulties, putting the strength of the economy before adherence to inappropriate dogma and ideology.’ He also approved of the autumn decision to try to avoid devaluation: ‘it would have been an ignominious thing to have resorted to devaluation without making any effort to see whether the situation could be cured without it.’ However, if the current deflationary

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measures did not work, the government should choose devaluation, or, preferably, allow the pound to float for a while. In that eventuality, it would be all the more necessary to keep aggregate expenditure in check to avoid further inflation. Later he regretted he had not made more of the last point (1979a, xii). On 21 September 1965 Milton Friedman reminded him of their exchange on floating exchange rates in 1952, recalling that they had agreed to disagree, the sticking point being a political judgment (Personal Correspondence 1965–70 A-F, RP). Friedman, while more convinced than ever of the economic virtues of floating rates, was now impressed by the political difficulty of introducing flexible rates. It was probably feasible for a government to make such a move only in the middle of a severe exchange crisis or immediately on taking office, when its predecessor could be blamed. He therefore suggested Lionel might try to educate the Conservative leadership in the virtues of floating rates in case they won the next general election. Sending him a copy of his speech, Lionel replied on 27 September (Personal Correspondence 1965–70 A-F, RP) that recent events had strengthened his view that governments needed the discipline of a fixed exchange rate. ‘I think I can say that it is quite certain that the Labour government would never have done what it has done to restrain domestic inflation if it had not set itself the objective of maintaining sterling at its present level. . . . So that in this respect you see I am as unredeemed as ever!’ He was prepared to concede, however, that a floating exchange rate might make sense for a country as large as the USA and that if there were ever a single European currency it might usefully float against the US dollar. The deflationary measures announced on 27 July 1965 included sizeable cuts in public investment, whose real effects were difficult to judge. They did not forestall another run on the pound in August, and the authorities had to obtain further international support for sterling (Blackaby ed 1978, 35–6; Cairncross and Eichengreen 1983, 178). The government tried to tighten up its incomes policy; although Robbins rightly argued in the Lords that it would not work without a reduction in aggregate demand, he allowed it could play a small role. He told Caroline on 24 August: Incomes policy is simply the expression of a wish that trade unions & employers will not allow wage & salary increases to exceed the expected rate of growth of productivity in any one year. There is a case for such a policy on the part of the government as employer – although even there there are difficulties, if elsewhere things are proceeding at a smarter pace. But outside the public sector, it is exposed to the criticism that if the pressure of demand is not inflationary it is unnecessary &, if it is, then it won’t work. It is really an ostrich policy evolved by the rabid

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expansionists who would like to blow up the economy beyond the point of optimal employment without invoking the consequences of doing so. But there is a spot of virtue in [Minister of Economic Affairs George] Brown’s advocacy.

When the death of the Speaker of the House of Commons threatened to reduce the government’s majority to one, Lionel was ‘sorry for the Labour people in many ways’ – although ‘I would be a hypocrite if I pretended that anything which embarrasses [Wilson] didn’t give me pleasure.’5 A general election on 31 March 1966 gave Labour a comfortable majority of ninety-eight over the Conservatives and Liberals combined. Lionel had expected Labour would win and was quite content with the result, as he told Caroline on 11 April: ‘The campaign was boring in the extreme & the opinion polls had correctly registered the probability of a Labour walkover. I don’t think the Conservatives deserved a different fate: they are all in a state of complete disarray – with the exception of Heath who came well out of the contest – and, leaving out the two rival leaders, man for man they compared ill with the Labour ministers – a result I certainly would not have anticipated up until two years ago.’ In the summer the Labour government faced a third speculative crisis. Its proximate cause was a seamen’s strike from 12 May to 1 July but the publication of the reserve figures on 4 July led to a further rush to sell sterling. The Chancellor of the Exchequer tightened monetary policy and announced another deflationary fiscal package. On 28 July Lionel spoke again in the Lords (HLDebs vol 276 cols 950–7). As he said, the latest crisis was not just another piece of bad luck, the British economy was still in an acute position of long-term financial disequilbrium, and the crisis was entirely predictable. The test of the policy measures was not that they dampen speculation but that they stop inflation. He welcomed them as ‘a watershed in policy in this country [which] marked recognition – genuine recognition at last – that you cannot run an economy of this sort, so dependent on its external connections, on the basis of creeping inflation and excess use of capacity’ and defended them against the criticisms that devaluation would have been preferable and that they would cause unemployment. He told Frank Knight on 3 October (Day Book Sep 66-Feb 67, RP): I do believe that for the time being at any rate, the Labour Government have at least jammed the brakes on, perhaps more severely than has happened before. This has been done rather clumsily and accompanied by all sorts of subsidiary measures 5

LCR to ICR, 5 September 1965. Wilson maintained a two-seat Labour majority by choosing a Welsh Liberal to replace Horace King, who became Speaker, as Deputy Speaker (Morgan 2001, 250).

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which can do little but mischief; but the main thing is that at the moment there is strong deflationary pressure, which is certainly what is needed. Voltaire said that you could kill a flock of sheep with an incantation provided that it was accompanied by a sufficient dose of arsenic. And that is how I feel about the supplementary measures. Whether these people will have the guts to keep the brakes on long enough is anybody’s guess. All that I can say is that at the moment they are showing more good sense and public spirit than the Opposition, who in the worst demagogic manner, are trying to cash in on the difficulties of the braking process.

Immediately after the speech, ‘Nearly every member of the Government front bench either congratulated me in speeches or thanked me personally for what I had said!’ He still disliked Wilson personally, as he told his sister on 31 July: ‘He is a very complex case. Personally his manner is so distasteful that I find it difficult to be just to him. But I think it ought to be said that he is not the ordinary type of political crook – he probably believes the double talk himself. There is a sort of trance-like infatuation with his own speech which reminds me of the more odious kind of nonconformist minister.’ Lionel also supported the Labour government over Rhodesia. The old Central African Federation, of Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland and Southern Rhodesia, had been dissolved in 1963, with the first two becoming independent states, Zambia and Malawi, under black rulers (Kaunda and Dr Hastings Banda). But the white minority regime in Southern Rhodesia, of which Ian Smith became Prime Minister in April 1964, had no intention of ceding power to the black majority. In November 1965, after negotiations by Wilson in Rhodesia failed to produce any agreement, Smith made his notorious unilateral declaration of independence (UDI). Wilson announced a policy of imposing oil sanctions (which had little effect on the Rhodesian economy or its leaders) (Morgan 2001, 222–3, 271). Before UDI Lionel thought the situation had ‘most of the ingredients of tragedy. If you educate the blacks they not unnaturally claim equality. If they get it they exclude the whites. The whites know this & are therefore led to intolerance & resistance. The problem is easy enough where the whites are few – clear out. But where they have built up the country & are determined to resist, what do you do? I don’t see any easy solution.’ After UDI he thought it was ‘all a terrible mess. I don’t believe in sending an expeditionary force, and I don’t believe that the Africans are ripe for selfgovernment. But I think Smith & Co are a pretty poor lot & I don’t think Wilson . . . could have done otherwise than what he has done. So I shall go to the House tomorrow night to vote for his enabling act [for sanctions]’ (LCR to ICR, 9 October and 14 November 1965).

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He continued to support the sanctions policy, even while he doubted it would prove effective. He told Caroline on 11 April 1966: ‘The plain fact is that Smith and Co are out to perpetuate white supremacy – and while we may find that the cost of preventing them is too high – war with S. Africa e.g. – that is the one thing which we cannot concede in negociation. Long delays yes. But indefinite postponement of black enfranchisement no – however unenthusiastic one might be about that prospect.’ When he realized the sanctions policy was not working he still would not vote against the government, as he told Baroness Birk on 18 June 1968 (Personal Correspondence 1966–70 A-F, RP): ‘But although I detest the Smith regime and have no illusions about their intentions, I become more and more convinced that the sanctions policy is not going to succeed and is in fact likely to hit most the poorer members of the coloured population. So I resign myself to the miserable and perhaps cowardly position of not voting at all.’ In the autumn of 1965 Lord Robbins put down a motion ‘to call attention to recent developments in the organisation of higher education’, which was debated on 1 December (HLDebs vol 270 cols 1249–67). He wanted to speak on what had happened since the Robbins Report and to criticize government policy, especially the perpetuation of the ‘binary system’ separating the ‘autonomous’ UGC-funded universities and colleges of advanced technology from the technical colleges and colleges of education (see Chapter 23). He told Keith Murray on 12 November (Day Book Sep 65-March 66, RP): I shall begin by noting and accepting with regret the final administrative set up. I shall proceed to welcome the general acceptance of the programme of expansion and having regard to the increased expansion plans of new universities, acquiesce in the decision to defer for a short time the planning of new ones, although I shall issue warning that this must not be indefinitely deferred. I shall then welcome the upgrading of the C.A.T.s and after a word or two about the dangers of undue imitation of traditional models, I shall pass on to the failure to accept our recommendations as regards the teacher training colleges in the university ambit, and proceed to a full-blooded attack on the philosophy of the socalled binary system, whereby this policy is justified. I do not quite know how I shall finish up but I daresay it will be by way of a more or less friendly appeal for reconsideration of this policy.

On the day, he told Caroline on 5 December, ‘The speech came off quite well I think. . . . I had a full house – probably because a statement on Rhodesia was expected. And I managed to deliver it with reasonable force

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& intelligibility. What effect it will have is another thing.’ It was one of his most eloquent and powerful speeches, which appealed to Crosland to reconsider: I would remind him of his own philosophy of educational equality on which he has written more eloquently than most of his generation. I would draw to his attention the atmosphere of frustrated plans and disappointed aspirations which has followed upon his recent decisions. I would appeal to him to think again, to think long and earnestly, before continuing on a course which can bring no pleasure or benefit to any but a few snobs at the centre and bullies at the periphery.

While Lionel was preparing this speech he read through his other speeches on higher education and put them together to make a short book, delivering the manuscript to his publisher a couple of days after the debate (LCR to ICR, 14 November 1965; LCR to Rex Allen, 16 and 25 November 1965, Day Book Sep 65-March 66, RP). He included his G¨ottingen address as the first item and gave the book its title; he dedicated the volume to Claus Moser and Richard Layard (1966a). The 1965/6 academic year was Lionel’s last as a member of the LSE academic staff. At its beginning he admitted to Caroline on 26 September that he did not find the School as exciting as he used to – or the Economics Department as much of a unity as it had seemed when he was head of it – and he no longer knew many people outside the department. Having lost the services of his longtime secretary Miss Beven, who was working elsewhere in the School, he began to spend most of his working week at Bracken House. On two or three mornings a week on his way to work he sat for William Coldstream, who had been commissioned to paint his portrait for LSE. He enjoyed Coldstream’s company for he was ‘one of the most knowledgeable & interesting talkers I know’, but after three months there was no end in sight to the sittings (LCR to ICR, 25 October 1965 and 23 January 1966). A year later Lionel commented to Harry Kydd (Day Book Sep 66-Feb 76, RP): ‘I observe that he is now occasionally giving some attention to the hands and the feet. But I should feel a Philistine and a cad if I were to indicate any curiosity concerning the termination of his labours.’ According to Coldstream’s biographer (Laughton 2004, 330), the ‘119 sittings at the Slade always began at 8.30/8.45 in the mornings, and lasted for 1 to 11/2 hours each. . . . The last sitting recorded is 26 October 1967.’ Lionel had expressed a preference for Coldstream (Caine to Coldstream, 19 October 1964, TGA 8922.5.20), having approved of his portrait of Carr-Saunders, ‘a speaking likeness & a work of art’ (‘Presentation of Portrait, 14.6.55’, LSE Speeches

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etc, RP), but he disliked his own portrait when it was finally unveiled at the School on 11 March 1968. As Goodman (1993, 269) remarked, ‘Several people painted by him [Coldstream] have complained of his habit of contracting the face so that the subject looks as if it had undergone an unsuccessful piece of plastic surgery.’ Lionel hoped for a stimulating last year of the Robbins Seminar. He had managed to keep it going during the Higher Education Committee with Phillips’s help. In 1960/1 it discussed recent literature such as books by Musgrave (1959), Kaldor (1960), Joan Robinson (1960), Friedman (1959), Baumol (1959) and Sraffa (1960). At the last meeting Phillips spoke on ‘recent contributions to the discussion of the determination of wage changes’, that is reactions to his famous article (1958). The following year (1961/2) the topic was the currently fashionable theory of economic growth including the work of Phillips, Paish, Kaldor and Meade (who came down from Cambridge to talk about his model) (programmes and papers in Seminar Papers II, RP). Growth theory featured again among the ‘miscellany of contributions to economic theory which have appeared in recent years in various journals’ in the Lent and Summer terms of 1963 (Economics Seminar 1963, RP). In 1963/4, however, many of the topics were heavily applied. Attendances were slipping: at the first meeting of the Summer term when Michael Beesley was to speak on transport planning, only four people including Beesley and Robbins turned up (R. to Members of the Economics Department, 28th April 1964, Economics Seminar 1963–64, RP). In 1964/5 the topics were again applied with the discussion in the Michaelmas term centred on Christopher Dow’s The Management of the British Economy 1945–1960 (1964) (Seminar 1964–65, RP). During the summer of 1965 Lionel read Hicks’s latest book, Capital and Growth. He considered it ‘a most remarkable achievement – a veritable tour de force’ and decided to take the book as the prescribed reading for the second half of the year. ‘I can think of nothing more agreable’, he told Hicks on 15 September (Day Book Sept 65-March 66, RP), ‘than to wind up in this way, considering the most recent thought of one who contributed so much to the excitements of the first years of that meeting more than thirty years ago.’ In the Michaelmas term, however, he wanted the seminar to discuss the international liquidity problem. He persuaded Maxwell Stamp, Lucius Thompson-McCausland, Frank Lee and Donald MacDougall to talk to the seminar, and because the IMF would be at the centre of the discussion he thought he would talk about his own experiences at Bretton Woods at the first meeting (letters to Lee, MacDougall, Stamp

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and Thompson-McCausland in Day Book Sep 65-March 66; ms Seminar 1965, Reminiscences of Bretton Woods, RP). When Lionel went to open the seminar on 1 November he found only two members of staff and no students present. One of the two was Meghnad Desai, who had just arrived at LSE as a lecturer in economics and was curious to witness the famous seminar (information from Lord Desai). On enquiry Lionel discovered the seminar now clashed with classes for students taking the new taught master’s degree. He cancelled the seminar, explaining to his guest speakers on 3 November: ‘It is one of those malign accidents which occur perhaps once in an academic career and is all the more infuriating since this is my last year at L.S.E., but I am afraid there is nothing to be done about it.’ By the end of 1964 Robbins’s work for the FT had increased so much that Poole offered him a salary increase on 2 November (History of Past Employment, RP). A large part of this work related to the group’s publishing interests in Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, J & A Churchill and E & S Livingstone. The profits of the last two were very satisfactory, those of Oliver & Boyd much less so. On 22 January 1963 Lionel had reported to the FT board that ‘there had been differences of opinion . . . as to the policy of financing new titles and he had stressed the need for discrimination in publishing books, particularly in curtailing slow titles’. He proposed Charles Macmillan of Livingstones should be appointed a director of Oliver & Boyd and Douglas Grant of Oliver & Boyd a director of Livingstones; Grant had been chairman of Oliver & Boyd before the takeover and Drogheda and Robbins both had a high regard for him. Six months later there was ‘still some concern over the liquidity of Oliver & Boyd’, but Robbins was hoping the firm would soon appoint a new educational editor (FT Board 25 June 1963). It was some months before one was found. In the meantime Bracken House Publications bought the Darien Press and contemplated the possibility of buying the Edinburgh printers R & R Clark as well, which would enable the amalgamation of the Oliver & Boyd printing works and the Darien Press on the R & R Clark site. Lionel was also concerned about finding a successor to Charles Macmillan at Livingstones (FT Board 23 July, 24 September and 22 October 1963). In 1964 Oliver & Boyd was still making heavy losses on its general list. It fell to Lionel as chairman of Bracken House Publications to weigh in with ‘a letter which had been placed before the Oliver & Boyd board designed to regularise the situation’ in March; a new educational editor was appointed in April; and a firm of management consultants was commissioned in May

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to look into the possibilities of rationalizing the common services of the several companies in Edinburgh – which soon included the printers T & A Constable (FT Board 24 March, 28 April, 26 May and 23 June 1964). When Lionel went up to Edinburgh for his monthly visit in July 1964 Constables had just been acquired, and it was ‘a convenient moment to look in and shake hands all round’. He also wanted to meet the new educational editor at Oliver & Boyd. As usual he took the overnight train to Edinburgh the night before and flew back to London at the end of the day of meetings. He told his sister on 26 July that ‘I always enjoy these visits, though the day tends to be congested and the double journey – night train & evening aeroplane [–] is quite strenuous. It is one of the loveliest cities: and although not so outstanding as at earlier times, has still a life & culture of its own.’ He reported to the FT board on 28 July that while he was in Edinburgh he had visited the Constable works, been appointed chairman of the board of that company and helped to interview the candidates for the new administration manager at Livingstones. At Oliver & Boyd the ‘reorganisation was going on and . . . the new educational editor . . . seemed to be an excellent man.’ Lionel told his sister on 20 March 1965 that he was ‘rather proud’ of his role in the reorganization of the FT group’s Scottish interests. The printing operations were consolidated and expanded on the Constables site; a single company was formed to provide accounting and warehousing services; and the management of the original companies was streamlined. After his visit to Edinburgh on 7–8 September 1965, two of the Oliver & Boyd directors were persuaded to resign (FT Board 27 April and 28 September 1965). Lionel wrote diplomatically but bluntly to one of them (James Thin, 9 September 1965, Day Book Sep 65-March 66, RP): ‘I have spent a good deal of time in the two days suggesting various quite drastic measures of reorganisation. I hope that not all of these would seem to you to be unwise, but I feel that – holding the views which you so sincerely hold – any experimentation with any positive role for you at this juncture would be bound to lead to a series of frustration both on your part and perhaps on the part of others.’ He left it to Douglas Grant as managing director ‘to reflect on the most tactful and appropriate way’ of persuading two other directors to resign (LCR to Grant, 9 September 1965, Day Book Sep 65-March 66, RP). With respect to the firm’s publishing plans, he told Grant, ‘The exercise carried out with the various editors in the last two days should be repeated at greater length and they should be pressed individually to consider extension of their plans so as to provide the selling organisation with more material in 1966 and 1967.’ His own view was that Oliver & Boyd, having cut down its unprofitable general

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list, should build on its strengths by expanding its educational publishing, including higher education. He had plenty of suggestions to make, such as two paperback series of monographs on political institutions and political thinkers. But, as he realized, building up a new list was inevitably a slow process, leaving Oliver & Boyd heavily dependent on its school educational list (LCR to Grant, 5 January 1966, LCR to Bobby Allan, 28 December 1965, Day Book Sep 65-March 66, RP). The consolidation of printing operations ran into an unforeseen snag: the Labour government’s Selective Employment Tax, largely the brainchild of Kaldor, introduced in the 1966 budget. This tax was levied as a flat rate surcharge on employers’ national insurance contributions but refunded to all industries except services and construction, the intention being deliberately to favour visible exports and manufacturing (which also received a premium), as well as to discourage labour hoarding in less productive industries. It was imposed on book publishing but not on newspaper publishing and printing (Blackaby ed 1978, 150–3). Lionel thought ‘(a) that the publishing of a book is as much productive in any sense of the word whatever as the designing of an aeroplane or the concoction of new antibiotics; and (b) that the differentiation between the publication of books and the publication of newspapers and periodicals is indefensible in theory and extremely anomalous in practice.’ He encouraged the Publishers Association to emphasize these arguments in making representations to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He did not join the delegation in view of his position as a newspaper publisher and a government representative on the board of BP (LCR to John Attenborough, 26 January 1967, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 M-R, RP). As he commented to Kaldor on 21 April 1967 (Personal Correspondence 1966–70 G-L, RP), ‘On balance, as newspaper publishers and printers, the F.T. group has gained considerably from the S.E.T.’ He thought it was ‘lunatic’ to give a premium on employment to the notoriously over-manned printing industry. When Oliver & Boyd did their printing in the same premises as their publishing, they received the selective employment refund and premium as did the two other Edinburgh printing works owned by Bracken House Publications. Under Robbins’s reorganization they lost it. ‘Imagine therefore,’ he told Kaldor, ‘the delicacy of the decision which confronted me on arrival in Edinburgh one day . . . [2 August 1966] when I was informed by the management of Oliver & Boyd that they had discovered that if they continued to print and bind on their own premises, they would receive an appropriate premium, whereas if the machines were transferred to the new site, they as publishers not doing their own printing would suffer the full

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impact of the tax.’6 In the Lords debate on the Selective Employment Payments bill a couple of days later Robbins enquired of Lord Shackleton, the government spokesman (HLDebs vol 276 col 1711), ‘whether it would be a sensible thing for me to arrest that operation which is now in train, having reached very satisfactory arrangements with the trade unions concerned, or whether I should proceed with it nevertheless’? In fact he had decided the rationalization should continue: ‘On the principle that the trees do not grow up to the sky, whereas presumably the advantages of larger scale production are lasting, and because the operation was already in full swing, I decided to let it go forward. But I cannot help feeling the situation was an anomalous one; and this feeling is confirmed when I reflect that the object of the tax was to drive people out of over-crowded industries.’ In responding to Lionel on 19 April and 4 May 1967 (Personal Correspondence 1966–70 G-L, RP) Kaldor defended this unfortunate incidence of SET with the practical difficulties of identifying industries, but on the basic principle of SET, ‘I wish I could convince you of this but short of making several appearances in your seminar (for which, alas, the times have passed) I do not see how it could be done.’ This was not the only problem Lionel had with his reorganization. The formation of Bracken House Edinburgh Services, with Robbins as chairman, Bobby Allan his alternate and the Edinburgh group accountant as managing director, led to ‘a rather unpleasant business dispute’ (LCR to ICR, 12 December 1966; LCR to Grant and Macmillan and LCR to Blackwood, 8 December, LCR to Grant, 15 December 1965, Day Book Sept 65-March 66, RP). He told Allan on 11 January 1966 that he thought Charles Macmillan had always been sceptical of reorganization, while Douglas Grant, who had been in favour of the common services company, had hoped it would be under his control. But Allan gained the impression that ‘our friends in Edinburgh [are] convinced that it was our intention here [in London] to manage the Edinburgh subsidiaries through the Service company, thus to deprive them of autonomy’ – which was not Robbins’s intention (LCR to Allan, 14 January 1966, Day Book Sep 65-March 1966, RP). The complaints continued, and in June Lionel suggested that Allan become chairman, with Grant as deputy chairman, of a new committee to oversee the relation between the Edinburgh companies and the other subsidiaries of Bracken House Publications. He stepped down from the chairmanship of 6

The date of the visit is given by LCR to ICR, 7 August 1966. On the same visit Lionel examined the doctoral thesis of a Canadian graduate student, James Lorimer, whom he had taken over from Bernard Corry on leave, with A.L. Macfie of Edinburgh University: LCR to Macfie, 18 July and 3 August 1966, LSE STUDENTS, RP.

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the services company, hoping Allan could bring about ‘a more satisfactory relationship’ between the services company and Oliver & Boyd (LCR to Drogheda, 9 June, LCR to Grant, 15 June 1966, Day Book April 66-August 66, RP). Another of the 1962 acquisitions was also causing trouble. It had been envisaged that Medical News, a weekly, would complement the monthly Practitioner ‘extremely well edited by Bill Thomson, a canny ominiscient Scottish doctor, with an inexhaustible appetite for work’ (Drogheda 1978, 164–5 and 151). Thomson became editor in chief of Medical News but resigned in 1966; Lionel was chairman of its board. Its profits were promising but its low circulation worrying (FT Board 26 February 1963, 28 January and 24 March 1964). By the beginning of 1965 Lionel was ‘not altogether happy with Medical News’; his inclination was to sell it and buy The Lancet, which was rumoured (baselessly) to be for sale (FT Board 26 January and 23 February 1965). He had also heard alarming reports of the unhappy state of the office from Dr David Carrick, the editor (Carrick to Thomson, nd, and Thomson to LCR, February 1965, FT, RP). However, when the International Publishing Corporation (IPC), the joint owners of Medical News, offered to buy the FT’s half-share, they were refused, only partly because of their low price. IPC had suggested distributing the paper free to doctors; Carrick and his staff thought this was unethical for a medical publication and threatened their resignation if it happened (FT Board 22 November 1966, 28 March and 25 April 1967). After protracted negotiations in which Lionel was involved, Bracken House Publications bought out IPC’s interest (FT Board 28 January 1968). Medical News was then sold, when David Carrick, who was well liked and admired for his integrity, became the FT’s medical adviser (Drogheda 1978, 164–5); Lionel remained one of his patients long after he retired from the FT. When Bracken House was built to house the St Clements Press in its basement, it was expected the press would continue general printing as well as the newspaper. From the outset, with high labour costs there were heavy losses on general printing, but the board hesitated to decide to discontinue general printing until January 1966. Even then it was a decision to close down general printing within two years. By 1966 the declining profits of the FT itself were causing concern (Kynaston 1988, 299, 335; FT Board 19 January and 23 February 1966). Partly for this reason Drogheda was keen to buy The Times, which was losing circulation and known to be up for sale, and merge it with the Financial Times. With the enthusiastic support of the editor and the advertisement manager (Sidney Henschel), and the acquiesence of the Pearson board, Drogheda began negotiations with the

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owners of The Times in the spring of 1966. But others at the FT were relieved when the FT’s offer was rejected in August (Drogheda 1978, 189– 93; Kynaston 1988, 335–8). Robbins was one of them: according to Newton (1997, 100), Lionel was ‘against the idea from the start. He thought it would be folly to jeopardise the success which the FT had become by such a leap into the dark.’ Lionel was also doubtful a few months later when Drogheda and Newton were discussing the possibility of the business section of the Sunday newspaper, The Observer, being produced in collaboration with the FT (FT Board 28 March 1967). At a special board meeting on 3 April, he said that ‘Speaking for himself, . . . [he] was bound to admit that he thought the adverse arguments had a superior weight.’ By this time Lionel was urging an increase in the price of the Financial Times, which the board agreed to on 28 June. In January 1967, with the merger with The Times off, Lionel took up an idea raised by George Weidenfeld of the publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson, who had intimated he would like to take over Oliver & Boyd or at least acquire a major interest in it. Weidenfeld told Robbins on 23 January that from his point of view the ideal arrangement would be one in which his firm had the majority interest. Lionel admitted Bracken House Publications would be reluctant to hold only a minority interest. He told the FT board that he personally thought that Weidenfeld could help with the problems at Oliver & Boyd: ‘So far as Oliver & Boyd is concerned, while I am confident that we now have a fairly satisfactory organisation at the editorial level, I do not think that we shall ever get flair and leadership from Douglas Grant.’ His fellow board members allowed him to continue the conversations (LCR to Weidenfeld, 2 January, LCR to Members of the Board of FT/FN, Weidenfeld and Nicholson [sic], 23 January 1967, Day Book Sep 66-Feb 67, RP; FT Board 24 January 1967). When Robbins and Pat Gibson met Weidenfeld a week later, they confirmed the negative attitude to a minority interest. Weidenfeld proposed instead that Bracken House Publications acquire a minority interest in Weidenfeld & Nicolson and give the latter a contract to manage Oliver & Boyd. ‘On this we commented adversely’, Robbins reported, as it hardly answered their concern to retain control over Oliver & Boyd. Gibson and Robbins asked what Weidenfeld’s reaction would be to the possibility of a merger. Weidenfeld was apparently more favourable to this and agreed to more conversations. The conversations, involving mainly Gibson and Allan on the Bracken House Publications side, continued until the summer of 1967 (LCR to Members of the FN/FT Board, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1 February 1967, Day Book Sep 66-Feb 67, RP; FT Board 28 June 1967).

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The pressure of business at Bracken House in 1967 meant that Lionel and Iris postponed a spring holiday in Italy to the summer (LCR to ICR, 9 April and 18 August 1967). It also meant Lionel missed the inaugural lecture of his successor in his chair of economics at LSE. He thought that as chairman of the FT he should at least once attend the Frankfurt International Book Fair (LCR to Harry Johnson, 9 October 1967, Johnson Papers). There he encountered, as he told Caroline on 15 October: ‘Miles upon miles of publishers stalls from all parts of the world, 200,000 volumes, and a substantial fraction of the most important publishers attending to gossip & negociate contracts regarding rights of one sort or another. . . . It was tiring, but no amount of imagination could have evoked so vivid a picture of the world’s trade in books – its extent & variety.’ In September 1967 a new holding company, Financial and Provincial Publishing Company Ltd, was formed to oversee the printing and publishing interests of the group. Lionel described it to Caroline on 8 October as a ‘great event in my business life: an amalgamation of the business financial interests of the F.T. & the Westminster Press . . . [which] will be a substantial reinforcement of financial power & an effective guarantee against encroachments by Thomson & others. It is something that I have been working for for nearly two years and, from my point of view, an arrangement greatly superior to the once contemplated merger with the Times.’ Lionel was asked to continue as chairman of the FT and to be on the board of the new company until he reached his seventysecond birthday in 1970, when he would retire with a pension of £3000 a year. He then also retired from the Pearson board but continued to represent the group on the board of The Economist (Gibson to LCR, 30 November 1967 and 22 January 1975, History of Past Employment, RP). He retired from the BP board in November 1968 on reaching his seventieth birthday. The creation of the new holding company changed Lionel’s work for the FT. At the end of 1967 he managed to get rid of Douglas Grant as managing director of Oliver & Boyd. In February 1968 FPPC acquired the publishers Longmans, which ‘meant a good deal of coming & going’ for Robbins, although he was not the chief negotiator (LCR to ICR, 10 December 1967 and 4 February 1968). In July Bracken House Publications Limited was transferred to the Longman Group and Lionel ceased to be its chairman, although joining the Longman board (FT Board 23 July 1968; The Times, March 16, 1968). In spite of his work for the FT and Bracken House Publications Lionel began to write another book. On 10 November 1965 Sir John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls College Oxford, wrote to ask if he would give the Chichele Lectures for 1966; on 16 November Lionel asked for time to

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respond and to think of a subject (Chichele Lectures, RP). Come Christmas, as well as completing a review of Viner’s edition of John Rae’s Life of Adam Smith (Robbins 1966f), he was working away at an outline of the four lectures (LCR to ICR, 28 December 1965) and on 3 January he wrote Sparrow with a proposed subject (Chichele Lectures, RP): the theory of economic development in the history of economic thought. His first lecture would provide ‘a general conspectus . . . tracing the general appearance of the theory of economic development from Adam Smith and the Physiocrats, through eighteenth century classical economics and the early modern literature, contrasting the persistence of the classical pre-occupations within the work of Marshall and the English school, with the comparative lack of such interest in the schools of Vienna and Lausanne’. The second lecture would deal with the changing views on population growth of such writers as Smith, Malthus and Wakefield; the third, on theories of accumulation, savings and investment, would ‘contrast orthodox classical views . . . with the heterodox theories of Malthus and under-consumptionists’ and proceed to examine the ‘so-called Keynesian revolution.’ The final lecture would discuss the development of ideas on the role of the entrepreneur and the free market. Robbins told Sparrow he would like to give his lectures in the Michaelmas term 1966 but to be free to attend the Ring cycle at Covent Garden. He wrote the first draft at Lyme in the summer vacation (LCR to ICR, 7 August and 26 September 1966). ‘I don’t know that I have said anything specially new’, he told Frank Knight on 3 October (Knight 61–17), ‘but I thought it was a convenient opportunity both to make clear that the existence of problems of growth was not discovered yesterday and at the same time to try to provide a coherent broad conspectus of the famous historic propositions. It is the sort of thing I like doing but of course it is immensely time-consuming.’

TWENTY-FIVE

The Arts

In the 1960s London threw off the drabness imposed by wartime devastation and postwar austerity. ‘Swinging London’ was a city of high as well as popular culture. Lionel Robbins’s contribution to the improvement of cultural life as the chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery in the 1950s has already been described. He contributed too to the revival of the performing arts in London through his service on the board of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden from 1956 to 1980. It is time to consider his contribution to ballet and opera, as well as his second term as a trustee of the National Gallery from 1960 to 1967.1 At the Royal Opera House 1956 was ‘a year which had more than its fair share of pleasure and pain’ (Drogheda 1978, 241–7). The Bolshoi Ballet on its first visit to London was a delight and a revelation and a real help to Covent Garden’s finances. There were some ‘excellent performances [of opera] and some frankly less so’, under Rafael Kubelik, music director 1955–8. There was the publication of the first report on the House since it had reopened in 1946, ‘a somewhat inadequate self-laudatory document’ which ‘touched off a whole stream of criticism’ and nearly led to Kubelik’s resignation. The report or the House’s finances were on the agenda for almost every board meeting. Lord Waverley, chairman until his death in January 1958, had not thought a separate finance committee was necessary ‘on the doubtful argument that finance was so important that it was a matter for the whole board. . . . It was only towards the end of his life that he was persuaded by Lionel to change his mind.’ Robbins’s first recorded contribution was to suggest at his second meeting that the report be launched at a press conference, which took place in June (ROH Board 21 February 1956, Royal Opera House Collections). 1

I am very grateful to Sir John Tooley and Lord Moser for illuminating conversations about LCR’s work for the Royal Opera House.

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At his third meeting on 20 March he was ‘invited . . . to reexamine the estimate for 1956–57’ with Lord Moore (as Drogheda then was), the general administrator David Webster and the chief accountant Douglas Lund, to suggest how it could be reduced by 20 or at least 10 per cent. Lund was also the accounting officer of the Arts Council of Great Britain: of this bizarre arrangement (Lebrecht 2001, 161), ‘Insiders joked that he would write a strong letter to himself demanding financial information [from the ROH], and then carry it from St James’s Square to Floral Street on his lunchtime walk to save postage, before replying to himself in equally robust terms.’ The Royal Opera House and its companies, the Covent Garden Opera Company and the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (which moved to Covent Garden in 1945), were financed by the Treasury through the Arts Council. Keynes announced the first grant to Covent Garden (£25,000) in July 1945 at the first meeting of the Arts Council, of which he was the first chairman (Moggridge 1992, 705). Keynes was also the first chairman of the Covent Garden Trust (which became the Royal Opera House Covent Garden Ltd in 1950) set up after the war to produce opera and ballet at the theatre, which had been used as a dance hall in wartime. It reopened with The Sleeping Beauty with designs by Oliver Messel on 20 February 1946. After Keynes died Waverley, still Sir John Anderson, became chairman. He took it on only after extracting a commitment from the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Dalton) that ‘the State will be assuming a definite obligation to see to it that, subject to others playing their part, Opera is not let down’ (Donaldson 1988, 63–4). According to Drogheda (1978, 227) Anderson ‘used always to carry [the letter] about with him in his pocket, taking it out and brandishing it when the need arose’. He was certainly still referring to it when Robbins joined the board. The Treasury also provided, at Anderson’s request, the secretary to the board, Denis Rickett. (His successor from 1968 was Robert Armstrong, who remained secretary even after his promotions to Prime Minister’s principal private secretary, Permanent Secretary of the Home Office and eventually the head of the civil service.) There was ‘active lobbying of the Treasury about funding levels for many years’, but John Tooley (1999, 215), Webster’s assistant from 1955 (and successor in 1970), was ‘never sure how successful it really was in obtaining more money’. In 1956 the Treasury’s grant to the Arts Council was, the chairman noted at the 20 March board meeting, ‘not sufficient to enable the Arts Council to give to Covent Garden and to Sadler’s Wells subsidies in line with their ascertained and accepted needs’. Lionel, taking the economist’s approach, asked Webster for ‘even approximate quantitative’ estimates of the economies or diseconomies which would result from various policies (such as no new

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productions or cutting out performances of operas and ballets with consistently low attendances, a shorter or longer opera season etc). After discussion with Webster and Lund he and Drogheda concluded that there was ‘no easy way out’ in that direction, the real problem was increased wages and salaries, and the price increases already decided upon were greater than those in other West End theatres – which should be emphasized in any conversations with the Treasury. They also produced a table of possible further price increases.2 The board decided not to approach the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Macmillan) for the time being nor to raise prices again before the autumn. In October Macmillan told Waverley he thought prices should be raised ‘before the Treasury were asked for further help’. In November Waverley postponed any approach to Macmillan because of the Suez crisis (ROH Board 17 April, 15 May, 16 October and 20 November 1956). The financial difficulties at the Sadler’s Wells theatre as well as at Covent Garden led the Treasury and the Arts Council to suggest a merger. At a special ROH board meeting on 5 March 1957 Lionel undertook to prepare a report on the possible savings. By the next board meeting on 19 March he had concluded they would be insignificant if there were no change in policy at Sadler’s Wells but could be ‘more considerable’ if the two ballet companies were singly managed and there were less duplication of opera. The first of these came about: Ninette de Valois, the founder of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (The Royal Ballet from January 1957), had founded the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet when she moved her first company to Covent Garden, and ran both companies; when her second company was threatened with disbandment it was easy to move it to Covent Garden’s management as the Royal Ballet Touring Company (Drogheda 1978, 250). With respect to opera, however, at a meeting at the Arts Council on 8 April, ‘Lord Waverley and Professor Robbins, as it turned out somewhat disingenously, “recoiled from unification” and spoke of a federal structure, giving no details’; Robbins suggested large cuts to Sadler’s Wells at a further meeting on 6 May before ‘Covent Garden finally “came clean” with the Arts Council on 28 May 1957, when Robbins admitted that . . . [the ROH board] had taken up such a position because they were concerned that it would be put about that they had “contrived the death of Sadler’s Wells out of envy and hatred”’ (Gilbert 2009, 135 and 137). The talks with the Arts Council in August– October 1957, in which Moore and Robbins represented the ROH, therefore discussed amalgamation. The ROH was willing on certain conditions, such 2

Extract from a letter addressed to Mr Webster by Professor Robbins dated 23rd March, 1956, and Moore and LCR to Waverley, 12 April 1956, Lord Robbins 1956–1973, ROH.

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as that the governing body consist of the present board of Covent Garden plus two representatives of Sadler’s Wells and that the accumulated deficits of the two houses were wiped out (W.E. Williams, Opera in London, 12 August, ROH Board 15 October 1957, ROH). Sadler’s Wells was understandably not keen. After proposing a merger with the Carl Rosa Opera Company, which was allowed to die in 1958 (Gilbert 2009, 141–8), it remained independent, moving to the Coliseum theatre and becoming English National Opera in 1968. Since 1946 the ROH policy had been that of ‘maintaining a repertory of operas sung in English, and presenting occasional performances, especially of Italian operas, in the original language’. On 18 December 1956 the board decided that ‘their policy must be fluid’: ‘although performances in English should be the normal rule, works should be given in the original tongue where this appeared to be more satisfactory.’ This reflected the fact that the 1946 policy was ‘to everyone but the most doctrinaire believers in the virtues of singing in English . . . not succeeding as a policy for what was traditionally an international opera house’ (Donaldson 1988, 109). The most praised productions – with notable exceptions: the famed 1957 production of Berlioz’s The Trojans was sung in English – tended to be those sung in the original language. Foreign, and increasingly English, singers were unwilling to learn the traditional roles in English. The rationale for the English policy, which Webster favoured, was that it would help to build up a company of native singers and encourage the composition of English works. In 1960, when Lionel sent him an essay on the issue of language in opera written by Sir Thomas Padmore, Webster replied on 3 March that he still wanted to produce Wagner’s Ring in English and that ‘We have to keep English in the rep. for the simple reason that it is not difficult to imagine singers, and I mean our own singers, getting to the point where they find it almost impossible to sing in English. [Blanche] Thebom, born and bred in America, but having sung for so many years at the Met. in foreign languages, found learning [the part of Dido] in Trojans in English jolly difficult’ (Lord Robbins 1956–1973, ROH). But the English policy was being gradually discarded, pushed by Drogheda first as chair of the opera subcommittee (of which Lionel was not a member) and then as chairman of the board in succession to Waverley (Donaldson 1988, 109–11). Lionel followed his lead. Ten years later, when the conductor Colin Davis and the producer Peter Hall wanted to produce Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro in English, Lionel was definitely in favour of Italian. In response to Tooley, worried about the clash between the two artistic directors and the board, he wrote on 29 November 1970 (Drogheda 1978, 333):

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First, I am sure that an opera house which aspires to performances of the highest excellence ought to perform Italian opera in Italian. Any resort to translation, however good, must necessarily be a second best. Moreover, quite apart from the musical considerations involved, any other policy necessarily limits your casting. Suppose your Figaro goes sick, where do you immediately find someone equally capable of performing in English rather than the original language? The public relations considerations are more various. I cannot believe that it is good policy for Covent Garden to seek to usurp the explicit functions of Sadler’s Wells in this respect. . . . We have definitely evolved in the other direction and if at this critical juncture in the relation between the two houses we reverse gear, this simply further complicates the excruciating question of our relative claims on the limited resources of the Arts Council.

He also disliked the idea of changing policy because of a press campaign by Davis and Hall. On this occasion the board backed down, but one of the singers declined to sing in English (ROH Board 26 January and 23 February 1971). The opera was sung in Italian. In Lionel’s second year on the ROH board he was asked to chair the ballet subcommittee. It had not met for some months and the board decided on 21 May 1957 that it should be reconstituted and meet more regularly. This was not the first or the last time that Lionel found himself a ‘referee’, this time between de Valois and Webster. With her legendary drive and determination, de Valois was impatient and impulsive. As Tooley put it (1999, 145), ‘As she saw an obstacle or stumbled across one, she was quick to find a way round it. She was a pragmatist, and capable of rapid changes of mind to achieve a particular objective which she regarded as important. There was an inconsistency and contrariness in her which could be maddening but was often endearing.’ Webster’s ‘chief virtue’, according to Drogheda (1978, 233) who found him difficult to deal with, was ‘his calmness and unflappability, and his ability to cope with crises. . . . He liked to keep things to himself, and it was not unusual for him to commit us to a particular course of action without proper consultation, and this at times caused much annoyance.’ Drogheda and de Valois both frequently turned to Tooley to find out what was happening. According to Sir John Tooley, Lionel would encourage de Valois to be more responsive to Webster and also ‘calm her down’ and he would persuade Webster to be more communicative to the board. Both of them wrote to Lionel from time to time rather than to each other about her complaints (eg de Valois to LCR, 20 June, Webster to LCR, 23 June 1959 and 9 December 1960, Lord Robbins 1956–1973, ROH). Another influence of Robbins was on the visual side of the ballet. At his first ballet subcommittee meeting on 13 June 1957 it was agreed to suggest

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to the board a list of expert advisers on music and decor in place of the existing advisory panel. Among those recommended on 11 July was the artist John Piper (who had been designing for Covent Garden since the revival of de Valois’s Job in 1948). At the 16 January 1958 meeting Robbins ‘commented on the excellence of the sets of [Nicholas] Georgiadis’ for Kenneth MacMillan’s The Burrow: ‘Could we not commission one or two other painters of that group? Would not Mr. [Victor] Pasmore be an admirable designer for a ballet?’ On 16 June 1958 he asked ‘whether any further enquiries’ had been made about using new designers for ballet. William Coldstream (on the board of the ROH as well as of the National Gallery) supported him: he would like to see ‘each year at least one painter of real merit who had not formerly worked for the ballet’ and agreed with Lionel this would be good for opera too. He suggested several names for the ballet including Pasmore and Ceri Richards, one of Lionel’s favourite painters. He shared Lionel’s preference for Georgiadis over Messel as designer for Handel’s Samson (the other members of the board did not agree with them); they both thought Oskar Kokoschka ‘would produce distinguished and remarkable designs’ for a new Ring, but this was another idea that did not materialize (ROH Board 17 June 1958 and 25 October 1960). As Tooley commented, ‘What Lionel dreamed of was going back to Diaghilev, hiring painters to design scenery.’ Tooley thought he was instrumental with opera too in pushing the board to consider using living painters. Pasmore later (in the 1980s) designed for the ballet (Anderson 2006, 229). Richards, who had designed sets and costumes for Lennox Berkeley’s Ruth and Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde at the Aldeburgh Festivals in 1957 and 1958, was asked to design the sets for Michael Tippett’s The Knot Garden in 1970 but had to decline because of ill health (Gooding 2002, 132–3). Georgiadis continued to collaborate with MacMillan, most notably for the Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet (1965), Manon (1974), Mayerling (1978) and the remade Prince of the Pagodas (1989), but he designed only two operas for the ROH – a sumptuous Aida in 1968 and the 1969 revival of The Trojans (Donaldson 1988, 137, 154). Georgiadis’s view (E. Georgiadis 2004, 101) was congenial to Lionel: ‘a designer ideally had to be a painter also, as he considered the various scenes for theatre, ballet and opera alike as compositions. What made his designs distinct was precisely the kind of artistic unity they projected, as sets and costumes merged to form harmonious pictures . . . sustained through the various acts.’ Lionel told his sister on 10 February 1965 that the Romeo and Juliet was ‘a triumph for all concerned especially Nicholas Georgiadis . . . whose sets were the most

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splendid we have had at C.G. since Diaghilev.’ He took his oldest grandson to the Aida ‘with all the pomp & circumstance imaginable’ as his first opera (LCR to ICR, 4 February 1968): William was ‘absolutely rapt’. Richard Robbins, who was a friend of Georgiadis, remembered that the expense of the opera sets was embarrassing to his father as chair of the finance committee. Lord Annan (on the board since 1966), in particular, criticized the excessive expenditure on Aida (ROH Board 22 October 1968). With the Treasury urging the ROH to charge higher seat prices, Lionel proposed to the board on 18 June 1957 that although the returns since the last price increase suggested there ought not to be a general price increase, there could be higher ballet prices on nights when Margot Fonteyn was dancing. De Valois and Webster objected but reluctantly agreed to consider it, although once the board had agreed de Valois tried to postpone its introduction (Ballet Subcommittee 14 November 1957; ROH Board 16 December 1958). She also opposed special prices for Rudolf Nureyev when he began to dance at Covent Garden in 1962 and suggested instead higher prices for certain ballets such as The Rite of Spring, triple bills or when there was more than one guest artist – to which the subcommittee agreed on 16 May 1962. Lionel gave up the chair of the ballet subcommittee when the Higher Education Committee began to meet (ROH Board 28 February 1961) but he remained an active member, especially after the Higher Education Committee had reported. Lionel enjoyed the board meetings, even if, as Tooley (1999, 216) noted, ‘There is a danger of arts boards becoming talking shops, and . . . Covent Garden has [not] always escaped this. Naturally, board members want to express views about choice of repertoire and singers, but there have been occasions when this has gone too far.’ One Arts Council observer (John Denison quoted by Lebrecht 2001, 85) commented: ‘There would be vigorous arguments at these meetings and voices were raised in anger . . . but if the Board failed to agree on a proposal all that would ever appear in the minutes is the Cabinet phrase: “The Board took note . . . ”’ According to Tooley, ‘meetings were always lively events: the minutes make them sober but they weren’t.’ The minutes may be sober but they do not hide that there were disagreements. Among the longstanding members with strong views were Isaiah Berlin (to 1965 and again after 1974) and Claus Moser (from 1965). Tooley found Lionel very helpful as a board member because ‘he spoke very directly and clearly about the impression a performance had made on him’; because he was a regular attender at performances other board members were aware that he had seen everything and ‘knew he would

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not utter something he had not thought carefully about’. He was a steadying influence on Drogheda, whose ‘enthusiasm sometimes ran away with him.’ Even more importantly, Lionel ‘recognized the principle that management managed, with the artistic director providing the artistic policy and programme’: although the board had the right to criticize it should be willing to be overruled on artistic matters and then agree and back the administration. At the same time the board had ‘the financial responsibility: if the board and finance committee were saying the choice of this or that work was too hazardous financially, then the administration must make the change’. Lionel’s own comments to Tooley on this were robust (31 December 1970, Lord Robbins 1956–1973, ROH): In my judgment . . . once you have appointed your man only big questions of principle involved by his activity should be the subject of board rulings. The question is, what are big questions of principle[?] . . . . . . suppose for instance that you had a director of productions who laid it down that abstract or symbolic backgrounds were now old hat and that nothing but verismo was to be the order of the day. . . . I would say that the board would be certainly entitled to intervene and if necessary prevent him from pursuing this policy unless he succeeded in persuading all of them that after all he was right. Or again, suppose that a musical director declares, what was certainly high-brow fashion in my young days, that Wagner is vulgar and spurious and that while he is musical director that pretentious pseudo-philosophical nonsense of The Ring shall not be seen on the boards. Again, is it open to question that the board would be entitled to tell him where he got off?

On 17 December 1957 Robbins put forward his proposal of a finance subcommittee and of an annual report, based on his experience at the National Gallery, which suggested it could ‘contribute very greatly to public understanding and [take] the acrimony out of criticism’. The board agreed he should talk to Waverley. By the next meeting on 21 January 1958 he had talked to Waverley before he died, who had now ‘come round to the view that this [an annual report] should be done’. The board agreed to ask the finance subcommittee to consider the form and timing of such a report and that the subcommittee should consist of Robbins, Oliver Franks and Burnet Pavitt, with Lund as secretary.3 Robbins chaired the finance subcommittee until 1975. Its usual preoccupations were the annual reports, the annual budgets, production costs, seat prices etc. The chronic problem was to try to keep the budget within 3

Pavitt was head of the UK branch of the pharmaceutical company Hoffman-La Roche; he played the piano with Drogheda’s wife Joan (Donaldson 1988, 108; Lebrecht 2001, 196).

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the annual grant and prevent the overdraft rising. The committee soon discovered that increases in the remuneration of performing artists cannot be offset by increases in productivity as can wage rises in other sectors such as manufacturing industry, so that in a growing economy any gap between costs and revenues will inexorably widen – a phenomenon soon to be extensively documented by Lionel’s former student William Baumol (Baumol and Bowen 1966). As Robbins (1971a, 265–6) explained it, ‘once the productions have reached a certain degree of excellence and are playing to capacity houses, once the internal organization has been squeezed of avoidable waste, there can be no movement in the House which corresponds to increased productivity in manufacture. Yet if the House is to carry on, the level of wages and salaries must inevitably rise with what is happening to incomes elsewhere, and the deficit must increase’ – even when there is no inflation, though of course inflation greatly exacerbates the problem. If a subsidy were kept in proportion with other revenues it would have to rise absolutely. Hence in its first year, when the ballet subcommittee recommended a salary rise for the second ballet company, the finance committee recommended that the budgets sent to the Arts Council should in future include a realistic estimate of likely salary increases. It also recommended an increase in the number of ballet performances as the average net loss on ballet had recently been less than on opera, an alteration in the number of performances of individual operas in the coming season so as to maximize box office receipts and the increased seat prices Robbins had suggested in the ballet subcommittee. Robbins and Lund also devoted considerable time to the first annual report which was approved by the board on 21 October (FSC 9 June, 11 July, 12 September, 10 and 30 October 1958). The Treasury grant for 1957/8 amounted to £302,000. When the Treasury offered £305,000 for 1958/9 the ROH estimated its need as £420,000 (ROH Board 8 January 1958). It managed to reduce this to £362,140, which the Treasury accepted but warned the Arts Council its grant might not be increased for a further two years after 1958/9 (FSC 14 February 1958). In November 1958, however, the Treasury suggested a fixed proportional annual grant. (The Chancellor was Heathcoat Amory who generously increased the National Gallery grant [see Chapter 21].) Lionel reported to the ROH board on 18 November that he had been with Drogheda and Webster to a meeting in the Treasury when the suggestion was made. The officials had suggested a grant equal to 40 per cent of expenses for each of the next five years, but Robbins thought it ought to be at least 45 per cent (the proportion implied by the 1958/9 grant). When the Treasury then offered 42 per cent, he set to and wrote a long memorandum explaining

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why the ROH could not further reduce costs or increase receipts. He also proposed, not for the first time and without success, that Covent Garden might be treated like the National Gallery and not have to pay the cost of rent and maintenance of the building to the Ministry of Works (Notes on the Treasury proposals, 16 January 1959, ROH). The Treasury offered 43 per cent of approved expenses for three years, which Robbins recommended the board accept, especially since the Treasury had agreed to pay off some of the overdraft over the next five years, and try to make up the remaining deficit by further adjustment of programmes (ROH Board 20 January 1959; Drogheda 1978, 271–2). The finance subcommittee regularly encountered the problem that even if the estimated deficit matched the expected grant, the actual deficit was higher. On 12 May 1959, for instance, the committee identified the source of the problem in the last financial year in new productions, but it was ‘not easy to single out any particular item or items as providing the culprits in this diagnosis; . . . all that can be said in a general way about expenditure on new productions is that in one way or another it has overshot the mark.’ In future new productions must be planned with financial considerations in mind and Lund should attend all meetings of the ballet and opera subcommittees. On 16 February 1960 the finance subcommittee decided it could not yet ask for an increase in the proportion since seat prices had not been raised since January 1959 and recommended another price increase during 1960/1. Robbins had some difficulty in persuading the board that profits from overseas tours by the ballet companies should not be used to cover current deficits and that any unexpected surpluses should be kept to meet future contingencies. Fortunately the Treasury agreed with him (ROH Board 23 February, 22 March, 26 April and 24 May 1960). In November 1961 the Treasury produced another grant formula. The previous arrangement was subject to a limit of £500,000 which had now been reached. The Treasury proposed the annual grant should be a fixed percentage (75 per cent) of House receipts in the previous year rather than a fixed percentage of current expenditure, with a limit of £600,000. Lionel was very critical, in a paper he prepared for the board (FSC 23 November 1961 and The question of subsidy). The new formula had great advantages ‘from the Treasury’s point of view . . . for it presents to the Opera House a double incentive to action tending to keep the subsidy low’, specifically to charge high prices and to reduce costs. It did ‘not need much imagination to understand with what relish this ingenious formula must be received by officials and ministers’. But from the ROH’s point of view it was unacceptable, for ‘if wages in general rise with average productivity, enterprises

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providing services, such as entertainment etc., where productivity increase has no meaning in physical terms, must still be subject to rising costs’. Secondly, receipts could be volatile: ‘This might not matter so much if we could expect constant costs year in year out; for then it could be argued that it would all come out in the wash. But will even the most loyal Treasury official be prepared to argue that this is a sensible assumption?’ It was potentially damaging to quality, because it ‘compels us continually to be thinking of nothing but box office appeal in the short run and cheese-paring economies’ and ‘permits no scope for the educational experiment: the promotion of works still unappreciated by the mass of opera and ballet goers’. It would also give the ROH no more grant in 1962/3 than the current formula would and the proposed ceiling was ‘equally unrealistic’. He urged the board to offer all the opposition it could to the Treasury proposal. At the very least it should ask for the grant to be based on current receipts, for a higher percentage (100 per cent) and for no upper limit less than £1m. On 15 January 1962 Lionel could report to the committee that ‘Ministerial approval’ – that of the Chancellor of the Exchequer Selwyn Lloyd, who like his predecessor had been generous to the National Gallery – had been given for a new formula of 17s 6d in the £ (87.5 per cent) on ‘reckonable receipts’ without a ceiling (Donaldson 1988, 117–18). After strong representations from the ROH and the Arts Council, the Treasury proposed to give ‘a round sum provision’ of £650,000 for 1962/3 and to make ‘adjustment based on actuals’ in the grant for 1963/4. At the subsequent board meeting on 23 January Drogheda noted that the Treasury ‘had done its best to be helpful to Covent Garden at a time of great financial difficulty’, Robbins that ‘he was sure that the Treasury had no intention of forcing Covent Garden to do nothing but popular works.’ Because the finance subcommittee thought prospective receipts in 1962/3 might lower the 1963/4 grant, it argued the board should think of raising seat prices. The board was initially reluctant – the musical director, Georg Solti, pointed out that seat prices at Covent Garden were already high compared with those in Berlin, Vienna or Milan – but agreed in April 1962 to an increase in September (ROH Board 27 February and 24 April 1962). The board had also now agreed to create the Friends of Covent Garden, which it considered preferable to a subscription scheme. In the event 1962/3 house takings, and hence the 1963/4 grant, were higher than expected and the overdraft was paid off; the following year receipts were down and hence the next year’s grant (but it nonetheless reached £1m) (Donaldson 1988, 118, 141, 214). When Robbins wrote the introduction to the 1962/3 annual report he provided a rationale for subsidies and one for prices (ROH Board

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26 November 1963 and Draft introduction to 1962/3 annual report). The ‘ultimate reason’ for a subsidy was that ‘it fosters an art of high excellence which is intrinsically good in itself. It is an educational function: the ability of appreciating such arts is a good which can only be acquired if they are there to be appreciated.’ Subsidiary reasons were that it provided a seedbed for talent which might not otherwise be developed in the country and that the performing arts were ‘an essential feature of the attractions of a metropolitan centre’ like London. At the same time, ‘it is only right that those who directly enjoy such amenities should make more contribution than those who only benefit indirectly. And where space is limited in relation to demand, as in theatres (in contrast to public galleries) the charging of suitable prices is probably much the most practical way of making it available. There are obvious anomalies in rationing by the purse. But the imagination boggles at the thought of the chaos which would ensue if, for instance, performances by Callas or Fonteyn were made available free to those who were first in the queue.’ The ‘practical criterion’ of pricing policy was, therefore, attendance. ‘If on an average the percentage attendance is high, then it is a legitimate deduction that the prices charged are about right in relation to demand. Prices which are too high defeat their own ends. Prices which are too low result in endless queues, black markets and other complications.’ As for criticisms that subsidies could be lower without foreign artists, not only did experience suggest the contrary but ‘the aim which we have consistently pursued of building up in London a tradition of native opera comparable to that of the best centres abroad would . . . also be jeopardised. We are now in a position in which our leading artists have achieved standards which make them welcome at the leading centres of the world.’ He mentioned Sutherland and Vickers among others. ‘For international talent is fostered by working with international talent: and the policy of bringing international artists here means that the rising home talent develops in a milieu in which the highest standards are at hand for comparison and emulation. We are deeply convinced that our present policy is one which is the best not only in regard to the standards of contemporary production, but also in the long run interests of the operatic arts in this country.’ When the Department of Education and Science (DES) was formed in April 1964, it took over from the Treasury responsibility for the finance of the universities. In March 1965, after ‘a nasty scuffle about the museums, galleries and Arts Council, which the Treasury showed some inclination to retain’ (Carswell 1985, 55), it also took responsibility for the arts. By this time the outlook for the arts in Britain had been unexpectedly transformed by Harold Wilson’s appointment of Jennie Lee as the first ‘minister for the

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arts’. She was at first a very junior minister in the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, but she persuaded Wilson to agree that if she produced a white paper with a policy for the arts that convinced the Cabinet he would back her. She asked for a senior civil servant to assist her and ‘she was lucky’: she got Antony Part, who had moved to the Ministry after finishing his work on the Robbins Report. The ‘low key, fairly pragmatic [and] not much given to purple prose’ white paper published in February 1965 argued for coherent planning and hence the move to the DES (Hollis 1997, 255–8; Part 1990, 101–3). The Arts Council, chaired by Cottesloe, did not want to give up the direct connection to the Treasury, but ‘Jennie then played her second trump card’ (the first being Wilson’s backing) and asked her lawyer friend Arnold Goodman first to join the Council and then, a fortnight later, to become its chairman (Goodman 1993, 265, 294–300; Hollis 1997, 256, 259–60). In the next five years the Arts Council’s grant trebled (from £3.2m to £9.4m); that to the national museums and galleries doubled (from £7m to £13m). When it was reported in the press in January 1968 that she might resign over the Chief Secretary of the Treasury’s attempt to bring her budget under control, Lionel wrote to her personally. She had ‘put new hope into the hearts of all of us. You have kept the arts out of politics and at the same time have proved the most effective inspiration and protector at a time of great danger. It is no exaggeration to say that during your period of office the cause of public support of the arts has prospered and progressed as never before.’ He asked her to consider ‘the damage to the public good’ before she made up her mind (Hollis 1997, 286–8; LCR to Lee, 12 January 1968, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 G-L, RP). During 1965 the ROH at first continued to struggle with the consequences of the grant formula. Robbins suggested, supported by Moser who had just joined the board and its finance subcommittee, that in general increased costs of inputs (wages and salaries etc) should be covered by increased prices but increased costs caused by extended activity warranted an alteration in the formula. After some ‘very strenuous meetings’ (Lionel’s description to his sister on 30 May) the DES agreed to abandon the formula. The grant was then negotiated in advance for each financial year based on the estimates for the year in question and provisional estimates for the following year (FSC 21 January, 18 February, 20 May 1965; ROH Board 26 January, 23 February, 26 April and 25 May 1965). Although ‘the advent of Jennie Lee . . . and Lord Goodman . . . meant a [temporary] respite . . . from the eternal difficulty of finding sufficient funds to maintain the standards of an international opera house’ (Donaldson 1988, 141), the underlying chronic problem of arts funding soon reasserted

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itself – in spite of repeated rises in seat prices and Goodman’s assistance with negotiations with the unions. The board found itself contemplating dropping the Ring from its 1967/8 and 1968/9 seasons and reluctantly deciding not to have a new Meistersinger (ROH Board 21 November 1966 and 24 January 1967). The DES also challenged the ROH’s pricing policy, suggesting splitting seats into expensive ones for which a full economic price would be charged and cheaper ones to be charged at a reasonable price for the less well-off. Lionel drafted a reply, which he circulated to the board on 22 May 1967: ‘We do not seek to minimize the deficit regardless of quality and the obligation to foster new talent and new productions. Moreover it is our policy not to raise prices beyond the point at which the House would be reasonably full, since empty seats are a discouragement to the performers and a waste of opportunities for enjoyment. Finally it is our settled policy to keep the prices of the cheaper seats at a level which does not make undue demands on the pockets of the poorer would-be consumers.’ He went on to expatiate on the difficulties of the DES’s suggestion, which he thought was underestimating the elasticity of demand for the higher priced seats. ‘The decade of the sixties [was] perhaps the most successful in the whole history of the Opera House . . . [as well as] a time of preoccupation with finance’ (Donaldson 1988, 141). Among the outstanding performances Lionel witnessed was a ‘grand first night . . . with a great party in the Crush Bar afterwards’ of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, designed by John Piper, on 2 February 1961: first performed at Aldeburgh the previous summer, Solti conducted it as his first opera after the announcement of his appointment as musical director as from September 1961. Two weeks later was the first night of a new production of one of Lionel’s favourite operas, Fidelio, conducted by Otto Klemperer, who had just recovered from a serious accident, with Sena Jurinac as Leonora/Fidelio and Jon Vickers as Florestan: it was an ‘immensely memorable & moving experience’ and he and Iris went again three weeks later and took his new friend Eric James, for this was ‘one of the sublimest productions’ he had ever seen. He was also ‘greatly cheered’ about the future of the ballet by the dancing of Lynn Seymour in Kenneth MacMillan’s new ballet, The Invitation (LCR to ICR, 5 and 25 February and 12 March 1961; LCR to James, 8 March 1961, General Correspondence January-May 1961, RP). In the next season he enjoyed ‘the excitement of an all star production of Don Giovanni with sets by [Franco] Zeffirelli in a sumptuous romantic & semi Victorian manner’, Michael Tippett’s opera King Priam and Nureyev in Swan Lake (LCR to ICR, 25 February and 24 June 1962). Others were critical of Zeffirelli’s ‘gigantic sets which dwarfed the

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singers and the action, and scene changes seriously impeded the dramatic flow of the opera’ in spite of Solti’s conducting (Tooley 1999, 29). In 1965, besides the MacMillan/Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet, ‘a marvellous Otello’ (which Lionel went to four times) conducted by Solti and a new production of Cinderella to which he took four grandchildren, ‘the great event . . . [was] the forthcoming production [in June] of Schoenberg’s Moses & Aron . . . more difficult to sing & produce than anything else in the whole repertory of opera. The chorus have been practicing for over a year!’ (LCR to ICR, 23 May, 28 December and 20 June 1965). It was only the third production of the opera and Solti had succeeded in persuading Peter Hall to produce it, with John Bury as designer (Hall 2000, 230–3). It was Hall’s debut at Covent Garden and the largest production he had ever done, with over 300 dancers, singers and actors (including six strippers) and a menagerie of animals. The first night was quite an occasion (Snowman 2003, xiv–xv): Everyone had read in the papers how this production . . . was going to be something of a scandal, what with naked virgins and a human sacrifice. . . . The lights dimmed and there was a ripple of applause. Into the pit, angular elbows and shoulders pugnaciously forward, darted Georg Solti, . . . Without him it would have been unthinkable for the Royal Opera to have mounted Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron. . . . But the production came to be recognised as one of the peaks of the Solti regime. Covent Garden in the 1960s was palpably the great international house Solti was determined to make it, able to present to the highest standards one of the most demanding works of the modern European imagination.

A new Ring under Solti, directed by the great bass Hans Hotter, started with Die Walk¨ure in 1961 followed by Siegfried in 1962 and Rheingold and G¨otterdammerung in 1964. Isaiah Berlin made sure the board congratulated and thanked Solti and Hotter on the complete cycle, but this did not stop it devoting a large part of two meetings on 29 September and 27 October 1964 to criticizing details such as the death of Hagen and the lighting of Brunnhilde’s rock. Andrew Porter was sufficiently critical in the FT that, as the editor recalled, Drogheda said he could not continue as chairman of both the newspaper and the opera house: ‘Would you please inform me which position you wish me to relinquish?’ Newton pointed out resignation would be damaging to either (Newton 1997, 96; Lebrecht 2001, 266–7). Lionel was less critical and saw the complete cycle at least five times in the next three years with various members of his family (LCR to ICR, 26 September and 19 October 1965, 23 October 1966, 24 September and 8 October 1967). Lionel was particularly impressed with MacMillan’s ballet to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, especially with Lynn Seymour in the main female part, as he told his sister on 25 June 1966: ‘Very good & very moving. She

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is not good looking or elegant. But her body is amazingly intense & liquid and assumes something of the expressiveness of some of Cezannes bathers – which I fancy is just what Macmillan intended.’ MacMillan had first proposed such a ballet in 1959, when the ballet subcommittee considered it quite favourably on 22 October and 19 November, in spite of the need for two fine singers, but, as Tooley put it (1999, 151), the idea ‘aroused instant horror in the boardroom’. According to the minutes for 27 October, ‘Some directors laid particular stress on the practical difficulties; others felt that the idea of a ballet to this work was objectionable in principle’; the board eventually decided to consult Sir Adrian Boult, who advised against. Six years later, when the ballet had been produced to great acclaim by John Cranko in Stuttgart, some board members were still against and would not agree unless someone from Covent Garden went to see it in Germany (ROH Board 23 November 1965). But the ‘general view’ of the ballet subcommittee on 18 January was that it should be performed at Covent Garden and the board agreed on 25 January. It opened in May 1966 with the sets designed for Stuttgart by Georgiadis. Lionel had continued, first with Coldstream and then with Colin Anderson after he joined the board in 1961, to urge the use of painters as designers for ballet and opera. Anderson agreed in 1963 to chair a new design subcommittee, whose other members were Coldstream and Pavitt. Lionel hoped it would keep Georgiadis and Ceri Richards in mind. But it was pointed out at board meetings that the choice of designer had usually to be the producer’s (22 October 1963 and 28 September 1965). Tooley later commented that Lionel was ‘old fashioned, not always seeing that painters could not provide what stage directors wanted’. Anderson ‘found the frustration of making proposals which were so often ignored such that at the beginning of 1968 he recommended that the committee should cease to exist’ (Drogheda 1978, 287–90). One ignored proposal was for Richards to design a new production of Tippett’s Midsummer Marriage (ROH Board 26 April 1966). Solti talked to Kokoschka about designing sets for several operas and Kokoschka submitted designs for a Magic Flute: the board on 23 June 1964 thought ‘They were very exciting; but the problem of realising them would be enormous, if not insoluble.’ Peter Hall agreed to produce the opera but not with the Kokoschka designs. Georgiadis was suggested. Hall chose his favourite collaborator John Bury. Lionel thought it was ‘a very passable new production’ (ROH Board 22 December 1964 and 23 March 1965; Donaldson 1988, 130; LCR to ICR, 17 July 1966). As Sir John Tooley commented, Lionel could admit he was wrong. For example, when Frederick Ashton (who succeeded de Valois as director of

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the Royal Ballet) and Robert Helpmann produced a new Swan Lake in 1963, at the next ballet subcommittee meeting, on 17 December, ‘Lord Robbins said that he would like to retract the misgivings he had expressed about Carl Toms as designer . . . : the sets were both good and appropriate.’ Drogheda, on the other hand, thought the sets were ‘unaccountably garish and vulgar’. Both were pleased with the long planned Nutcracker, choreographed by Nureyev and designed by Georgiadis, in 1968, and with Enigma Variations, which many regard as Ashton’s finest ballet, designed by Julia Trevelyan Oman (Drogheda 1978, 297, 302–3; LCR to ICR 10 November 1968). The new Nutcracker was only one of the ballets Lionel took his grandchildren to at Christmastime. After Cinderella in 1965 he took four of them to Sleeping Beauty in 1966, as he told his sister on 20 December: ‘Rapture and an incredible consumption of sweet cakes chocolate & ice cream. William, who has a real feeling for music, pleased me greatly by picking out [Merle] Park, who was dancing a minor role, as the one he liked best “because she fitted into the music best”.’ Later he would take them to the opera: Wilma (Caroline Johnson) recalled that when she was a student at St Martin’s College of Art he would ring when he had a spare ticket, I’d arrive straight from the studio, often covered in paint. . . . He never batted an eyelid, and insisted on introducing me to everyone. I remember meeting the conductor Colin Davis, at some very glitzy affair. ‘This is my grand daughter, Caroline, isn’t she beautiful?’ he beamed with pride. I was wearing a floor length psychedelic kaftan, and silver stilettos, I had my hair in a beehive with a fake bird pinned in it, orange lipstick and bright yellow eyeshadow. I should think most people assumed I’d escaped from the dressing rooms. But he wasn’t in the least interested in appearances, he’d drive me home in his blue Mini, which he could hardly fit into. I don’t think it would have occurred to him to go out and buy an expensive car as a status symbol. . . . And the Mini always got us home.

On becoming chairman Drogheda decided the Royal Box should be available to other board members on nights it would otherwise have been empty (Drogheda 1978, 256). Lionel and Iris enjoyed many evenings there with friends, such as celebrating his birthdays with Trovatore conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini and companions the Frank Lees and Ronald Edwards in 1965 and with Fidelio with the Henry Moores and the Hendys two years later. In February 1967 he took his ‘comrade of the Higher Education Committee’ Helen Gardner to Falstaff (the title role sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau) along with Ifor Evans and the Arthur Salters (LCR to ICR, 12 December

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1965, 18 February and 26 November 1967). One party he organized was ‘a rather recherch´e one, a reunion with Karl Popper and Fritz Hayek, who is coming over specially from Freiburg’ on New Year’s Eve 1963 (LCR to Graham Hutton, 19 December 1963, General Correspondence OctoberDecember 1963, RP). The other members of the party were Iris, Hayek’s daughter Christine, Popper’s wife Hennie and John Watkins and his wife Micky. They were to hear a performance with a good cast of Rosenkavalier. As Watkins remembered, the request to wear evening dress created a ‘tremendous turmoil at the Popper end of things’, but when Watkins collected the Poppers he found Popper wearing his dinner jacket and putting cotton wool in his ears. Watkins asked why. Popper replied: ‘Because it’s a Strauss opera.’ Popper had not liked to tell Lionel he could not abide the music of Richard Strauss. Not all of Robbins’s involvement with Covent Garden was enjoyable. In 1964 he was, as he described it to his sister on 14 June, ‘more or less dragged by circumstances into chairing a committee of inquiry into a row which has broken out . . . about the management of a school for singers called the London Opera Centre – a squalid business with distinguished people behaving shockingly’. The London Opera Centre for Advanced Training and Development was less than a year old: it had come into existence in 1963 following the report of a committee under Bridges set up by the Arts Council in 1959, which had recommended the formation of a publicly funded advanced opera school, and the ROH’s acquisition of a former cinema, the Troxy in Commercial Road, where the new centre had to share its space with rehearsal facilities for the ROH. But there was already the National School of Opera, which had been formed by the singer Joan Cross (perhaps now most remembered as the first Ellen Orford in Britten’s Peter Grimes) and Ann Wood, who were persuaded to become director of studies and warden respectively of the new school. The first director of the London Opera Centre, Humphrey Proctor-Gregg, found them impossible to work with and soon resigned. The two ladies then said they would resign if the chosen successor, James Robertson, was appointed, and when he was, they did, issuing their own press statement in order to air their grievances publicly. Three governors of the school resigned. ‘The result, not unpredictably, was that several unfriendly articles appeared, written with little effort to check the facts. Lionel Robbins with his usual selflessness presided over the special committee’ (Drogheda 1978, 276–9). Lionel persuaded Jack Donaldson of the ROH board and Ninette de Valois to serve on the committee along with three members of the board of the Opera Centre (LCR to Donaldson, LCR to Gerald Coke, 1 June 1964, Opera Centre Row, RP).

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The work of the committee was mainly a fact-finding exercise with interviews with all concerned including the students: its report, signed on 31 July, printed in August and released for publication in the press on 10 September (London Opera Centre: Report of the Committee appointed to investigate recent criticisms; LCR to Norman Tucker, 8 September 1964, London Opera Centre – General, RP), dealt with the various allegations of Cross and Wood one by one, finding several of them inaccurate or at least exaggerated (to take only one instance, the amount of time the auditorium was used for ROH rehearsals), but admitting that the former cinema was not an ideal space for the Centre (or for rehearsals). Lionel told his sister on 14 September that the report ‘I think – has terminated the controversy’ after ‘six weeks averting evil rather than doing anything very positively creative’. The Centre survived its inauspicious beginning and lasted fifteen years; it trained some very fine singers such as Kiri Te Kanawa (LCR to ICR, 17 December 1971). In 1967 Georg Solti accepted the offer of music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, agreeing to remain at Covent Garden until the summer of 1971 (Solti 1997, 155). His successor at Covent Garden was Colin Davis, whose first Figaro in December 1971 saw the debut of Te Kanawa (as well as the dispute over the language in which it would be sung). The board was clear that it was time to appoint a British conductor, which left at least four candidates, of which Davis was, according to Drogheda (1978, 325–6) his own, Solti’s and Webster’s preference. Davis conducted the new production of The Midsummer Marriage in 1968 and The Trojans with the new sets by Georgiadis in 1969. Drogheda introduced Davis to Peter Hall, who agreed to join Covent Garden as artistic director in the autumn of 1971. But having directed Eugene Onegin and Tristan and Isolde for Solti and Tippett’s The Knot Garden for Davis in 1970, in July 1971 he decided he had made a mistake and ‘left Colin Davis and John Tooley in the lurch’ (Hall 2000, 235–8, 269–70), subsequently becoming director of the new National Theatre. This was a particularly severe blow to Davis, who found relations with the board difficult (Tooley 1999, 39). On one occasion Lionel commented (quoted by Donaldson 1988, 147) that ‘One must always be prepared to make wide allowances for the artistic temperament but I am aware that some members of the Board are not pleased with such manifestations as we have been exposed to from time to time.’ Sir John Tooley judged that ‘Lionel was the one [board member] who could help Colin to relax and did – just by interjecting the odd comment.’ In 1970 Ashton and Webster both retired. Their successors were MacMillan and Tooley. Two years earlier Webster had informed Drogheda and Tooley, and Ashton himself, that he and Ashton would retire at the same

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time; Drogheda had agreed with Webster that the succession (for which he knew de Valois wanted John Field and Kenneth MacMillan as joint directors) should not be discussed by the board as a whole. He consulted only Mark Bonham Carter (chairman of the ballet subcommittee) and Lionel Robbins and ‘for nearly a year nothing was actually discussed or minuted at a board meeting as such, although we all accepted the position.’ The members of the Royal Ballet were shocked to learn of Ashton’s enforced retirement while they were dancing in New York (Drogheda 1978, 316–17). When Webster flew out to New York Tooley cabled him that Drogheda, Robbins and de Valois all believed Webster should make a public announcement immediately (Tooley to Webster, 29 April 1968, quoted in Lebrecht 2001, 272). MacMillan’s directorship thus began under a cloud; John Field, for his part, resigned after six months. Deborah MacMillan told Iris Robbins (25 May 1984) that for her husband Lionel was ‘a marvellous member of the Board, a staunch supporter of the Ballet and . . . he felt that you were both great allies’. Lionel was also directly involved in Tooley’s appointment. When Drogheda assumed he could do this without advertizing the position, although some board members warned him it would be unwise, Goodman as chairman of the Arts Council objected. As Goodman wrote (1993, 303–5), We [the Arts Council] communicated this view to Lord Drogheda, but Lord Drogheda was not a an easy man to communicate a view which was not wholly palatable to him. . . . I wrote him a memorandum . . . [whose cogency] was sufficient for a meeting to be held with Lord Drogheda when two or three of my colleagues and I went to meet two or three of his colleagues and him. One of his colleagues was Lord Robbins . . . [who] was a man of strong preconceptions and of immense loyalty to his friends. Garrett was his friend and in anything to do with Covent Garden the two men stood shoulder to shoulder, a couple of very formidable musketeers.

A compromise was reached and half a dozen possible candidates were invited to apply: only one did so formally and the search committee chaired by Robbins recommended Tooley. The new production of The Trojans (sung in French) which opened the 1969/70 season was to celebrate the centenary of Berlioz’s birth. It used the first full published score in the new edition of the collected works of Hector Berlioz which had been initiated by the Berlioz Centenary Committee in 1962. The general editor was Hugh Macdonald of Pembroke College Cambridge. When a New Berlioz Edition Trust was formed, David Cairns, the Berlioz scholar, who was then the FT’s assistant music critic, asked Lionel on 18 July 1966 to become a trustee (Day Book April 66-August 66, RP). One

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of Robbins’s first ‘duties’ was to attend the musical launching of the edition with a performance of the Symphonie Funebre et Triomphale (edited by Hugh Macdonald in the first volume to be published) by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in January 1967 (LCR to H.M. Allan (Lord Mayor of Liverpool) and LCR to Stephen Gray, 6 January 1967, Day Book Sep 66-Feb 67, RP). Lionel was chairman of the Trust by the time the next three volumes, Les Troyens, edited by Macdonald, were published in 1969. As chairman he helped the trust to obtain a grant from the British Academy to supplement the funding from the Gulbenkian Foundation (Richard Macnutt to LCR, 16 December 1971, LCR to George Zarnecki, 4 February 1972, and subsequent correspondence, Berlioz, RP). He remained chairman until his death, when Moser agreed to succeed him. As the general editor then wrote to Iris Robbins (19 May 1984), ‘In relation to his many other achievements and interests [this] chairmanship . . . may seem of comparatively small amount, but within the framework of our enterprise his contribution was of enormous value and importance.’ The redevelopment of the Royal Opera House was something else that Lionel remained involved with until the 1980s. This began in the mid-1960s when the government decided that the fruit and vegetable market should be moved from Covent Garden to a new site at Nine Elms. As Sir John Tooley recalled, Drogheda phoned him and told him ‘We must immediately plan.’ He also suggested the ROH should consult the architects who had been appointed for the redevelopment of the old market, the Gollins Melvin Ward partnership. On 22 July 1965 Melvin showed various schemes to the finance subcommittee. Lionel firmly stated that any scheme involving demolition of the auditorium would not be approved and that any scheme involving lengthy closure of the House would be ‘unsatisfactory’. A year later (19 May 1966) Ward displayed the first model showing suggested additional buildings surrounding the Opera House to accommodate badly needed rehearsal and storage space and a second auditorium as well as plans for alterations to the existing building. In early 1967 the first of a long series of committees and working parties was formed (ROH Board 28 February 1967), commencing years of discussions and negotiations before building work on Phase I, the extension behind the Opera House designed by Edmund Ward, could begin in 1979 (see Chapter 27). Lionel Robbins’s second term as a trustee of the National Gallery nearly ended after only a year. In August 1961 the recently acquired Goya portrait of the first Duke of Wellington (1812) was stolen three weeks after it went on public view. When the Financial Times art critic, Denys Sutton, attacked

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the trustees over security, over cleaning and over the large sum paid for two Renoir Danseuses (whose purchase Lionel had, incidentally, strongly supported) (‘The National Gallery at the Cross-roads’, 12 September 1961), Lionel sent a letter of resignation to the chairman, John Witt, with, as he told Philip Hendy on 14 September, ‘a very heavy heart. I do not think I have ever felt so humiliated’ (NG26/86). Witt, with the backing of the other trustees, persuaded him to withdraw it. A few months later when he was away visiting US universities with the Committee on Higher Education, he was asked to serve as chairman again and was elected to the chair for three years while he was in Russia on 7 June 1962 (Witt to LCR, 6 and 15 May and 12 June 1962, NG26/120). On 4 October Henry Moore proposed that the new chairman represent the National Gallery on the Tate Gallery board, which he did until the end of his second National Gallery term in 1967. In 1962–3 Robbins took part in a special enquiry undertaken by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art into the sale and export of major works of art owned by public and semi-public bodies. This arose out of the decision of the Royal Academy to sell a cartoon by Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist. This the RA was legally entitled to do but it caused a public outcry. The NACF mounted a major campaign to raise the £800,000 needed for the National Gallery to purchase the drawing, launching its appeal at the gallery where the cartoon was put on display on 30 March 1962: in the next four months more than a million people came to see it. The campaign succeeded when the Prime Minister announced on 30 July that the government would contribute the remaining £350,000 needed (Verdi 2003, 37–8). Robbins, as the newly elected chairman of the trustees, had been to see the Chief Secretary to the Treasury (John Boyd-Carpenter) about the cartoon a few days earlier and had raised the general question of the sale of works of art by public bodies outside the national collections. The augmented Reviewing Committee included besides the permanent members, Robbins, Anthony Blunt (as Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures), the Dean of Gloucester representing the Church of England, and Noel Annan, perhaps because, as the chair of the committee (Cottesloe) put it, ‘it has even been said that the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge, might if they thought fit dispose of King’s College Chapel.’4 4

Boyd-Carpenter to LCR, 20 September, and Reviewing Committee: Special Enquiry, Note by the Chairman, 25 October 1962, Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art September 1962–1964, RP. The committee’s minutes and papers are in the same file.

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As with the Waverley Committee on the Export of Works of Art etc Lionel’s contributions show in the report submitted to Boyd-Carpenter on 31 January 1964. As he commented at the first meeting on 29 October, ‘the action of the Royal Academy could open the way to the sale of many works of art of supreme importance’. The trustees of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, for instance, might claim they could sell the pictures for the educational purposes of Dulwich College, to whom Sir Francis Bourgeois had left his collection. (The committee subsequently ascertained they could not.) ‘He had been a member of the Waverley Committee and could say with certainty that if the possibility of a case such as that of the Leonardo Cartoon had been suggested, they would have framed different recommendations for the control of sales by public and semi-public bodies.’ He still believed that, as the Waverley Committee had argued, private owners should receive full compensation for works they were not permitted to export, but it would ‘not, however, be unfair discrimination to treat charitable institutions differently from private owners. . . . He would like the principle to be recommended that when a charitable institution wished to export a work of art of national importance and was prevented from doing so, then full compensation should not necessarily be given.’ The chairman and others were less sure, and there were long exchanges over the moral and legal issues involved at the next three meetings on 1 and 29 May and 2 August 1963, especially between Robbins and the Chief Charity Commissioner. But the resulting report emphasized the Waverley principle for private owners, allowing for different treatment of public or semi-public owners (which the committee eventually defined roughly as bodies whose main revenue was from rates or taxes or which were entitled to the tax relief accorded to charities). As it noted, ‘The most serious weakness of the present system is a reflection and to some extent a necessary consequence of its greatest strength: if the export is never prevented unless an offer is made to purchase at a fair price for retention in this country there must always be a risk that highly valuable works of art will be lost to the nation in spite of the existence of the control.’ It therefore recommended the government should state that ‘where they are advised that works of art, or integral collections, of substantial value in the hands of public or semi-public bodies are of national importance under the Waverley criteria, licences for their export will not be issued’. (On the meaning of ‘substantial value’ Lionel successfully argued for £25,000 rather than the £100,000 first suggested.) If the owners then wished to sell they would have the option of selling privately or by auction in the UK or negotiating with the government for purchase for a public collection. If they opted for negotiation, ‘the Government should have regard to all the

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circumstances, including the probable value of the works or collections in both a free and a restricted market, and the character of the body wishing to sell them. In the case of public bodies the restricted market value would be the most that should be offered; and in the case of some charitable trusts that are virtually public possessions the offer should in our view not exceed that value, or exceed it by only a small margin. Other trusts may be so little of the nature of a public possession that it would be proper to offer them the whole, or nearly the whole, of the free market value.’ It took the government six months to decide to publish the report, and when it finally did, a month before it was defeated in the general election, it issued a press statement noting the report ‘does . . . raise some difficult questions’ and no decision could be taken for the time being. It rejected the idea of a special fund to finance special grants, on which the augmented committee had ‘strongly support[ed]’ the earlier recommendation of the Reviewing Committee.5 The National Gallery trustees were preoccupied with matters of security in the early 1960s. On 27 June 1962 someone threw a bottle of ink at the Leonardo Cartoon; when the thrower was charged in court a month later he was found ‘unfit to plead and was ordered to be detained under the Queen’s pleasure’ (NG Board 12 July and 4 October 1962). The Goya was still missing; the third of several anonymous letters sent to news agencies or newspapers demanding a large sum of money for its return arrived in July 1962, asking that someone ‘with the fearless fortitude of a Mon[t]gomery start the fund for 140,000’ (Theft of the ‘Goya’ Portrait, Brief History of Theft, 20 November 1965, NG26/119). From the outset Lionel was ready with suggestions for action of one kind or another, such as a broadcast which was made by John Witt in September 1961, and he was characteristically optimistic that the painting would be returned eventually. In July 1962, as he told his sister on 22 July, he ‘succeeded in coaxing that gallant soldier [Field Marshal Montgomery] to issue a rebuke & an exhortation to return the picture – which however so far has only elicited another letter demanding a free pardon which the police, of course, won’t rise to’. After a conference with the police in July, he thought ‘the Police were not gifted with much imagination’ and was ‘still dissatisfied with the way the Police were handling the case’ in October. In November, after lunching with Detective Chief Superintendent Mannings, appointed the first security adviser to the 5

Boyd-Carpenter to Cottesloe, 23 June, Cottesloe to Boyd-Carpenter, 25 June, RCSE(64)1, Press Statement Sale of Works of Art by Public and Semi-Public Bodies, 31 August 1964, Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art September 1962–1964, RP.

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national museums and galleries following the recommendation of a committee under Bridges into Security at the National Gallery, he was more charitable. By this time the gallery had a security staff of eighty-one men and a dog (NG Board 12 July, 4 October and 1 November 1962; The Times, 5 October 1962). In 1963 more anonymous letters arrived, one in May to Robbins at home, which he immediately handed over to the police. In November he and Hendy appeared on the ‘Panorama’ television programme in order to keep the theft in the public eye. The thief obliged by sending two more anonymous letters, but Lionel still found the police unhelpful and wished he could talk to the culprit himself (NG Board 6 June, 7 November and 5 December 1963 and 6 February 1964). It was not until 1965 that further letters arrived, one, received by the Daily Mirror on Friday 21 May, enclosing a ticket from the left luggage office at Birmingham New Street railway station (Levey, Return of Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, 26 May 1965, National Gallery X Correspondence May 1964-, RP). Early next morning the telephone rang at 4 Marine Parade, Lyme Regis, to tell Robbins that the parcel collected by the police appeared to contain the missing Goya, without its frame. Lionel was on the telephone for most of the rest of the day. When Michael Levey had verified it was the Goya, Lionel could report to his sister on the Sunday that ‘All is well & the picture is now in a safe at the Gallery awaiting expert examination tomorrow. . . . I always thought it would come back somehow.’ Hendy was away so it was Robbins who faced ‘a barrage of enquiries from the Press throughout May 22nd and 23rd’ and ‘frenzied scenes with the Press photographers’ at the press conference on the 24th (NG Board 3 June 1965). A few weeks later Kempton Bunton, an unemployed man from Newcastle, turned up at Scotland Yard and confessed to taking the picture four years earlier. Lionel appeared at his trial, when Bunton was acquitted on all counts except that of stealing the frame and jailed for three months. The trustees did not think much of this verdict: Lionel complained about the state of the law to the Lord Chancellor as did Jennie Lee to the Home Secretary.6 The highlight of Lionel’s second term was the acquisition of C´ezanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses in November 1964. This was publicly criticized, although the purchase of C´ezanne’s Dans le Parc du Chateau Noir the previous year had been welcomed (A. Robbins 2006, 23–5). When the latter, which had belonged to the dealer Ambroise Vollard, came on the market Lionel thought 6

Theft of the ‘Goya’ Portrait, Brief History of Theft, 20 November 1965, NG26/119; LCR to Lord Gardiner, 17 November 1965, DAY BOOK September 65-March 66, RP; NG Board 2 December 1965 and 6 January 1966.

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that although the painting was an ideal ‘Lane replacement’ (a picture for which the Gallery could call on the Treasury for assistance in buying to replace the half of the Lane collection lent to Dublin since 1959), the trustees could hardly ask for such assistance so soon after the contribution towards the Leonardo Cartoon. Instead the Gallery should buy the painting and warn the Treasury that it would ask for an increase in the Lane replacement grant next year (NG Board 3 January 1963; draft letter to Sir Ronald Harris, Lane Replacements, January 1963, National Gallery, RP). On 7 February 1963 Lionel reported to the trustees that although the purchase had seemed to be going through, on 6 February M. Andr´e Malraux [French Minister of Cultural Affairs] had instructed that the C´ezanne should be stopped at the Customs in Paris for reconsideration. He [Robbins] said it seemed best to follow the same procedure as for the similar difficulty which had occurred in the case of the two Renoir Danseuses. Within the last week or two he had happened to meet the French Ambassador in London, and had mentioned the C´ezanne, expressing appreciation of what he then understood to be the position, that M. Malraux had given his blessing to the export; . . . he might find an opportunity, if this were thought desirable, to speak privately to the French Ambassador about the present impasse.

A month later he reported that the Foreign Office had agreed he could telephone the French Ambassador, who had been ‘most sympathetic’, and a month later still that the purchase had gone through after the Ambassador had spoken to Malraux (NG Board 7 March and 4 April 1963). Lionel told his sister on 7 April: ‘I don’t think this would have happened but for the good offices of the French Ambassador here who throughout has behaved like an angel. It is a very late landscape and a most notable addition to the all too few Cezannes in London.’ C´ezanne painted three versions of the Grandes Baigneuses in the last decade of his life. One was bought by Albert Barnes for his collection, two by Auguste Pellerin, whose son sold one to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, while the third remained in the collection of Pellerin’s daughter (Hendy, Cezanne: “Les grandes baigneuses”, 10 August 1964, National Gallery X Correspondence May 1964-, RP). Lionel had seen all three and told his fellow trustees on 2 April 1964: ‘He felt that the one now in the Pellerin Collection was of the same order of importance as the other two. The Barnes collection version was probably the most exciting, whereas the one in the Philadelphia Museum, although very beautiful, had struck him as somewhat unfinished, with the medium used almost as if it were watercolour. The Pellerin picture is probably the most brilliant in colour.’ Henry Moore, who rejoined the National Gallery board in March 1964, supported him: the

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picture ‘represented the monumental phase of C´ezanne’s art, in which his work could be compared with that of the Old Masters.’ When Hendy first heard that Mme Lecomte and her family intended to sell her Baigneuses, he believed the French government would never allow it to leave France. Lionel commented at the 6 February 1964 board meeting that ‘he felt there was nothing to be done about the “Baigneuses”, although he considered it superior to two other large versions in Philadelphia.’ When the gallery learned the Louvre might not want the painting which might thus be exportable, Moore (and Robbins) thought Malraux ‘would not dare’ to permit the export. Lionel also feared the Treasury would not be able to help enough towards the inevitably high purchase price, but he suggested some trustees should be prepared to go to Paris if they heard the picture really was available. ‘The Chairman said that he had not much hope that these negotiations [with the dealer] would result in more than that the Gallery, having kept constantly in touch with the Louvre, might be able to complete some less sensational purchase from France.’ He also raised the possibility of seeking assistance from private donors to supplement Lane replacement funds from the Treasury (NG Board 5 March 1964). On 26 July, however, he could tell his sister that he was ‘chasing one of the biggest prizes on earth for the N.G. Details later’; by 11 October ‘until I am sure one way or the other, the subject is almost too tension-creating to write about.’ To the trustees’ surprise the French government had allowed an export licence for the painting; the price was approximately £475,000. The picture ‘was immediately dispatched to us [the National Gallery] before the Minister [Malraux] could change his mind’ and arrived in London at the end of July for the trustees to look at it while they had an option to purchase it until the end of October. Robbins told the 1 October 1964 board meeting: ‘In most cases the impression was enthusiastically in favour of its acquisition provided that sufficient money could be raised to avoid making what might be regarded as excessive demands on the Treasury; and in no case was there positive opposition. Since the time that the picture was likely to be allowed to remain in the country was short, the Chairman then proceeded to take steps to enlist the aid of possible benefactors.’ He had approached the art collector Major Allnatt, who had not been encouraging. On the advice of Leonard Wolfson he had approached Max Rayne, the West End property developer and philanthropist, who liked modern and Impressionist paintings: ‘Mr Rayne said that in principle he was prepared to help substantially.’ Robbins had talked to W.W. Morton at the Treasury and then he and Rayne had talked to the Chief Secretary the Treasury on 25 September. On the day of the election which brought in a Labour government on 15 October, Lionel

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talked to Morton again, and at the end of the month the new Financial Secretary came to see the painting before meeting Robbins, Rayne and Hendy.7 As he told the trustees on 5 November, Lionel found the meeting ‘somewhat uncomfortable’ because Rayne offered half the purchase price and the Treasury tried to get him up to two-thirds. He told his sister on 8 November that he still ‘[did] not know what will happen’. Before the meeting Lionel emphasized the ‘quite exceptional nature’ of the painting and the ‘uniqueness of this opportunity’. He pointed out that Rayne would find it easier to persuade the other trustees of the Rayne Foundation if the government were willing to contribute and that there could be ‘no more felicitous way’ of helping to fill the gap left by the loan of half the Lane collection to Dublin (LCR to Morton, 30 October 1964, T227/2492). After the 5 November 1964 board meeting he wrote Morton again to tell him of the trustees’ willingness to match a Treasury contribution, concluding: The plain facts of the situation are that we have been given the first refusal of a work of art the like of which is not likely ever to come on the market again; that Mr. Rayne has offered a contribution towards its acquisition far greater than any contribution ever made by any private individual to assist the acquisition of a work of art for the Gallery; and that we have been assured in recent weeks that the Government is prepared to do more for the Arts and culture in this country than has been done by any of its predecessors. In such a situation surely it is impossible to think that this splendid opportunity should be allowed to go by default.

The Labour government agreed to provide a special grant of £125,000. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Callaghan) was asked to make a decision he responded: ‘Buy it!’ (note on N.N. Burrett to Chancellor, 5 November 1964, T227/2492). Rayne told Robbins on 15 November that he was ‘happy that we were able to secure the Cezanne and have something of your own feeling for the picture’ and that it was ‘reassuring to find busy and important people like yourself devoting so much effort and emotion to something like the Cezanne – and, indeed, the National Gallery’ (National Gallery X Correspondence May 1964-, RP). Lionel gave a dinner party for Rayne at LSE on 7 January 1965, the day before the painting went on display at the Gallery behind a special perspex shield; Callaghan gave a lunch for Rayne in February (NG Board 7 January and 4 February 1965). As for the press criticism, Lionel would have sympathized with one of its themes (A. Robbins 2006, 24) that ‘the nation was being punished for earlier refusals to 7

W.W. Morton, ‘National Gallery: Cezanne’, 21 September, and Note for Record, 25 September, Morton to Couzens, 15 October, and The Cezanne Meeting on 2 November 1964, T227/2492, TNA.

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recognize the importance of the nineteenth-century master. This fantastic sum is being paid by the very gallery which once hid the Lane bequest . . . in the basement.’ The acquisition of a particular picture was usually proposed to the NG board by the director. When the trustees differed Lionel tended to rely on the judgment of the director and his staff, especially when he had to give the casting vote. This did not prevent some resentment on the part of the staff against the power of the trustees – as one episode towards the end of Lionel’s second term as chairman showed. It also showed his skills as a chairman could lead him astray. The board was considering on 3 November 1966 the purchase of two pictures by the eighteenth-century Italian painter Francesco Guardi. Hendy was ill and Michael Levey spoke in his absence, reporting the staff were not in favour of purchasing either picture. Lionel, who had talked to Hendy on the telephone before the meeting, said he understood the director shared Levey’s views though not so strongly. Lionel then went round the table: some of the trustees were in favour, others against. Lionel pointed out that resources were limited and also that Henry Moore, not present, was against purchase. Denis Mahon, whose opinions were always strongly held, spoke in support of buying the smaller of the two pictures, Sophronia before the Saracen King. When it came to a vote, two of the opponents had changed their minds and there was a majority in favour of the purchase of Sophronia, without Lionel’s vote. Lionel then said Hendy had told him that ‘he would not oppose a majority decision of the Board in favour of the acquisition.’ As an afterthought he asked the keeper what he thought: Martin Davies replied ‘that, while of course acquiescing in the Board’s decision, he did not believe this picture to be suitable for the National Gallery.’ Hendy and Levey were very upset, both that the opinion of a trustee (Mahon) had been allowed to override the considered opinion of the staff and Hendy that his views had been misrepresented, as indeed they had. Lionel was very apologetic when he realized Hendy had actually said he would not oppose a board decision to purchase the other Guardi picture. Lionel also apologized for not asking the keeper’s opinion until the very end of the meeting. But he also defended the board – ‘I do submit that to describe it [what happened at this meeting] as a vote of no confidence by the Trustees in the staff is – to put it mildly – an exaggeration’ – and Mahon, who ‘on most of the critical decisions of recent years . . . has been on the side of the angels, and has often swayed wavering opinion the right way’ (LCR to Levey, 8 November, and LCR to Hendy, 11 November 1966, Day Book Sep 66-Feb 67, RP).

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In a second letter to Hendy on 14 November (Day Book Sep 66-Feb 67, RP) he defended the constitutional arrangements on two grounds. In the first place, I cannot believe that it can be laid down as an infallible rule that the staff is always right. I recollect for instance an incident at the Tate where a Picasso was purchased at the suggestion, in my hearing, of one Philip Hendy, in spite of the fact that the Director disliked the picture . . . yet I think it was a good thing that this purchase was made and that the Gallery now has an example of this period of Picasso’s work which the then director thought so inferior and unimportant. I cannot think that a position of this sort could never arise at the National Gallery, whatever the Board and whoever the Director. Secondly, since the Board while it exists has ultimate responsibility vis-a-vis the public and Parliament, I cannot believe that it should be thought to be expedient that it should have any ultimate inhibition laid upon it. This seems to me to be absolutely out of line with any constitutional arrangement that I know of. Moreover, I cannot believe that you could get men of spirit to accept such a position. I suppose you could collect from the country at large a set of people who were willing for the sake of the honour of association to accept a position of pure rubber stamps. But I cannot believe that they would be the sort of persons whom you of all people would really wish to be associated with.

Lionel circulated a statement before the 1 December meeting admitting he had misled the trustees and asking that the Guardi be discussed again. Mahon again spoke in favour of Sophronia, another trustee and Hendy against. The chairman ‘said he appreciated Mr. Mahon’s views about a policy of acquiring unfashionable pictures. . . . But he was against spending £12,000 on the “Sophronia”.’ When the board moved on to discuss an early version of Rubens’s The Judgment of Paris of which the gallery possessed a late version, Lionel cannily ‘called the Board’s attention to the financial situation. He asked if any Trustee favoured the purchase of both the Rubens and the Guardi “Sophronia”.’ Mahon said he did. ‘The Chairman then asked if any Trustees were against purchasing either the Rubens or one of the Guardis.’ Three were. The remaining six were in favour of purchasing the Rubens. The board accordingly decided to buy the Rubens (which Lionel himself considered ‘rather ugly but historically important’: LCR to ICR, 4 December 1966) and to rescind its previous decision to buy one of the Guardis. On 15 December 1966 Lionel suggested to Hendy that as his term as a trustee would expire in July, the trustees should elect a new chairman in January (NG26/87). He took the chair for the last time on 5 January, when Witt was elected to succeed him again. Hendy, who was in India, wrote a very warm letter of thanks to Lionel for his service as chairman (Special Letters, RP). He dedicated his book on Piero della Francesca (1968b) to Lionel and

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Iris. In the remaining months of his term Lionel found himself backing Hendy again, albeit reluctantly. In a discussion on 4 May on whether to purchase one of the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s paintings, SS Andrew and Thomas, he spoke against purchase, largely because he wanted the trustees to be able to buy a Vuillard, Dejeuner dans un Jardin en Normandie, in the collection of Major Allnatt, in case it came on the market in the near future. (Lionel was friendly with Allnatt, who had lent the gallery some of his paintings, and knew he was in poor health; the gallery had the right of first refusal on the sale of any of the paintings he had lent.) When he saw the draft minutes he told Martin Davies that ‘alas, . . . his vote on the Bernini had been wrongly recorded. . . . He had indeed, during the discussion, voted against the purchase, but when, almost at the end, Philip [Hendy] said that he himself was on the whole in favour of buying the picture, Lionel said “I capitulate”.’ He asked that his vote be recorded in favour, as it is in the revised minutes (Davies to Witt, 19 and 23 May 1967, NG26/115). Allnatt, when he heard Lionel had stepped down, wrote on 12 June (Personal Correspondence 1966–70 A-F, RP) that he ‘much approve[d] of this, because for years you have been doing far too much work’. Lionel replied the next day that he did not think he would do less work: ‘I don’t really work too hard and I should be unhappy if I were not working as hard as I do.’ When Lionel left the board, he thought it ‘just conceivable’ but unlikely that he might return. As he told his sister on 24 September he had heard that Jennie Lee wanted younger new trustees. He had accordingly suggested his LSE colleague Basil Yamey (Hendy to Witt, 23 August 1967, NG26/115). So it was a very pleasant surprise to be asked to serve a third term. He rejoined the board on 5 October 1967, the day the trustees had planned to hold his farewell dinner. The other new trustees were John Piper and Edward Playfair. The next National Gallery party was for Hendy who retired in December (LCR to ICR, 10 December 1967). Martin Davies succeeded Hendy as director. Michael Levey was promoted to keeper and succeeded Davies as director in 1973. Witt was chairman until March 1972 when Playfair succeeded him. Lionel remained a member of the Publications and Finance Committees: as he told Playfair on 7 March 1972 (NG26/87), the work of the latter ‘consist[ed] chiefly in saying “yes” or “no” to Cazenove’. As an ordinary trustee Lionel continued to support the acquisition of Impressionist or Post-Impressionist paintings. In 1968 the gallery acquired an early C´ezanne, The Painter’s Father, Louis-Auguste C´ezanne (1865): the trustees on 7 December 1967 had ‘expressed the greatest enthusiasm for this picture, Mr Moore, Mr Piper and Mr Forge in particular commenting on its importance, and Lord Robbins pointing out that this type of C´ezanne is not

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represented in public collections in London’, and on 4 April decided to buy it even without help from Rayne, who had been gently approached by Witt and Robbins. When it came to Allnatt’s collection, the trustees also decided on 4 April 1968 not to buy his Van Dyck Portrait of Agostino Pallavicino because they wanted his Vuillard, which was the other half of a Vuillard already in the gallery. Allnatt died in August 1969. Lionel, and Mahon, argued vigorously on 4 December 1969 for Allnatt’s Caravaggio, Salome with the Head of St John the Baptist, when the director was ‘not . . . persuaded that the painting was a good one or that it was by Caravaggio’. Moore ‘spoke warmly in favour of the Vuillard’ and the trustees decided to buy it. They agreed by a majority of only one vote to purchase the Caravaggio, over the opposition of the director and the keeper. Mindful of earlier friction, ‘Lord Robbins paid tribute to the weight and integrity of the arguments advanced in opposition’ by Davies and Levey (and at the next meeting on 1 January 1970 to their ‘admirable minuting of the complex discussion’). At the Tate, meanwhile, the long-running dispute with the National Gallery over modern foreign pictures had been temporarily resolved during Witt’s first term as chairman of the National Gallery. Following the move of Courtauld’s pictures to the new Courtauld Institute gallery in 1958 and the resolution of the Lane problem in 1959, the Tate trustees had offered in 1960 to transfer thirty-four Impressionist paintings to the National Gallery. In 1961 the latter asked for seventeen Post-Impressionist paintings as well. Lionel, who supported this request, argued on 5 January and again on 6 April that ‘he was sure’ Samuel Courtauld would have wanted the pictures bought out of the Courtauld Fund to hang in the National Gallery. The Tate ‘responded with a passionate protest’ (Spalding 1998, 124). The National Gallery accepted some of its arguments, though again requesting the Courtauld Fund pictures, and Witt agreed that thirty-five of the fifty-one should remain at the Tate. It offered to lend Van Gogh’s Chair and Pipe to the Tate but otherwise the Courtauld Fund pictures would hang in the National Gallery, including the coveted Seurat Bathers. As Lionel commented to the Tate board on 21 March 1963 (TAM 72/37, Tate Archive), ‘the question of the general desirability of transfer after a period of time was quite separate from the transfer of the Courtauld pictures’: the problem remained that the Tate was ‘a hive which was likely to be raided’ by the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum, a problem ‘very much in his mind recently, particularly in relation to purchasing pictures of the late 19th century which was . . . [still] a sort of no man’s land’: the Tate could not afford to buy these pictures at all and the National Gallery was so short of them that it could not consider buying

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minor works. Hence the Tate’s real need was for a more generous grant for purchases, not just for Impressionists but for more recent works. Given that the National Gallery had ‘an understanding with the Treasury, which was sometimes kept and sometimes not, that they would help to fill gaps left by predecessors’ (Tate Board 18 April 1963), he suggested, at a special meeting to consider purchasing policy on 8 October 1963, that the Tate should ‘try to establish a presumption that the Treasury would make good the gaps in the work of the great 20th century masters, over a period’. He was always ready with advice on how best to approach the government, advising the Tate board to tackle the permanent officials at the Treasury and (after March 1965) at the DES, especially Harold Rossetti ‘whom he had always found extremely helpful’ (Tate Board 17 October 1963 and 26 July 1965, TAM72/37). It was good advice: at the beginning of 1964 the Treasury offered not only an increased annual grant (£60,000) but also promised ‘gap’ money of £50,000 each year for five years, which enabled the Tate in 1965 to buy Picasso’s The Three Dancers, its ‘most important purchase since the acquisition of Seurat’s Bathers, Asni`eres through the Courtauld Fund’ (Spalding 1998, 144). Rothenstein retired as director in 1964. Well in advance Sir Colin Anderson, now chairman of the trustees, held another evening meeting at his house in Hampstead for all the trustees except Lawrence Gowing, who had announced he wished to be a candidate. There, after ‘much discussion and . . . in spite of the considerable hesitation voiced by Lionel Robbins, agreement was reached’ and Anderson told the deputy director Norman Reid that the trustees’ first choice was Gowing. Perhaps Lionel recognized Gowing’s weaknesses (in administration) as well as his strengths (in artistic judgment). But the Treasury pointed out that the trustees could not appoint a director without a proper hiring process: the position was advertized in April 1964 and applications were considered by a selection board chaired by Bridges. According to Spalding (1998, 141–3), Dennis Proctor’s reference swung the selection board in favour of Reid who took up his new duties on 1 October. Lionel told his sister on 26 July that he found the day he spent sitting on the selection board ‘a difficult and in a way distressing business since the chief competitors are both friends & both men for which I have deep instinctive sympathy’. A few months later Gowing, who had resigned his position as principal of Chelsea School of Art, became keeper of the British Collection, leaving after two years to become professor of fine art at the University of Leeds. While he was at the Tate the Turner rooms were rehung and redecorated; Reid also redecorated and renovated other rooms, brought the modern foreign

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collection upstairs from the lower floor, and rehung the entire gallery with the British Collection on the left and the Modern Collection on the right of the central sculpture hall (Spalding 1998, 144–6). When Lionel attended the reception attended by HM The Queen to celebrate the rehanging on 15 February 1967, he commented to his sister: ‘The galleries do look very good; and I think we can really claim that we have something like a Museum of Modern Art in London. The English collection too has been rearranged and the Turners especially the late canvases look truly magnificent.’ Other issues that arose during Robbins’s second term on the Tate board included the extension of the building, which rumbled on for years, and Henry Moore’s offer to donate a large number of his works to the Tate, which complicated the building issue as the Tate used this as an additional argument for the extension (Spalding 1998, 160–5). The Labour government offered £200,000 towards an extension to house the Moore gift as long as the Tate matched this from other sources: Robbins noted the ambiguity in the Financial Secretary’s letter to Jennie Lee which contained no provision for any escalation of costs (Tate Board 20 April 1967). The matter was not resolved before Lionel’s term came to an end, by which time the idea of a separate Moore museum was being actively considered, but as a friend of Moore he remained involved in the informal discussions at Moore’s home in Hertfordshire (Lousada, Note of conversation between the chairman, vice-chairman and Mr Henry Moore, 19 October 1967, TAM72/39). (In 1977 Moore endowed the Henry Moore Foundation at his home (part of an old pig farm); in 2007 his house was open to the public for the first time.) The National Gallery and the Tate made another attempt to obtain a change in the law regarding the acceptance of works of art in lieu of death duties, this time to try to increase the number of works accepted for provincial galleries, Lionel drafting the statement submitted to Jennie Lee (Tate Board 22 September 1966, TAM72/39). Finally, just as Lionel ceased to be chairman of the National Gallery trustees, the Tate trustees decided the time had come to conclude the agreement on the distribution of British pictures which Lionel had signed on first becoming chairman of the National Gallery in 1954 (see Chapter 21). As Anderson wrote Lionel on 4 January 1967 (TAM 72/39), the changes consequent on the National Gallery and Tate Gallery Act had gone smoothly and ‘can now be considered complete. So this seems, from every standpoint, a suitable moment to rectify the position. The Tate Board, in complete confidence that the cordial and intimate relations between the Galleries will remain unchanged, has therefore asked me to tell you that it feels the specific agreement of twelve years ago, which has outlived its usefulness, should now lapse.’

TWENTY-SIX

The Troubles at LSE

For those of us who were at LSE at the time, what quickly became known as ‘the troubles’ began in the Michaelmas term 1966 following the appointment of Walter Adams as the next director of the School. At a time when the white minority government of Rhodesia was defying the British government and world opinion, the appointment of the first Principal of the multiracial University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in Salisbury (now Harare) was instantly controversial. Robbins was not involved in his appointment, but with strong feelings of loyalty towards Adams because of his work for Jewish refugees in the 1930s, he could not but defend him when his appointment was criticized in the first round of troubles at LSE in 1966/7. This year was the first after Robbins’s retirement from the academic staff, when he was only a parttime lecturer and largely an observer of developments at the School. He was intimately involved, however, in the second, more serious round of the troubles, which began a year after Adams’s arrival just when Robbins succeeded Bridges as Chairman of the Court of Governors.1 Sydney Caine had agreed to continue as director until he was sixty-five in 1967. When the selection committee for his successor asked for the views of the academic staff, Lionel responded to Michael Wise (a member of the committee) on 26 November 1965 (Adams, RP) that he wanted to put on record that he thought the ‘fundamental desiderata’ for a new director were ‘capacity for leadership, real administrative ability and good standing with the world of affairs’. He thought the committee would have difficulty finding a distinguished scholar who also had these characteristics. He made his opinions known when names were mentioned in the 1

I am very grateful to Ben Roberts, Basil Yamey, John Watkins, Meghnad Desai and Alan Day for illuminating conversations about the second round. In 1966/7 I was a third-year undergraduate, in 1968/9 taking the new MSc.

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Senior Common Room, objecting particularly to Aubrey Jones: Lionel was ‘disgusted’ when Jones, who had specialized in economics (see Chapter 7), described himself in his memoirs as a pupil of Laski rather than of Hayek and Robbins ‘which . . . would have put an entirely different complexion on his up-bringing at the university’ (LCR to Wise and Roberts, 5 January 1966, Adams, RP). His preferred candidate among those seriously considered by the committee was Ronald Edwards. He told his sister on 23 October 1966: ‘my top candidate . . . would have been Ronald Edwards once Professor at the School & now head of the Electricity Supply Board. But the silly academics set their faces against any one who could be described as practical.’ The others considered were Alan Bullock, then Master of St Catherine’s College Oxford, William Deakin, Warden of St Antony’s College Oxford, and Sir Fraser Noble, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Aberdeen, none of whom wanted to move. In the spring of 1966 the committee considered two completely new names and decided on Adams (Dahrendorf 1995, 446). His appointment from 1 October 1967 for five years was announced on 17 June. Lionel told Karl Popper on 28 October (Adams, RP) that ‘if I had had any say, Adams would certainly not have been the first man on my list’ but since Edwards was ruled out, ‘when I heard that they had appointed Adams, having regard to what I knew of his record in the past, and his general qualities of character, I was not at all unhappy.’ By October there had not only been critical press coverage of Adams’s behaviour as Principal in Salisbury but a group of LSE students who belonged to the newly reestablished Socialist Society (Soc Soc) had put together a pamphlet, LSE’s New Director: A Report on Walter Adams, which they published on 17 October (Dahrendorf 1995, 448). A major source of their information was the Birley Report on disturbances at the University College of Rhodesia in March 1966, which was severely critical of Adams as an administrator but not of his racial views; another was Louis BlomCooper’s report to Amnesty International in August 1966. The students used Robert Birley’s criticism of Adams as an administrator, but they more strongly criticized him for not making a stand against the white government’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence. They concluded: ‘Adams – a Principal unprepared to defend the freedom of his staff and students – is not a suitable person to be placed in charge of any centre of higher education. Nor, especially, is he suitable as the Director of a multi-racial college like L.S.E., since his belief in multi-racialism does not seem to extend to actions in its defence.’ Lionel took strong exception to this last sentence. As he told Popper and Watkins on 24 October (Adams, RP), he thought it ‘incredible that

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such a man [who abandoned his academic career to work for the Academic Assistance Council in 1933] should be inspired by any but liberal sentiments in the conduct of any academic institution with which he is involved’. He was prepared to give him the benefit of doubt with respect to his low political profile in Salisbury: Let it once be assumed that he has determined, rightly or wrongly, that his duty is to keep the multi-racial institution going, regardless of the disturbed situation round him, and for that reason he must avoid any connection likely to involve him in political controversy and it is easy to see how genuine misapprehensions may arise in the minds of those who are preoccupied with politics, and how misrepresentations may easily be made. But this is a priori. What it is not a priori is the fact that a man who was willing to sacrifice all his prospects to save those exiled from totalitarian tyranny on racial grounds is now victimized by the suggestion that he is unfit to be head of a multiracial institution.

The day the pamphlet went on sale in Houghton Street, the President of the Students’ Union, David Adelstein, wrote to the chairman of the governors, asking him if he could say how much of the information in the pamphlet was true, how much of it was known to the selection committee, what had been the reasons for overlooking the criticisms if known and whether he thought there was a case for reconsidering the decision; Bridges replied that on grounds of confidentiality he could answer only that not all the information in the pamphlet was accurate. Before Adelstein received Bridges’ reply a Union meeting on 21 October passed a motion ‘seriously question[ing]’ Adams’s appointment. Bridges wrote to The Times on 25 October expressing indignation about the campaign against Adams; Birley and Blom-Cooper also wrote to The Times that comments in their reports had been quoted out of context in the students’ pamphlet (Dahrendorf 1995, 448–9). Lionel wrote to Adams on 7 November (Adams 7/2, BLPES): As you probably know, my relation with L.S.E. has gradually faded to that of occasional lecturer – I give one course & take a handful of graduate students. But I feel I must write to express my delight at the thought of seeing you once more at the School and to urge you not to be too discouraged by the utterly shameful behaviour of the Students Union & a handful of members of the Staff. I can assure you that this business has been engineered by a small body of extremists and one or two sincere people who were taken in by them: and that you would find the main body of responsible opinion utterly sick at what these people have said and done. I hope you have seen the letters in the Times. The way in which men & women of good will have rallied to testify on your behalf is one of the few cheerful features of the whole business. I am sure that when you turn up in person you will find a very warm welcome from all the people from whom you would wish to receive it.

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Lionel underestimated the strength of feeling among the academic staff. An Academic Board meeting on 2 November took four hours to produce a motion of support for Adams (Dahrendorf 1995, 450–1). Caine later judged that if he had asked the staff if they liked the Adams appointment or if they were happy with the selection procedures, a majority would have answered yes to the first question and an overwhelming majority no to the second (Report by the Director on the present term, Agenda for Court 8 December 1966). Meanwhile Caine had refused to allow Adelstein to send a letter as President of the Students’ Union, thus using the School’s name and address, to The Times in reply to Bridges’ letter. The Union had voted, by the usual overwhelming majority, on 28 October that Adelstein should send the letter, and, with the support of two junior members of the Law Department who doubted Caine’s interpretation of the School’s regulations, he had done so. He was informed he would be brought before the School’s board of discipline. As Dahrendorf (1995, 450) commented, ‘And so . . . a substantive difference was turned into a dispute about authority and its use, coupled, to make matters worse, with a question of the right to express a view freely.’ When the board met on 21 November, it found that Adelstein had broken the rules but acted in good faith, imposed no penalty and only issued a warning against further infringements. Lionel gave his Chichele Lectures at Oxford on 14, 15, 21 and 22 October. The lectures, each of which was summarized in The Times, ‘were reasonably well attended – for Oxford where on the whole people don’t go to lectures – and I think quite well received’; he was ‘not at all dissatisfied’ with them and told his sister on 23 October that he intended to turn them into a book. But first he took time to make speeches, in the House of Lords and elsewhere, and to complete his introduction to Mill’s Essays on Economic and Society for the Toronto edition of Mill’s works.2 He then spent the Christmas vacation preparing for a conference on ‘Gold and International Monetary Reform’ at the Johns Hopkins Center in Bologna on 13–15 January. The idea of the conference, organized by Randall Hinshaw, had come from Philip Cortney, whom Lionel first met in New York in 1948 (see Chapter 19), who thought of getting major participants in the current debates on the 2

HLDebs vol 277 cols 922–30; ms ‘Toast of the Oil Industries Club 18/11/66’, Addresses on Finance & Economics 1955–; ms ‘I.P.A. [Institute of Public Administration] 6.12.66’, University & School Occasions Speeches etc; LCR to F.E.L. Priestley, 14 December 1966, Introduction to Mill, RP; Robbins (1967a). The Lords debate was on Sterling and World Trade. LCR also gave evidence to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee on university finance (Parliament and Control of University Expenditure, Minutes of Evidence taken by the Committee of Public Accounts, Tuesday, 29th November 1966, Miscellaneous Education, RP).

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reform of the international monetary system to engage in an open dialogue. When Lionel received an invitation, he told Hinshaw he had better count him out: ‘I confess that . . . when the possibility of a conference was broached . . . I imagined something of a more or less academic nature. . . . I never dreamt of a situation in which Triffin, Rueff and I should have to seek agreement on documents to be published, or declare to the world at large the reasons for our disagreement.’ He agreed only to contribute a survey of the issues. He suggested an agenda for the conference and a chairman, Willard Thorp, whose skills in the chair he had admired at the meetings at the Merrill Center in 1960. At the conference he also summed up the areas of disagreement among the participants.3 The conference was sufficiently successful for further conferences to be held with the same format, Thorp in the chair and Robbins the moderator, almost every other year, the next two in Bologna (Hinshaw ed 1971 and 1972) (though Lionel missed the one in 1969 because of the troubles at LSE), later ones at Claremont College in California or in Germany (see Chapter 27). Regular attenders included Haberler, Machlup and Mundell as well as Rueff and Triffin. Lionel was pleased with the first conference, as he told his sister on 21 January 1967: ‘the chief participants – Jacques Rueff, Robert Triffin, Eddie Bernstein and Otmar Emminger . . . were quite first class & their contributions on the various issues of international monetary policy absorbingly interesting. My keynote address which had taken so much time at Xmas went down quite well & I now don’t regret the expenditure, since it brought me reasonably up to date on this very difficult subject.’ He was confident enough to accept an invitation to give the opening address at the fifth Conference of University Professors sponsored by the American Bankers Association (LCR to Allan Metzler, 10 February 1967, Day Book Sep 66-Feb 67). This was to be held at Montauk Point, Long Island, New York on 5–8 September 1967, shortly before the IMF annual meeting at Rio de Janeiro which was concerned with reform of the Fund and, as it turned out, just weeks before the long-delayed devaluation of the UK pound in November. The Bretton Woods system was under strain. It was widely perceived not to be solving the problems of balance-of-payments adjustment and international liquidity it was supposed to solve, since many countries were suffering from persistent balance-of-payments problems and there was thought to be at least a potential shortage of international liquidity. Triffin had identified 3

LCR to Hinshaw, 12 September and 5 October, LCR to Cortney, 31 October 1966, Day Book Sep 66-Feb 67, RP; Hinshaw ed 1967, 143–50.

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a resulting third problem, the confidence problem, that the US would not be able to maintain the convertibility into gold of the US dollars held as international reserves if central banks tried to convert them, given the increasing US overall balance-of-payments deficit. In his opening remarks at Bologna (Hinshaw ed 1967, 7–25) Robbins first raised the possibility of using floating exchange rates to solve the adjustment problem, making clear his own doubts. Then, as ‘the one surviving member of the U.K. economic delegation’ to Bretton Woods (which was not strictly true: Redvers Opie was still alive), he discussed the extent to which the IMF had helped to solve international monetary problems since 1946. It had obviously not managed to solve the adjustment problem. Although he did not think there had yet been a shortage of liquidity (as evidenced by postwar inflation), the confidence problem was ‘potentially even more menacing’. But, as he said, ‘If we are trying to establish a perspective, I think the first thing that must be said is that they [the Bretton Woods institutions] have totally failed to prevent inflation’ – which was hardly surprising as their creators had not been thinking of inflation as a problem in 1944. ‘I remember getting up one morning at Bretton Woods to find among my papers a minute by Sir Ralph (then Mr.) Hawtrey which had been passed on to me by Keynes. I forget the exact words. . . . “What’s all this talk about the dangers of deflation?” said the writer; “Inflation, not deflation, is the postwar problem.” “Dear Lionel,” ran Keynes’s covering note, “I thought you would like to see what the old thing is saying. After all, he may be right.”’ As for solutions to the current problems, apart from the need for the UK to put its own house in order, he had mixed feelings about a rise in the price of gold, advocated by Rueff among others, which he would support only as an expedient of last resort, and he definitely opposed Rueff’s aim of returning to a gold standard, though agreeing the current version of a gold-exchange standard had outlived its usefulness. He sympathized with the Triffin aim of bringing the IMF nearer to the original Keynes conception of a world central bank rather than a fund, though he suspected this would not happen. He expected, correctly, that less ambitious ad hoc arrangements, such as the creation of a new reserve asset suggested by Bernstein and others, would be tried. In his address to the Montauk Point conference (1968b) he came to the same conclusion. The international monetary problem was ‘essentially political in nature’: political considerations would stand in the way of freely floating exchange rates, because few governments would be prepared to tolerate the exchange rate variability required; higher reserves would not eliminate the need for balance-of-payments adjustment under fixed rates; in the last analysis the only ‘ultimate solution’ was a genuine world currency

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(not gold), but as that was unlikely to happen the realistic need was for the improvement of the existing arrangements – which only required political willingness to cooperate on the part of the major countries. When Lionel wrote to his sister Caroline on 12 February 1967, telling her that he was coming over in September, he had spent the day, with Clive’s two sons and Richard, choosing pictures for a retrospective exhibition of Clive’s work at the South London Art Gallery in May, for which he was writing one of the memoirs for the catalogue (Robbins 1967b). He also reported: Since I last wrote the troubles at L.S.E. have flared up again, this time with tragic consequences. Denied by the Director – & rightly so – the use of the Theatre for yet another Stop Adams meeting [on 31 January], some of the students rioted and as they attempted to rush the hall, one of the more aged porters who had lined up with his younger colleagues had a heart attack & died. The matter is now under investigation by a Board of Discipline & many of us heartily hope that some of those responsible will be expelled. I am afraid much of the trouble is due to Caine’s weakness. He is a fundamentally decent fellow. But the Hamlet-like irresolution in a situation demanding sterner measures has given the agitators the impression that they can do just anything. Did I tell you that at least three of the central core were Americans? One of them boasted – we brought Berkeley to a standstill & we will do the same at L.S.E.

Caine had decided to ban the meeting only that afternoon, informing Marshall Bloom, the newly arrived American graduate student who had been elected chairman of the Graduate Students’ Association, one hour before it was due to take place. Caine had porters posted outside the doors of the Old Theatre and its light fuses removed. Students gathered outside in increasing numbers, including ‘moderates’ disturbed about another apparent attack on free speech. Caine tried to explain his decision but soon there was a move to get into the dark theatre. The meeting dispersed when Caine reported the porter’s collapse, many students moving to their usual refuge, the Three Tuns Bar (Dahrendorf 1995, 451–3; personal recollection). As in the Michaelmas term the authorities’ reactions led many moderate students to sympathize with the activists. The academic staff were divided. Even the three professors on the committee of enquiry into the events of 31 January, finding a prima facie case for disciplinary proceedings, were split on whether such action should be taken (Dahrendorf 1995, 453). As an observer Lionel took a hard line. His sources of information, besides the Senior Common Room, included his friend Georg Tugendhat, a governor, who had already been complaining to Lionel that the Court under Bridges was a mere rubber stamp. After a special Court meeting on 2 February Tugendhat told Lionel (Personal Correspondence 1966–70 S-Z, RP): ‘Bridges took the

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wind out of everyone’s sails by starting off with a statement that in his opinion the students had committed a very serious breach of discipline and that this state of affairs could not be allowed to continue. He announced the setting up of a disciplinary committee and hoped that its findings would be available within a fortnight. As the matter was now sub judice he could not answer any further questions . . .’ Lionel did not agree with Tugendhat’s idea of changing the method of choosing governors to serve on the Standing Committee but he agreed there should be more communication between the Standing Committee and the Court. He defended his wartime superior, who must by now be ‘very tired and exhausted’ (LCR to Tugendhat, 9 and 14 February and 29 March 1967, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 S-Z, RP). He wrote to Caine himself on 14 February that he and some of his friends were ‘bewildered’ (Day Book Sep 66-Feb 67, RP): ‘We all know that the unfortunate Ted Poole had a weak heart. But we find it extremely difficult to believe that if there had not been any student demonstration, he would not still be alive. . . . how can it be argued [as Caine had] that the individuals who organized the demonstration have no responsibility for his death?’ They certainly had a ‘very heavy moral responsibility’ in his view. In a second letter on 21 February he added: ‘All this waffle in the Common Room and elsewhere about liberty and freedom of speech is utterly beside the point. The principles of liberty and freedom of speech do not oblige corporations to allow their own buildings to be used for attempts to overturn decisions of their governing body and to upset the orderly conduct of their affairs.’ On 13 March Bridges’ board of discipline found Adelstein and Bloom, unsuccessfully defended by the Professor of English Law John Griffith, guilty of disobeying the director’s orders not to hold a meeting and of encouraging the storming of the Old Theatre and suspended them for the rest of the academic year. Lionel thought the sentence was too lenient, as he told Tugendhat on 17 March (Personal Correspondence 1966–70 S-Z, RP). The Students’ Union called a mass meeting and decided on a sit-in which lasted for eight days, until the end of term. It was peaceful and good-humoured, with those who wished to attend lectures stepping around or over their friends who were sitting in. Robbins of course continued to lecture on the history of economic thought. (But I do not remember the occasion of which he recalled (1980b, 53) that he took a vote on whether to continue his lecture on Ricardo’s theory of profit.) He was severely critical of the authorities’ next step: on 17 March the Standing Committee, hearing an appeal on behalf of Adelstein and Bloom, dropped the charge of ‘encouragement’ and allowed them some earlier access to the School. He

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told Tugendhat in his letter that day: ‘I am afraid those responsible at the School have made every conceivable error; the picture on the front of The Times of Sydney arguing in a futile way with the rebels is symbolic of the whole business, which from beginning to end shows a complete incapacity to know when to relax and when to be firm. There is a line which Matthew Arnold said which has continually come into my head this week: “You would have all things well, yet will use no harsh means”.’ He told his sister on 26 March: ‘My private view is that students who boycott lectures & interfere with the business of the School should not be allowed to sit their finals. That would speedily bring about a change of attitude. But this is thought to be being beastly. Meanwhile a good deal of the future depends upon Walter’s willingness to stand up to this kind of music.’ Adams was to prove a bitter disappointment. Although Lionel was remarkably unthinking about the probable counterproductive consequences of harsh action by the School’s authorities, he was more perceptive than many commentators about the concerns of the LSE student body. As he told his sister on 26 March, ‘It is to get out of all proportion to put it down to poor accommodation, bad staff student relationships as has been done by some of the papers’, so he told Eddie Playfair on 23 March (Personal Correspondence 1966–70 M-R, RP): What has happened is essentially a dispute about the appointment of a Director. . . . There is no real reason to believe that in general staff-student relationships, although leaving much to be desired, are any worse than in other university institutions in this country; indeed, in many respects, I would say they were better. There is, of course, student unrest in the air all through the English-speaking world; but it is to see the fly on the barn door and not the barn door itself to dissociate these manifestations at L.S.E. from the specific dispute about the Directorship.

Another issue of concern to LSE students was the Labour government’s proposal to raise the fees for overseas students at UK universities. (Some 20 per cent of LSE students came from abroad.) Here Lionel was on the same side as the students though not for their reasons. He had no objection to an increase in student fees in general – indeed he argued strongly for it in the Higher Education Committee in order to reduce the direct government subsidy to universities and colleges and the implicit subsidy to overseas students – as long as an increase did not discriminate against foreigners. The current proposal was ‘detestable’ because ‘it is an overt slap in the face of the foreigner’ (LCR to Lord Gladwyn, 10 February 1967, Day Book Sep 66-Feb 67, RP). When he spoke in the Lords debate on 14 February, he had, he told his sister on 18 February, ‘much fun attacking the government

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on a measure on which they were being attacked by many of their own backbenchers’. Before the Summer term began Adelstein and Bloom signed a statement that they would ‘work . . . with the School authorities through constitutional processes’ and the governors lifted their suspension. Lionel did not approve (LCR to Stephanie Smellie, 1 May 1967, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 S-Z, RP): ‘If it were not for the fact that Adams, who is the only person entitled to talk without reluctance about clemency, had been on the spot, I should regard it as a sort of academic Munich.’ But Adams had been in London and had apparently been consulted. Lionel told Alec Spearman on 27 April (Personal Correspondence 1966–70 S-Z, RP) that Adams had ‘made a very good impression’ on the governors and members of the academic staff he had met soon after his arrival. Lionel had greeted him by inviting him and his wife to come, with Iris and the Phelps Browns in the Royal Box, to the Luchino Visconti production of La Traviata with Mirella Freni at Covent Garden (LCR to Adams, 19 April 1967, Adams 9/36). As he told Spearman, ‘It was the first time we had met for many years but both of us were enormously impressed with his charm, his quiet reserve and the strong sense of purpose and knowledge of his own mind which even five minutes in his company conveys. If only he could take over this term – ’ In the summer Iris and Lionel went to Italy again, to Venice and for a walking holiday in the Dolomites (LCR to ICR, 18 August 1967). When Lionel then went to the Montauk Point conference Iris, disliking the heat of the eastern seaboard, did not accompany him; after the conference he travelled to Princeton to see the Viners (LCR to Frances Viner, 26 July 1967, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 S-Z, RP). But first he visited Caroline and Joe, now in an apartment near Bryn Mawr because of Joe’s rapidly declining health: Joe had had several heart attacks and was now an invalid. As Lionel suspected it might be, it was the last time he saw Joe, who died in December. Lionel thought of him (LCR to ICR, 14 January 1968) ‘in his prime, the dark pillar not yet turned, as we saw him first; striding the sands at Boscastle or presiding at Ithan feasts with Rabelasian jests and vast Johnsonian exaggerations, the life and soul of the party’. Lionel’s main intellectual work in 1967 was the revision of his Chichele Lectures. When he first wrote them he thought the four lectures – ‘(a) a general view, (b) the history of population theory, (3) the history of the theory of accumulation & (4) the history of the theory of organization’ – were ‘not perfectly balanced, as there ought to be another lecture on Education & Invention & perhaps another on money’. He worked on the two new chapters

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and a concluding chapter on the desirability of economic development in the Easter and Summer vacations and completed the revision at Christmas (LCR to ICR, 26 September 1966, 13 March and 24 September 1967, 14 January 1968). The resulting book, The Theory of Economic Development in the History of Economic Thought (1968a), a broad historical survey with considerable emphasis on (and quotation from) A. Smith and J.S. Mill, is not his best. The FT reviewer commented on 24 October 1968, ‘The first [aim] is to show that the economists working between 1730 and 1900 had interesting things to say about specific causes of growth; this he does convincingly. The other [aim] is to suggest that their remarks are unified, relevant to-day and would repay careful study by statesmen and economists; here he is not so convincing.’ The Economica reviewer (Youngson 1969), who criticized it for omissions of topics or persons, would have liked it to be longer. Other economists were frankly disappointed, including one of his former graduate students (Maclennan 1969): as the EJ reviewer (Coats 1969) put it, ‘Readers of his earlier works will encounter few surprises, and the text lacks the constructive polemical force of his classic Theory of Economi Policy.’ The publication had been a trial. On 29 March 1968 Tim Farmiloe of Macmillan admitted there were delays in getting to the proof stage due to the time copyediting had taken, partly because of the need to correct mistakes in the quotations. When Farmiloe sent specimen page proofs, Lionel was alarmed. He told Farmiloe on 18 April that having been told that a substantial amount of editorial work had been done on the manuscript he ‘look[ed] forward with dismay’ to the rest of the proofs, and warned him on 26 April that he might not be able to keep to the deadline for their return and for the index if ‘I have to perform the distasteful task of ploughing through the text and weighing in regard to sentence after sentence the question whether your – or your assistant’s – conception of what is decent English does or does not express my thought better than my own’. When the proofs arrived his worst fears were realized. His angry letters led Farmiloe to hand responsibility for seeing the book through the press to his predecessor, Rex Allen. Lionel, greatly relieved, made the effort to meet the deadline. This was not the end of his troubles: finding printing errors when he received his advance copy of the book, he declined the suggestion of a celebratory luncheon on publication day. He was further annoyed when complimentary copies to friends went astray, the US publication was delayed until the end of the year, and by February 1969 there had been only three short reviews.4 4

The correspondence with Farmiloe and Allen is in Theory of Econ Development, RP.

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In the 1967/8 academic year LSE was relatively quiet. Most of its members were more preoccupied with political events outside the School and indeed outside Britain. There was a Machinery of Government Committee, set up following the special Court meeting on 2 February 1967, whose proceedings Tugendhat reported to Lionel. The committee’s report in February 1968 appeared with three notes of reservation, a note of dissent and a minority report, twice as long as the twenty-five-page majority report, advocating ‘parity’ of staff and students. It ‘sank almost without trace’ (Dahrendorf 1995, 440). Lionel had earlier commented to Tugendhat on 20 September 1967 (Court Correspondence up to 1970, RP) that a possible line of action ‘might be just to offer the students a couple of representatives on the Court of Governors – not the Standing Committee – and to leave them to take that or get nothing. I don’t believe that their representatives would add anything positive to the proceedings of the Court but I cannot believe that they would do any harm.’ Lionel’s involvement in School business was limited. In December 1966 Caine asked him to join a special committee to consider the prospects of raising money to purchase Strand House, a building adjacent to LSE owned and used by the booksellers W.H. Smith & Son Ltd as their headquarters and warehouse. It would be ideal for the badly overcrowded BLPES and Caine had known for some time that Smiths were thinking of moving: when Garrett Drogheda became a governor in 1963 Caine asked him to let his friend David Smith know that LSE might be interested in the building (Caine to Kidd, 12 December 1963, LSE CF442/52/4A). Three years later it looked very unlikely that the School would be able to purchase the building – the UGC had refused to help – but then, as the School’s secretary Harry Kidd reported to Smith’s estate manager on 15 December 1966 (LSE CF442/52/4C), ‘the patient being reported to be at death’s door, sundry powerful friends and acquaintances have shown signs of rallying round at the last moment . . . [and] a determined effort is, after all, going to be made.’ In February 1967 the Principal of the University (Douglas Logan) persuaded the UGC that if LSE found the money to buy the site the University could use UGC money to cover the cost of the building and its conversion. Caine thought the special committee should start meeting in case Smith decided to offer the building to LSE. ‘Needless to say’ Lionel was willing to serve (Caine to LCR, 1 March, LCR to Caine, 3 March 1967, Library – Strand House 67–70, RP). Robbins was to be heavily involved in raising the funds but not quite yet. In April the special committee, chaired by Harmer as vice-chairman of the governors, decided it should ask how long the UGC would allow LSE to find

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out whether it could raise the funds for the site and also more on Smith’s intentions. In June and July Caine reported that the UGC had agreed to an extension of the time limit and that Smiths had decided to dispose of the building in 1972 and were prepared to sell it to LSE at a price equal to its value in five years’ time. The committee agreed that the director would arrange for LSE representatives to visit the United States during the vacation to talk to foundations and other possible donors; Lionel offered to consult Viner in Princeton about possible donors (Minutes of Special Committee to consider the Library Problem 27 April, 12 June and 31 July 1967, Adams 8/7). He also met David Smith when Smith lunched at the FT in July (LCR to Adams, 24 July 1967, Library – Strand House 67–70, RP). On one of Robbins’s regular business visits to Edinburgh in late 1966 Keith Murray asked to see him. He agreed, ‘expecting some consultation on general university matters’, but when he arrived he found Murray with William Macfarlane Gray, formerly Provost of the Royal Burgh of Stirling. They asked him if he would be willing to become the first Chancellor of the new University of Stirling. He was so surprised, not having any Scottish ancestry, that he asked for time to consider before he agreed in December.5 He paid his first visit to Stirling in February 1967. He thought its site was ‘the loveliest site [for a university] of anywhere in the world except Vancouver’ and was equally impressed by the academic plans of the Principal, Tom Cottrell, for what would be the first new university founded in Scotland since 1583. The great hall of Stirling Castle (fifteenth century) would be used for ceremonials (LCR to ICR, 12 February 1967). He later admitted to mixed feelings (Stirling Graduation Ceremony June 1978, Stirling Addresses, RP): ‘I was overcome by the beauty of the setting – the hills behind, the loch in the centre, the Wallace Memorial on the left and the Castle and the ancient capital to the south. . . . But the first piles of the Pathfoot Building were being dug. There was much mud about. It was very messy: and as I looked around, I could not repress the thought “can it be that I have become Chancellor of a University which is going to ruin this marvellous landscape[?]”’ That building later won an architectural award; the whole is ‘a beautifully landscaped rural campus’ on the edges of Airthrey Loch and several of the later buildings ‘attain a measure of architectural quality’ (Gifford and Walker 2002, 789–91). 5

LCR, Stirling Graduation Ceremony June 1978, Stirling Addresses, RP; The Times, 30 December 1966. It was not the first such invitation. Asked to become the first Chancellor of Brunel University in 1964, he had refused on the ground that he was involved in the creation of the University of York: LCR to Topping, 15 December 1964, General Correspondence July 1964–, RP.

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Lionel used his monthly visits to Edinburgh for frequent discussions with Cottrell and with the Secretary, Harry Donnelly, whom he knew from the Committee on Higher Education when Donnelly was the assessor from the Scottish Office. But he was quite clear, as he told Donnelly on 5 January 1967 (Day Book Sep 66-Feb 67, RP), that the Chancellor’s role was only ‘the performance of certain ceremonial duties and availability for consultation. . . . Most of the chaps who rang me up [when the appointment was announced] seemed to think that I should have in my head some vast scheme which I should proceed to propound, not only to you [Donnelly] and the University, but to the world at large. But in vain is the net spread in front of the knowing bird.’ His first ceremonial duty, his own installation on 5 April 1968, ‘involved 36 hours of nonstop activity – two speeches – one a set address lasting an hour – a luncheon with handshaking for some two hundred guests & a ceremonial dinner & a church service’ (LCR to ICR, 7 April 1968). His inaugural address, ‘in the XIXth C. long winded Scottish tradition’ (as he described it to Caroline on 15 October 1967), expatiated appropriately on his ‘quite special debt to Scottish intellectual influences [Hume and Smith] and a quite special admiration for the Scottish University tradition, both for its achievements and for [its] educational principles’. For the next ten years he presided over the annual graduation ceremonies giving a (short) address each time. At the first, held in December 1968 to award master’s degrees, he received an honorary doctorate.6 The University of Strathclyde, the former Royal College of Science and Technology in Glasgow whose transformation into a university had been recommended by the Higher Education Committee, had awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1966. In 1967 he received three honorary degrees: Heriot-Watt and Sheffield in July and the Royal College of Art in November, when the college celebrated its acquisition of university status – as recommended in the Robbins Report – and installed Colin Anderson as its first Provost.7 On 30 November Harold Wilson wrote to tell him he was submitting a recommendation to HM The Queen that Lionel be appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in the New Year Honours list (Special Letters, RP). The CH is a most distinguished honour; Lionel’s friends were especially pleased he should be given it for his services to the arts and to learning (Letters of Congratulation, RP). The investiture took place at a private audience with Her Majesty on 29 February 1968 6 7

There are printed or typed copies of his addresses in Stirling Addresses, RP. Tss Response on behalf of the honorary graduands Strathclyde – April 1966, and University of Sheffield Degree Congregation, 15th July 1967, Speech by Lord Robbins, ms notes Heriot Watt, University & School Occasions etc; LCR to Raymond Smart, Vice-Principal, HeriotWatt, 27 January 1967, Day Book Sep 66-Feb 67, RP; The Times, 3 November 1967.

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(Philip Moore to LCR, 25 January, LCR to Moore, 26 January 1968, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 M-R, RP). An unexpected invitation in September 1967 was to speak at Reed College in Oregon the following March. Lionel was tempted as he had never been to that part of the United States (LCR to ICR, 24 September 1967). He consulted Viner, who encouraged him to go but warned him on 26 November that the College’s arrangements might be rather casual (Personal Correspondence 1966–70 S-Z, RP). When he arrived, after visiting Caroline and the Viners, he found the conference ‘a strange business’: expecting a small seminar, he was startled, as he told Caroline on 31 March, to find an audience of 800 people. He had been asked to speak on ‘student revolt & all that’ in a symposium on ‘Individuality and the New Society’. With papers by a psychologist, two economists (Robbins and Friedman), the political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset and a biologist, even the editor of the proceedings, Abraham Kaplan, had difficulty in relating them to one another. The participants had been ‘invited less on the basis of their academic disciplines than because they were seminal thinkers who had already offered thoughtful formulations and appraisals of the basic issues concerned with the future of the individual’, in Lionel’s case the Robbins Report (Kaplan ed 1970, x). To his sister he commended only Friedman’s paper, ‘The market versus the bureaucrat’, and that by the psychologist, Kenneth Keniston, on ‘Dissenting youth and the new society’. His own paper (1970a) is of some interest in the context of the trouble at LSE, though he had nothing profound to say. It had two contradictory strands, as his sociologist colleague Tom Marshall pointed out when he read it in February 1969 (‘Thoughts provoked by your speech at Portland, Oregon’, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 M-R, RP): youthful alienation and revolt were not novel, as he knew from his own socialist youth (and the prospects of student power now were as unrealistic as other forms of syndicalism he had been tempted by then); the current student unrest was unprecedented in focussing on universities. Looking for reasons for the latter he thought it might be due to the size of universities or to the attitude of their faculty in putting research above teaching. Insofar as it went beyond students he was inclined to think it was their observation of the twentieth-century world – a view he still held years later (1980b, 60–3). The external events which formed the background to the 1967/8 academic year were dramatic. At home the Labour government’s measures to deal with the balance-of-payments crisis in July 1966 had held the line for a year. Thereafter sterling began to weaken and devaluation once more to be openly discussed. The six-day war between Israel and Egypt in June and the closing of the Suez Canal did not help, nor a dock strike which began in September. Devaluation (to US $2.40) was announced on Saturday

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18 November. When Robbins spoke in the House of Lords on 21 November, his opening words echoed his ‘Inquest on the Crisis’ in 1947 (see Chapter 18). Britain had ‘suffered a great setback’ and ‘a deep humiliation’ in letting down its creditors. But he did not blame it on the Labour government, which had inherited a bad situation and made brave efforts to make it better. The Chancellor, in particular, had ‘defended an unpopular policy with great courage’ and need not resign. The devaluation was inevitable and also large enough that it should do the trick and restore external balance, as long, of course, as inflation was avoided at home. The government would certainly be to blame if in future it did not reduce public expenditure and control the money supply (HLDebs vol 286 cols 970–4). For a while he doubted the government would be firm enough, especially when Roy Jenkins replaced Callaghan as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Jenkins turned out to be remarkably tough – imposing swingeing public expenditure cuts in January and a formidable deflationary budget in April 1968 – as Robbins acknowledged on 10 April (HLDebs vol 291 col 395–404). Lionel continued to think little of the Conservatives: instead of accepting any responsibility for the state of the economy they simply ‘resort to mere abuse’. When Enoch Powell made his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in Birmingham on 20 April calling for the repatriation of black and other Commonwealth immigrants, the political scene reached a state of ‘unmitigated squalor’ (LCR to ICR, 10 December 1967 and 1 May 1968). In the United States reaction against involvement in the Vietnam War was reaching its height. President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not stand for reelection. In France political conflict against President de Gaulle led to strikes, riots and student revolts, the events of May 1968. With these events, Lionel told Caroline on May 27, Attention here has shifted from domestic affairs to the goings on in France. A good deal of suppressed schadenfreude. I personally think the students in continental universities have real grievances as compared with their counterparts in the English speaking world. But I don’t approve of smashing windows and burning stock exchanges. At the same time, it seems to me the authorities have handled things about as badly as they could. You should always play student disorder very long and only call in the police and the military when you know exactly what you want to do and how to do it, which was palpably not the case in this instance.

In November 1967 Bridges informed the governors that he wished to resign as chairman before the end of 1968. Harmer also wished to give up the vice-chairmanship ‘as soon as reasonably possible’ (Agenda for Standing Committee 14 November 1967). The selection committee for a new

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chairman, appointed by the Court on 7 December, comprised the chairman and the vice-chairman of the governors, the vice-chairman of the Academic Board, six governors appointed by the Court and five professorial members of the Academic Board. The Students’ Union objected: the Academic Board discussed their motions on 7 February 1968 and eventually agreed to tell the Union that the committee constituted by the Court could not be changed. Some of the governors on the committee, notably Drogheda, thought Bridges’ successor should be a particularly strong and forceful chairman. Ben Roberts, who was a member of the selection committee, recalled that one day he was contacted by Drogheda’s secretary and told that Drogheda was anxious to see him about something important. When he saw him, at Drogheda’s house that evening, he was told: ‘We’ve got to make Lionel Chairman of the Court.’ Roberts warned Drogheda it would not be easy. ‘“He polarises opinion, especially the leftwing element who are absolutely determined and totally ruthless.” “You’ve got to persuade enough people in the School,” Drogheda replied, “I’ll deal with the Governors.” I said, “OK”, though I was doubtful whether I could overcome the opposition who regarded him as too domineering and too committed. Others like me thought he was just the man for the time.’ On 28 May 1968 Bridges reported to the Standing Committee that the selection committee had met twice, at the second meeting agreeing ‘to recommend a person for election for an initial period of three years’. At the next Court meeting on 13 June Robbins was elected to the Court and appointed chairman from 1 October 1968. In his replies to the many letters of support from his friends, colleagues and former students he emphasized he had taken on the job only out of a sense of duty. It was ‘one of the few things I have chosen in my life without any prospect of enjoyment whatever’; ‘only a very strong sense that by sheer accident I was probably the appropriate victim led me to accept’; had it happened before the student troubles it ‘would have given me a great deal of private enjoyment [but] as it is, I can only think of it in terms of blood, sweat and tears’; and he had ‘never taken anything on which caused me more apprehension. The trouble about the student problem is not really the handling of the majority of students, who perhaps even more than earlier generations are decent, friendly, seriousminded people. It is rather the extreme difficulty of discovering the middle path of policy in dealing with the intransigent few without compromising the essential liberties of our essentially liberal – in the non party sense – institution.’8 8

Letters to John Watkins, 18 June, G.L. Mehta, 2 July, Sydney Caine, 18 June, and Lady Birk, 18 June 1968, Personal Correspondence 1966–70, RP.

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Before he took up his duties the summer of 1968 was very social and enjoyable. Caroline came over in June and Lionel and Iris threw several parties for her. After she left they went to the Aldeburgh Festival with the Harmers, and then it was ‘official or private parties almost every night – a river picnic & another visit to Don Carlos [which they had seen with the Machlups and with Caroline in June]; . . . Cosi at C.G. . . . dinner with friends’. Two weeks later it was still ‘the time of visiting tourists & what with entertaining friends and giving parties to people who have given parties to us there has scarcely been an evening free’. There was a holiday with Iris in the Dolomites in August, which began, as had an earlier trip to Florence, Ravenna and Milan in May, with another lecture at the Johns Hopkins Bologna Center (LCR to ICR, 27 May, 13 and 27 July 1968). In the Lords there were debates on student unrest, finance and the Fulton Report on the civil service. He spoke in the second reading debate of the Finance bill: ‘in broad sympathy’ with the aims and methods of the Chancellor to curtail consumption, he thought the government (and earlier governments) had not done enough to encourage saving and recommended ‘an excellent book by a Mr Nicholas Kaldor’ (An Expenditure Tax) (HLDebs vol 295 cols 348–54). He was severely critical of the Fulton Report, which characterized the civil service as e´ litist and dilettante, unduly dominated by Oxford and Cambridge graduates and still based on ‘the philosophy of the amateur’ especially in the Administrative Class (the highest grade) (Hennessy 1988, 195). The debate on 24 July focussed on the charge of amateurism. Lionel thought it was ‘one of the best debates for a long time with three splendid maiden speeches from ex public servants [Baroness Sharp, Lord Helsby and Lord Redcliffe-Maud (Lionel’s old ally, John Maud)] . . . my own contribution [HLDebs vol 295 cols 1129–35] will lose me some friends among the authors of the report. . . . But someone had to say how bad it was; and my friends in the public service, at least, seem to have been pleased.’ Frank Lee, who had been ‘profoundly miserable about the report’, thanked him on 29 July for ‘the splendid and scornful words in which you dealt with Chapter I of the report and for the tribute which you paid to the “amateurs”’ (Special Letters, RP). But he did not speak in the student debate. He had decided he had better make no public pronouncements on such matters while he was chairman of the LSE governors. So, on 19 June, ‘I sat through a most ill-informed debate . . . relieved only by a splendid speech by Eric James. I was longing to get up and speak but . . . I sat glued to my seat.’ (James argued [HLDebs vol 293 cols 747–56] that the older generation should not overreact, must ‘keep our nerve’ and retain liberal principles of rational criticism and free discussion.) He told Toby Weaver of the DES he would

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have liked to say something on the lines of his speech at Reed College which he had written before the troubles in France (LCR to Sir Charles Wilson, 1 July, LCR to Weaver, 21 June 1968, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 S-Z, RP). He also began to put together a collection of his various papers in the history of economic thought. He wrote a long introductory paper, which was to give the collection its title, The Evolution of Economic Theory, based on a lecture to a group of Russian economists visiting LSE in 1960 ‘trying to show how Economics as taught in the West can be viewed as a series of modifications of the Ricardian system’. He included his articles, reviews or talks on Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis, Bentham, Malthus, Mill, Jevons, Wicksell, Henry Clay’s biography of Montagu Norman, Harrod’s biography of Keynes and Robertson’s Lectures on Economic Principles, as well as his introductions to editions of Torrens’s Letters on Commercial Policy, Mill, Wicksell and Wicksteed and his DNB entry on Edwin Cannan. The Malthus piece opened the discussion of James Meade’s presidential address to the Royal Economic Society in 1966, the centenary of Malthus’s birth. Montagu Norman was ‘never one of my heroes’ and he was not convinced by Clay’s explanations of Norman’s actions as Governor of the Bank of England (1920–44). The resulting volume (1970b) is a useful contribution to the history of economics which has lasted better than his Theory of Economic Development. The first Standing Committee meeting chaired by Robbins took place on 1 October. Harmer had agreed to remain vice-chairman for the time being. The other members, besides the director and the pro-director, Harold Edey, were five lay governors and three academic governors (Bernard Donoughue, Maurice Freedman and Ben Roberts).9 On 3 December the committee agreed, as did the Court on 12 December, that all five academic governors should be members of the Standing Committee: Arthur John and Basil Yamey joined the committee in January. Robbins began his first meeting by reporting on the possible acquisition of Strand House. The story of his own activities on behalf of the new library can be picked where it was left off in the summer of 1967. He had talked to Viner, who 9

The lay governors were Maurice Allen, Lesley Farrer-Brown who had been director of the Nuffield Foundation for many years, Morris Finer QC, Dame Mary Green the headmistress of Kidbrooke School, Frederick Seebohm a director of Barclays Bank and chairman of the Rowntree Memorial Trust. Two members had just retired and were replaced in November by Roland Freeman of the GLC and Sir Richard Powell, about to retire as Permanent Secretary of the Board of Trade. Finer and Freeman had been presidents of the Students’ Union in their time at LSE.

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had warned him that US foundations tended not to be enthusiastic about supporting libraries and suggested instead enlisting the help of influential American individuals who could locate potential donors, for instance former LSE students William Baumol and David Rockefeller and Carl Kaysen, head of the Institute of Advanced Study. In the UK Lionel talked to Isaiah Berlin, who recommended an American committee of suitable alumni and friends of the School which could approach foundations and other donors on its behalf (LCR to Caine, Adams and Harmer, 12 September 1967, LCR to Adams, 9 February 1968, Preliminary Correspondence Library American Appeal Sep 67-Dec 70, RP). In May Adams had seen Kaysen and Baumol in the States; before he went he asked Lionel if he would prepare the first draft of a document defining the ‘philosophy’ behind an appeal for funds, in other words the international importance of the British Library of Political and Economic Science. On 20 September Lionel sent his draft, which ended with the idea of forming an American Friends of LSE, to Baumol (Preliminary Correspondence Library American Appeal Sep 67-Dec 70, RP): ‘What do you think of this? . . . I find the shadow over that splendid institution [LSE] long and disquieting. Part of this clearly springs from the late troubles, now I hope resolving themselves; but part of it is due to the feeling of helplessness in regard to the [physical] congestion. . . . I can think of no single event which would do more to restore hope and morale than to get under way some scheme for saving the position of the Library.’ There had been further conversations with David Smith, who had suggested a two-stage arrangement on the price – agreement on a minimum price (the current value of the property) now and on the actual price at the time of purchase – and given the School three months to consider this. But as Adams and Robbins explained to Smith on 10 October the School had not been able to respond in that time, for several reasons: ‘L.S.E. had to approach U.G.C. through [the] University Court; absence overseas of the Principal of the University, and for a time of the Chairman of U.G.C.; U.G.C.’s refusal to instruct District Valuer to act until he could be authorized to negotiate a sale price, not an estimate; climate unfavourable to an appeal in the U.K. for funds; etc’ (Adams to LCR, 16 February, LCR to Drogheda, 27 February 1968, and Adams note of meeting with Smith, Library – Strand House 67–70, RP). Adams and Robbins had seen representatives of the Ford Foundation, with equally inconclusive results. But they had learned from Logan that the University Court had committed the university to paying the cost of the building if and when the School was able to raise sufficient funds for the purchase of the site. The October 1 Standing Committee meeting agreed to go ahead with forming an American Friends of LSE and to begin planning

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for an appeal in the UK. Lionel contacted Baumol the next day (Preliminary Correspondence Library American Appeal Sep 67-Dec 70, RP). Adams and Robbins saw Smith again, when Smith agreed to an extension of the time limit to 1 April 1969 (note by Adams and Smith to Adams, 29 October 1968, Library – Strand House 67–70, RP). Will and Hilda Baumol subsequently came over for a fortnight in January to help with the setting up of the American Friends of LSE, David Rockefeller having declined to chair it because he was about to become chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank. From the outset Lionel intended to be an active chairman of the governors and to increase the participation of outside governors. In preparation for a special meeting of the Court on 31 October he wrote to several possible new governors asking them to serve (Court Correspondence up to 1970, RP) as well as a lengthy memorandum about the library. But already he was confronted with a crisis. On Sunday 27 October there was a major demonstration in London against the Vietnam War. On Friday 17 October the LSE Students’ Union passed a motion, originating from an ‘Ad Hoc Committee to Occupy LSE in support of the 27 October Vietnam Demonstration’, that the School’s premises should be made available over the weekend of the demonstration for use for ‘sanctuary, medical aid and political discussion’ by some of the thousands of demonstrators expected from all over the country (Hoch and Schoenbach 1969, 10–11). From what he wrote to his sister on 19 October Lionel obviously expected he and Adams would act tough: ‘There is a monster demonstration next weekend, organized by the anarchists & nihilists, ostensibly to protest about Vietnam, but in fact to create the maximum disturbance compatible with the safety of their own skins & the Students Union at L.S.E., at present dominated by a minority of pure wreckers has passed a resolution of intention to seize the building next weekend & make it a sanctuary (for those fleeing from justice) & a medical clearing station. This of course is intended as a challenge to the governing body & in the next few days we shall have to decide what to do.’ A special Standing Committee meeting was called for Tuesday 22 October, when the director asked for authority to close the School in certain circumstances. The committee gave him the authority. It also decided that unless another Union meeting the next day overturned the 17 October resolution, it would issue a public statement announcing that the School would be closed over the weekend. Adams told the committee that his present intention was to close Connaught House, which housed the School’s administrative offices, on Friday evening and the rest of the School on Saturday evening. Robbins expected Adams to take charge: the Standing Committee agreed

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that ‘the Director would be the focus of contact with the press, radio and television and all other members of the Committee agreed not to make statements to the press, etc. The Director would establish a command post over the weekend to keep in touch with developments and would ensure that it was appropriately manned.’ The President of the Students’ Union was at that time Colin Crouch, a ‘moderate’ in LSE student terms. He opposed the weekend occupation at the Union meeting on 23 October, which was chaired by the economics lecturer Meghnad Desai, honorary president of the Union. Adams cancelled classes to ensure the meeting was well attended, which it was. The Old Theatre was packed to capacity. Almost half the student body turned out, including many who rarely bothered to attend Union meetings. After three hours of debate there was a vote. Dahrendorf (1995, 461) described the result succinctly: ‘Like others of its kind, the meeting ended in confusion. A majority of sixty overturned the earlier decision; when . . . Desai . . . ordered a recount, there was still a majority of six against action; but the pandemonium over a second recount led to a statement by the Union President that, if action was taken, the Students’ Union would be neutral, that is it would neither authorize nor condemn the action.’ The next day Adams posted a notice, which included: ‘The Governors and I cannot . . . acquiesce in an unauthorised occupation of the buildings which would put in jeopardy the School’s property, reputation and ability to fulfil its fundamental academic purpose.’ He therefore intended to close the School from 6 p.m. on Saturday to Monday morning and the academic staff would not be allowed access. Crouch (1970, 75) recalled: ‘The effect of this on the student body and a good number of the staff was extraordinary. People who previously had opposed the occupation now supported it for no other reason than that the Governors had intervened. It is difficult to conceive of a worse position for an authority than that wherein its actions against a particular group turn that group’s former opponents into its allies.’ Crouch’s remark may be something of an overstatement, but there was suspicion as to just who was running the School. As for the occupation, Soc Soc students stayed in the School that night (Thursday) to make sure it would be open in the morning. According to Ben Roberts, Adams conferred with him and Harold Edey that evening, but could not make up his mind. When morning came Adams himself with two professors (Roberts and Edey) attempted to close the front entrance of the School; the students inside let others in by a back door. The occupation lasted until Sunday evening, when its organizers made sure the buildings were thoroughly cleaned (Hoch and Schoenbach 1969, 17–24).

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On the Sunday evening Alan Day, vice-chairman of the Academic Board and a member of the GPC, talked to Lionel. He let him know that among the academic staff there was criticism of the authorities’ response to the threat of occupation: some criticized the closure of the School, others that it had not been done earlier to forestall an occupation. More worryingly, there was criticism of the absence of consultation. Lionel defended Adams in writing to Day the next day that he had consulted the academic members of the Standing Committee. When Day polled a number of his colleagues a couple of days later he found that most of those he talked to thought the action taken by the director had been ‘broadly correct’, though some had doubts about the timing, but on the matter of consultation there was ‘quite a strong feeling’ there could have been more (Letters (Internal) 68–9, RP). When the Court met on 31 October the first item on the agenda was Adams’s report on the weekend events, but he and Lionel answered the resulting questions. They noted that some junior members of staff had supported the students, that both graduate and undergraduate students took part in the ‘occupation’, that some students and staff suggested a compromise that part of the buildings should be opened over the weekend for purposes of discussion but Adams had rejected this, and that ‘As a result of these events, the School was taking further steps to make its buildings more secure’ and setting up a ‘Contingencies Committee’. Robbins then spoke. He was ‘convinced that the Court ought to make a clear statement’: it should ‘emphatically condemn the “occupation”’, ‘affirm its unreserved support for the Director’, clarify ‘what action was proper for members of a university institution in these circumstances’ and warn staff who had supported the students that ‘similar action in the future could be regarded as grounds for termination of contract’. He produced the draft statement he had already prepared and, with several amendments, it was issued to the press immediately after the meeting. One member of the Court, Tom Marshall, said that if a vote were taken on the statement he would abstain. It is a good thing Lionel’s first draft was not issued. As it was, the watered down version did not go down well. It concluded: We have considered the position of certain junior members of staff who are alleged to have encouraged and participated in the unauthorised occupation. On this occasion, having regard to the immaturity of those concerned, we take the view that the process whereby staff in clear breach of contract can be dismissed need not be invoked. But we declare that any future attempt on the part of members of staff, senior or junior, to encourage or participate in action on the part of students likely to endanger the integrity and orderly conduct of the School could be regarded as misconduct warranting the termination of contract.

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As Hoch and Schoenbach put it (1969, 26–7), ‘Moderates naturally started screaming about “academic freedom”. . . . The Union passed a blistering motion censuring not only the Governors, but Union Council as well. . . . The Council promptly resigned, producing a lengthy election charade which took the Soc Soc “revolutionaries” out of action for an entire month.’ In their resignation statement Crouch and his colleagues noted that the Socialist Society had ‘ensured that to all intents and purposes an L.S.E. student is to the world at large one of their supporters’ and that by staying in office they would perpetuate this myth, but ‘on the other side the Court of Governors has, by its statement last week, posed a similar threat to the wellbeing of L.S.E. Like the Students’ Union, they react to events with anger and hysteria. Their dark warnings are couched in such vague words as to mean almost anything.’ This time Lionel drafted a much more conciliatory statement which was issued by the Standing Committee on 7 November. (He also wrote a ‘Draft of a possible statement by me’, defending the governors’ stand, but he thought better of making it.)10 On 4 November Alan Day informed Lionel that there was considerable concern about the statement centring on the word ‘encourage’ in the final paragraph. He thought many of his colleagues, perhaps even the majority, would support a resolution condemning this as unclear and capable of being interpreted as an attack on freedom of speech. He urged Lionel to issue a clarification. Lionel did so only by telling Day the same day that he could show his reply to ‘any of our colleagues who you think to be in need of these elucidations’. The reply was vigorous – and not entirely reassuring to those most concerned. ‘Let me say with all the emphasis I can command that the Governors are not hostile to academic freedom. On the contrary, they are proud of the tradition of the School which has upheld such freedom from its inception, and they intend to maintain it. . . . I confess I myself see no sinister double entendre in the last paragraph of my statement. But if it will dispel misunderstandings, I would like to say explicitly that the word “encourage” in this context means direct and public encouragement of action likely to endanger the integrity and orderly conduct of the School, either when such action is taking place or as a direct preliminary to such action.’ He referred any sceptical readers to the Robbins Report: ‘I have not changed my attitude one iota since that day; if anybody had asked me at 10

LCR’s drafts and the final versions of the 31 October and 7 November 1968 statements and Crouch and his colleagues’ resignation statement of 4 November are in Statements & Drafts 68–69, RP.

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that time whether the concept of academic freedom involved freedom to organise active revolt or riot against the rules and regulations of a university institution, I should have affirmed as firmly as I do now that such action does not come within my definition.’ His letter was circulated to all LSE academic staff (Letters (Internal) 68–69, RP). Lionel admitted to the Court on 12 December that its 31 October statement had had ‘a varied reception’. On 13 November he had received a statement deploring it, forwarded by David Glass (Sociology) and John Griffith, signed by seventy-seven members of the staff including three other professors of law or sociology. Lionel told Glass and Wedderburn (law) that he did not understand their position. He told another colleague he thought Griffith’s behaviour had ‘certainly not been helpful’ (Letters (Internal) 68–69, RP). A few days later a letter from 159 other members of staff had supported the authorities’ actions. Lionel was unrepentant, as he had told his sister on 10 November. Things have developed at L.S.E. as I feared . . . the extremist group occupied the building & used it as a sanctuary & a dressing station during the great anti Vietnam demonstration despite an explicit prohibition by the Director acting on behalf of the governing body. Since the G. Body having endorsed the Director’s action & having declared its intention of severe punitive action if any such thing is attempted in the future, the School itself has been torn asunder by a rift between loyalists & rebels on the staff. It is all very unpleasant. But so far I haven’t any regrets. The G.B.’s declaration has saved us in the eyes of the outside world & the internal struggle had to come sooner or later. The expectation is that the extremist group will attempt another coup in the fairly near future: & it may be that the School will have to be closed for a time. Such is the muddlement of minds, I am sure that any disciplinary action will arouse widespread resistance & confusion. . . . But it is difficult to see how further conflict can be avoided. The poor old L.S.E. is the focus of what is in effect an international conspiracy to change the structure of University government. The resolution overtly declaring ‘guerilla’ war was moved in the Union by an American graduate student not six weeks yet in the country!

Lionel turned seventy on 22 November 1968. This brought ‘unexpected cheer’ during weeks in which he went to LSE almost every day and ‘when I am not there, my head is still full of the place’. In the week immediately following his birthday there were two parties, ‘one organized by Kurt Klappholz & Anne Bohm of special L.S.E. cronies’ and a larger one of ‘many of the socalled liberal economists organized by the Institute of Economic Affairs at which, to my utter surprise, I was handed the truly princely gift of a complete recording of the Ring’ (the first complete recording conducted by Solti) (LCR to ICR, 30 November 1968). On 13 December a group of former

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students and colleagues presented him with a festschrift (Peston and Corry eds 1972) at a dinner at LSE. They deemed it advisable, given the troubles, to describe the event as Dr Corry’s private party on the door. It was a very lively party. When Lionel, expatiating on his life as an economist reached the 1930s, Dick Lipsey interrupted: ‘Did you really take that stand [against Keynes]?’, at which point Richard Sayers jumped up and said ‘Yes, you did – and you did a lot of harm!’ It was, as Lipsey says, ‘a very unfortunate occasion’, but Lionel thanked the organizers after Christmas: ‘I enjoyed every minute of it, the criticism as much as the tributes to the past; and I came away feeling a strong stimulus to write down reminiscences of the intellectual history of the School as seen from our Departmental angle. It was a splendidly warm occasion . . . ’11 By this time the next incident in the sequence of troubles had taken place. Lionel enjoyed this one. Oration Day, on 5 December, when the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper was to speak, provided a golden opportunity for the radical students ‘to organise on four issues: the question of the Governors’ relevance to a university community, the question of privilege (reserved seats, sherry party [for the governors]), the right of students to question anyone who came to lecture, and the tendency of Free World academics to apologise for fascism in Greece and elsewhere’, since TrevorRoper had earlier in the year published an article in the Sunday Times in which he did not wholly condemn the colonels running Greece. Soc Soc asked students to gather outside the Old Theatre before the Oration and to move in to take seats on a ‘first come first served’ basis (Hoch and Schoenbach 1969, 28–9; Soc Soc, ‘Oration or Discussion?’, 4 December 1968, Court Meetings 1969, RP). Hence in the two days before the Oration there was ‘much coming and going both at the administrative plane and on governing & academic bodies’ (LCR to ICR, 7 September 1968), with special meetings of the GPC and the Academic Board on 4 December. But the Standing Committee on 3 and 4 December had already decided on its tactics, which included relaying the Oration to the Founders Room for governors and guests to listen in comfort and offering a separate meeting afterwards for students to put questions to the speaker. On the day the students easily succeeded in gaining admission to the Old Theatre and occupying most of the seats. The student activists’ and 11

Information from Bernard Corry, David Laidler and Dick Lipsey, who also remember the occasion for getting stuck for three hours in the lift up to Lipsey’s flat afterwards; Essays in Honour of Lionel Robbins, Presentation Dinner held at the London School of Economics and Political Science on Friday, 13th December 1968, Special Letters; LCR to Corry and Peston, 8 January 1968, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 A-F, RP.

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Lionel’s versions agree on what happened. Hoch and Schoenbach (1969, 30–1) report: Enter Robbins, Adams and Trevor-Roper. . . . A Soc Soc leader stood up to Lord Robbins . . . as he was about to begin and explained that the meeting had insisted on having a question period. But he forgot to demand an elected chairman. Robbins chewed his way out of the bag. He said that Trevor-Roper could not answer questions immediately afterwards, but would later. He then launched into his prepared counter-insurgency speech about how he was connected with LSE since long ago, but how he was sure that student discontent would disappear if he could just have a man-to-man talk with us, and about what a wonderful professor Trevor-Roper was. The activists were annoyed, but impotent. . . . But the worst was yet to come. We had now trapped ourselves and eight hundred other students into having to listen to Trevor-Roper for three-quarters of an hour. . . . Within one minute of Trevor Roper’s last sputter, he, Robbins, and Adams were out and away at the rear of the stage.

Lionel told his sister: ‘we managed to outmanoeuvre them [the militants] by announcing alternative arrangements obviously more convenient and attractive to the majority of the audience. So that T.R.’s oration, one of the best I have ever heard, a disquisition on the uses of history passed off without incident. . . . All very exciting & not without a certain low delight in successful warfare.’ Meghnad Desai chaired the separate question and answer session after the Oration. He remembers that Lionel came to the meeting and sat in the front row and afterwards went to Desai’s room and complimented him. The next three months were grim. In mid-December Iris broke her leg badly just above the ankle stepping off a curb while Christmas shopping. She was in hospital for a month and her leg encased in plaster for another three. Lionel spent a ‘somewhat sober’ Christmas alone at Meadway Close, as he told Caroline on 30 December: ‘Anne & Brenda have been marvellous looking after my creature comforts & I go to the hospital every day. But although . . . she has broken something or been seriously laid up every five years since we were married . . . this has been more of a shock than [most] of the earlier troubles & I have felt curiously disinclined for sustained work & have spent a great deal of time just sitting or listening to records.’ At the same time, as he had told Caroline a week earlier, the situation at LSE had ‘become even more anxious – not this time because of the students but because of the quite inexplicable behaviour of W. Adams who, at the moment at any

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rate, is illustrating all the rumours – except that of racial prejudice – which emanated from Rhodesia – failure to communicate, omissions deliberate or otherwise – to call meetings and an apparent complete inability to keep up with the clock as regards prior obligations. This is much more difficult to deal with than student disturbance & I frankly wish I was not in a responsible position, particularly since these proclivities seem to spring from some antipathy towards me.’ Lionel had been aware of ‘a certain holding back’ on Adams’s part but not of any friction between them. In December he wrote him three letters he did not send (Adams, RP). The first followed the Court meeting on 12 December and concerned Adams’s report on the term. He ‘welcomed your [Adams’s] emphasis on the positive achievements of the School – if I may so, it was very eloquently said. But the rest – the – to me quite amazing – playing down of the dangers of the position and what certainly seemed to be a warning to us all to keep off the grass – leaves me saddened and perplexed.’ The other members of the Standing Committee must have been ‘bewilder[ed] when they [were] warned not to “concern themselves with detail” and “to keep at a distance”.’12 I ask myself are there two opposing conceptions involved? . . . before I agreed to assume this anxious assignment, I came and told you frankly that my ideas of the functions of the Court and its members were more positive than those of some who have chaired in the past; and you did not demur. On the contrary indeed you gave me to understand that you would welcome such an attitude. Had you told me that you preferred a lone hand, I would not have argued with [you]. But my answer to Edward [Bridges] would have been different. Anyway here we are now in the same boat with the probability of more storms ahead and I should be lacking in candour did I not reveal to you the apprehensions which what you appeared to be saying have aroused in my mind.

The next two unsent letters written a few days later were longer and more damning. Adams and Robbins had talked to Dr Arthur Trottenberg of the Ford Foundation at LSE in November. Afterwards Trottenberg had written Robbins from New York on 6 December telling him that a document he was expecting from Adams would be of great help in the foundation’s deliberations (Preliminary Correspondence Library American Appeal 67–70, RP). According to Ben Roberts, ‘A week before the meeting [of the Ford 12

According to the minutes, ‘The Director suggested that the Court could best serve the School by bringing a detached view to bear on matters of major policy.’

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Foundation in New York] John [Pike, the financial secretary of the School] asked Lionel, “What have you done about the letter [to Adams asking for information] from the Ford Foundation?” “What letter? He’s never shown it to me,” said Lionel. Walter Adams first denied having received the letter. Lionel said that he had to produce it. He did. From that day on – he really was angry.’ In the first of two letters Lionel did send to Adams, he told him that he wanted to see him about the projected American Friends of LSE and that he had been surprised to learn from Pike that the memorandum to Trottenberg had not been sent; he asked for it to go off immediately and also asked Adams to convene three meetings – of a new Public Relations Panel, with Goodman Derrick & Company (Lord Goodman’s firm which had agreed to act as the School’s solicitors) and of the academic governors to consider ways of forestalling a proposed Rhodesian Vigil by the students early in the Lent term. He did not receive a reply, so he wrote again. He curtly asked for a reply and for the meeting with the academic governors either the next day (a Friday) or on the Monday. He added a postscript: he was ‘deeply disturbed’ that the material for Ford was only being sent that day (LCR to Adams, 13 and 19 December 1968, Adams, RP). It was when he had not received any response to that letter by Monday that he wrote the two long unsent letters. After Christmas he found a letter from Adams apologizing for the delay in completing the memorandum for Dr Trottenberg and saying he would call the desired meetings. Lionel told Harmer on 30 December that ‘This does not solve the problem of what I fancy must be a chronic tendency to procrastination; but at least it allays fears of any underlying indisposition to co-operate which I confess . . . were beginning to worry me a little’ (Adams, RP). In January Lionel learned that the Ford Foundation had decided it could not help (Marshall Robinson to LCR, 15 and 17 January 1969, Preliminary Correspondence Library American Appeal 67–70, RP). A year earlier Lionel had attended the first History of Economic Thought conference at Sussex, actively participating in the sessions and giving the after-dinner speech. He agreed to do so again at the second conference at Nottingham in January 1969 – though when Donald Winch had been persuaded to give a paper on ‘Keynes and the academic community’ which would be critical of Lionel’s stance in the 1930s, Robbins offered to stay away so as not to inhibit him – but in the event he did not go because of Iris’s accident. A few weeks later he felt obliged to pull out of a twenty-fifth anniversary conference on Bretton Woods at Queen’s University in Canada in June 1969, although he had wanted to go and had obtained clearance from William Armstrong, the head of the civil service. He also told A.W. Coats

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that he had better count him out of the third History of Economic Thought conference in January 1970 because of the troubles at LSE.13 In 1969 events moved quickly to the climax, though not exactly the end, of the troubles on Friday 24 January. At the beginning of term Soc Soc issued another Agitator pamphlet, describing links between some LSE governors and companies doing business with Rhodesia and South Africa. (Robbins and Harmer were included as directors of British Petroleum.) The Standing Committee on Tuesday 7 January discussed ‘possible events in the coming term’. Adams thought that if there were trouble it might occur over the coming weekend in connection with a march to protest about Rhodesia and South Africa at the beginning of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference; for this week the Students’ Union had organized a series of evening meetings on the problem of Rhodesia. ‘He did not think a sit-in over the week-end was very likely, but if there were any prospect of this the gates in the Old and St. Clements Buildings would be closed.’ The notorious ‘gates’ – iron grilles – had been installed over the previous three months at strategic points on the staircases. When the ‘teach-in’ on Rhodesia began the next day Adams was asked to speak. He did so and again on Friday but he refused to reappear later on Friday night. Some of the militant students then staged an impromptu ‘occupation’ of the Senior Common Room for a couple of hours (Hoch and Schoenbach 1969, 34–7). A week later, on the afternoon of Friday 17 January, Lionel appeared at a packed meeting in the Old Theatre, having promised to do so during his intervention on Oration Day. As Crouch (1970, 82–3) commented, ‘Unlike his encounter over the Trevor-Roper affair, the meeting was not a successful one.’ In the previous couple of days a copy of a confidential report from the GPC to the Academic Board with proposals for ‘the preservation of order’ and ‘the maintenance of freedom’ had been leaked by ‘some sympathetic staff members traitorously . . . to Soc Soc’ and Soc Soc had stepped up its leaflet campaign urging direct action of some form or other (Hoch and Schoenbach 1969, 45). ‘At 4.05 pm he [Robbins] walked into the Old Theatre from the back of the stage and was promptly greeted by several catcalls plus a large amount of applause. The Union President introduced him . . . – and then explained to Lord Robbins that the students were most interested in having a discussion with him.’ But before he answered the many, inevitably hostile, questions he made a statement in which he told his audience that 13

Information from Donald Winch; LCR to A.W. Coats, 28 February 1968, Winch to LCR, 4 November, LCR to Winch, 11 November 1968, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 S-Z; LCR to Armstrong, 31 December 1968 and 18 February 1969, LCR to Coats, 21 May and 4 June 1969, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 A-F, RP.

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he had been connected with the School for over forty years and went on to describe his life at the School at length. This made different impressions on different observers. Hoch and Schoenbach (1969, 53) describe the militants’ reaction: ‘The students could hardly believe it. After the GPC Report, the Beaver story [a scurrilous story about Adams having made contingency plans to close the School], and the Soc Soc propaganda barrage, everyone was worried that the place would be closed, and here was the Chairman of the Governors giving us anecdotes about his childhood.’ Among the ‘moderates’, some of us were irritated by his assumption that the School was his School and not that of the current students, whom he implied were trying to destroy it; others found his performance rather moving. But there were the gates. Dahrendorf (1995, 464–5) suggests that Robbins’s admission at the end of the questioning that they were not only intended to protect property but also ‘to prevent “unauthorised” access to parts of the buildings, for example, during occupations’ brought them into prominence. But the gates were already noticeable and noticed, and most students, however ‘moderate’, intensely disliked the idea that they were there to protect LSE from its own students, creating a sneaking sympathy with the militants who wanted to remove the gates themselves if the authorities did not. The Union meeting immediately after Robbins’s meeting passed by a large majority an emergency motion that the gates must be removed within seven days; otherwise the students would do so themselves. In the seven days, during which the Academic Board on Wednesday 22 January approved the GPC report, an emergency Union meeting on Thursday 23 January passed by a small majority a resolution that direct action to remove the gates would be ‘inappropriate’ if there was a chance to remove them by negotiation. The next day, when another Union meeting was called, Soc Soc announced it would introduce another resolution for direct action unless the negotiations got the gates down ‘in a reasonable amount of time’ – which it did not expect, according to its leaflet (copy in Standing Committee 1969(1), RP): ‘On the contrary, we see in iron gates and the recently passed General Purposes Manifesto a strong attempt to strengthen and make more explicit who controls the LSE. And every time you pass one of these cage doors, THE PROOF IS RIGHT BEFORE YOUR EYES.’ At the Friday afternoon Union meeting, attended by about 550 students compared with over 700 students the day before, the first vote on a Soc Soc motion produced a very small majority in favour and calls for a recount which increased the majority only slightly. However, in the resulting confusion many students set off for the gates. But the GPC had been meeting all afternoon and the students found some of its members, including Alan

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Day and John Watkins, and some other academic staff already stationed by the gates. With various tools the activists soon got the gates down, and when word went round that the police (called by Adams) were on their way they began to disperse, some joining the peaceful Friday night drinkers in the Three Tuns Bar in the basement of the St Clements Building. At 9.30 Adams declared the School closed. When half an hour later the police arrived everyone in the bar was obliged to leave through a line of academic staff acting as an identification committee with the police. Three students were arrested then, twenty-five or so later outside Bow Street police station; the next morning they were released on bail (Dahrendorf 1995, 465–7). According to John Watkins, ‘Lionel was hopping mad the next day because Walter Adams never telephoned him’ on the Friday. On Saturday Watkins, who lived in Hampstead Garden Suburb, drove him to a meeting of an ad hoc hybrid committee of the GPC and the academic governors on the Standing Committee at Senate House. ‘Lionel took it for granted he will take the chair. Alan Day stood up, or raised his hand, and said: “This is a meeting of academic members, it should be chaired by the Director.” Lionel received this with a sort of ill grace. He sat down but after that he felt he should keep clear of GPC things. He certainly became very active.’ Thereafter, as Lionel told the Court on 30 January, ‘the Standing Committee [was] meeting every day and would continue to do so until the crisis was over.’ Basil Yamey remembered Lionel as the ‘Field Marshal mustering his forces’ with Watkins ‘one of the brigadiers’ though he was a member of the GPC not the Standing Committee. The Standing Committee met almost every day around 5 p.m., ‘planning the next day’s manoeuvres’. Yamey also remembered that the academic governors often ‘had to act as brakes’. Alan Day, as vice-chairman of the Academic Board, attended the Standing Committee meetings, as usually did John Montgomerie of Goodman Derrick & Co. The GPC met most afternoons, usually with one or two academic governors present, but some members resigned, feeling they had not been kept fully informed. As Dahrendorf commented (1995, 469), ‘In practice . . . the line taken by the Standing Committee, including its academic Governors, prevailed.’ The major decisions taken by the Standing Committee in the next three weeks were when and how to reopen the School and the nature of the disciplinary actions against those who had incited the ‘riot’. Robbins told the Court on 30 January that it was ‘considered unwise to reopen while there was a danger of further damage to property and the risk of exposing to danger loyal members of staff who had attempted to resist students removing the gates’. He reported the actions the Standing Committee had taken. On 28 January at Senate House it had discussed the drafts of letters to be sent to

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three junior members of staff thought to have encouraged or approved the students’ action, summoning them to appear before a special committee. It also decided to ask the School’s solicitors to seek injunctions against thirteen persons, including David Adelstein, Paul Hoch and Victor Schoenbach, not to enter the School without special permission; Lionel swore the affidavit on behalf of LSE on 30 January. The previous day he had served notice on the three lecturers (the social psychologist Nicholas Bateson, the sociologist Robin Blackburn and the economist Laurence Harris) to appear before the special committee on 31 January and 1 February (affidavit and letters in Legal 68–69, RP). After the Court meeting the Standing Committee decided not to initiate disciplinary proceedings against Meghnad Desai at this stage. Harris’s solicitor, acting also for Blackburn, asked for a fourteen-day adjournment, which was granted for all three cases. He challenged the inclusion of the chairman and the director on the special committee: Harmer replaced Robbins and Adams stood down. Bateson decided to represent himself at his hearing which began on 15 February. Harris’s and Blackburn’s solicitor obtained a further adjournment for four weeks, his clients having objected not only to the presence of Robbins and Adams but also to Bernard Donoughue (who had been at one of the meetings mentioned in the charges against Harris) and Ben Roberts (who was known to be a ‘hawk’) on the special committee.14 While LSE was closed many members of the academic staff gave their lectures outside the School (in the bar of the Passfield hall of residence, for instance). On 3 February a large LSE Students’ Union meeting at Friends House, Euston Road, passed motions objecting to ‘victimisation’ of ‘staff, students or workers’; the Standing Committee thought these ‘failed to meet the conditions essential for the reopening of the School’. Some staff tried to mediate between the Standing Committee and the students. On 5 February the committee saw one group which advocated immediate reopening and withdrawal or temporary suspension of all disciplinary charges and another which believed that all disciplinary procedures should be completed and penalties imposed before the School reopened. The GPC took the latter line and on 5 February suggested reopening on 10 March for a full term of academic work before the summer examinations. The Academic Board on 6 February voted for a reopening ‘not later than the end of next week’. The Standing Committee postponed a decision until Tuesday 11 February, when, 14

James Goudie to LCR, 30 January, Goudie to Goodman Derrick & Co, 10 and 11 February 1969, Edey to LCR, Memorandum Agreed today (1015) with Montgomerie of Goodman Derrick & Co, 12 February 1969, Legal 68–69, RP.

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at a meeting attended by Goodman as well as Montgomerie, it decided the School should reopen on Wednesday 19 February.15 The Baumols arrived in London for a fortnight over the weekend of the gates, providing a boost to morale as well as company: along with visits to the opera and ballet Lionel saw Baumol in meetings with Adams and others over the projected American Friends of LSE. After the Baumols returned to Princeton Lionel wrote on 12 February (Preliminary Correspondence Library American Appeal 67–70, RP): ‘Matters . . . deteriorated considerably after your departure. There developed an insidious revolt among weaker members of the staff and a movement towards universal forgiveness and concession to the more extreme demands of the rebels. I am glad to say, however, that the academic Governors and the rest of the governing body stood firm’ with respect to both reopening and disciplinary measures. The School reopened (Hoch and Schoenbach 1969, 124–5): about 300 students assembled in Lincoln’s Inn Fields near the School and staged a carnival-like march back featuring angel’s haloes, chains, gags, a policeman’s hat, horns, toy sledgehammers and an oversized head of the Director. . . . After chanting for a while inside the lobby, everyone raced off to do his thing: some scurried to their usual consultations in the coffee bar; others inspected the re-erected gates and the less obtrusive solid oak doors guarding the stairways . . . ; still others rushed to get books out of the library in case of another closure. The bar, unfortunately, had not opened yet.

A long afternoon meeting of the Union was almost entirely taken up with procedural matters. Finally, ‘the Soc Soc motion calling for immediate occupation was defeated, and several strongly-worded anti-Administration motions carried instead.’ The Union rejected another occupation motion a week later. A few students began a token sit-in which soon collapsed for lack of support. The Standing Committee continued to meet almost daily. It was most often concerned with legal matters. The injunctions against thirteen persons not to enter the School were heard in court on 25 February. The previous day some members of the Standing Committee and of the GPC met the Students’ Union Council; after the students left Robbins said that ‘in his opinion there was no possibility that the Governors would be willing’ to drop the charges. He also wanted to commence internal disciplinary proceedings against the students; Goodman’s firm advised that the School could not do so before the injunction proceedings came to trial (LCR to Goodman, 11 and 17 February 1969, Legal 68–69, RP). After the injunctions against ten of 15

There are drafts by LCR of the statement issued to the press on 12 February, and of earlier drafts of statements that the School would be opened on 17 February, 24 February and 10 March, in Statements & Drafts 68–69, RP.

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the thirteen were continued in a limited form, Lionel again asked Goodman about the possibility of starting internal disciplinary proceedings; Goodman again advised that LSE would risk being in contempt of Court. As Lionel told Harmer on 3 March (Legal 68–69, RP), ‘nothing that was said on this matter could shake him or Montgomerie’. At a special Court meeting on 6 March Lionel was not in the chair. The strain had begun to tell and his doctor thought he had suffered a slight heart attack and ordered him to rest at home. Harmer made a report to the governors, giving (as far as one can tell from the minutes) a more moderate version of Lionel’s briefing notes dictated the day before (LCR to Harmer, 5 March 1969, Court Correspondence up to 1970, RP). Lionel wrote to Caroline on 10 March: Just at the moment I am slightly immobilized. I have a very minor coronary disturbance & have been advised to rest for a week or so. Nothing to worry about but profoundly irritating just at this juncture. All due to LSE or rather W.A. – the student problems are tough but straightforward & the sort of thing I am accustomed to. But how to deal with a handsome clergyman-type who is palpably not up to his job and secretive & evasive into the bargain – that is another matter. . . . If it were not that otherwise suitable action would play right into the hands of the student militants, I should know exactly what to do, however distasteful. As it is, one has to soldier on pro tem pretending that all is well.

Lionel was out of action for the rest of the month. After a fortnight Richard drove his parents to Lyme for a long weekend on 20 March and then, after a few days in London when Lionel and Iris both had to see their doctors and Lionel resumed his duties at the FT (as well as chairing a Standing Committee meeting and seeing David Smith again on 1 April), they returned to Lyme for another ten days. Iris’s leg was out of plaster but she could not walk easily. During his own enforced immobility Lionel returned to the collection of his papers in the history of economic thought he had put aside in October, ‘putting in footnotes & correcting adjectives’ (LCR to ICR, 22 March and 1 April 1969). He sent it to Rex Allen on 9 April and Macmillan agreed to publish it early in 1970 (Allen to LCR, 23 April 1969, Evolution of Modern Economic Theory, RP; Robbins 1970b). He also began writing his autobiography. As he told Caroline on 5 April he had ‘mapped out a plan last year in the winter & a period of convalescence after a heart attack seems a very appropriate time to launch the enterprise. At the moment I am quite enjoying it.’ After the night of the gates LSE asked David Smith for an extension of the 1 April deadline for the School to decide whether it could buy Strand House. Smith agreed to only a month but then asked for a meeting with Adams and Robbins. At the meeting on 1 April Smith presented a new option: his firm,

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wanting to build a new office building near Kings Cross, could redevelop Strand House for the library and rent it to LSE if LSE could not afford to buy the building. The reason for this offer was apparently that it might enable Smiths to obtain planning permission for their new building. Lionel did not think this was on. He had already consulted Max Rayne – who was after all a very successful property developer (Marriott 1989, 82–7) – when Rayne had suggested Smith’s estimate of the value of Strand House was too high. He asked the Standing Committee to agree to his writing a letter stating that LSE could not service a large rent and would not be interested in a redevelopment but would be interested in buying the existing building. Smith asked for another meeting, at which the redevelopment option was not mentioned. But he made the reasonable demand that unless his firm knew that LSE really was going to try to raise the money they would have to look for another buyer; they would not, however, do so before June.16 There followed several weeks of toing and froing with the University and the UGC, which Lionel summarized to Baumol on 3 July (Preliminary Correspondence Library American Appeal 67–70, RP): . . . as you know, we had been refused permission at this stage without any money to invoke the aid of the University Grants Committee valuation arrangements . . . There thereupon ensued an agonizing series of negotiations with the U.G.C. which eventually resulted in a total refusal of permission to proceed . . . for a few hours I was in complete despair. But after further conversations with Douglas Logan . . . it was agreed that we could proceed to negotiations on a purely tentative basis if Smiths would so agree, using an agent of our own choosing, and on the strict understanding that any price arrived at might be disallowed by the U.G.C. There next arose the problem of how to get an agent who would not run us into extravagant expenses. After a certain amount of lobbying, I succeeded in inducing no less a person than Max Rayne, the most successful of our real estate property developers and a truly civilised man . . . to undertake the negotiations for nothing. The present position therefore is that we are hoping to enter into negotiations with Smiths in the next week or so. What will come of it I cannot predict but since Rayne’s private estimate of the value of the building is a third less than that which we believed to be the U.G.C. estimate, if his people succeed in getting any price below that of the District Valuer, we ought to be safe enough from prohibition on the score of excessive expense. Meanwhile, affairs at the School have calmed down a bit, largely owing to the summer examinations and the approach of the end of the term. 16

Adams to Smith, 26 February, Smith to Adams, 19 March, [Smith], Meeting with London School of Economics, 1.iv.69, LCR to Rayne, 28 January, Rayne to LCR, 29 January and 21 February 1969, Library – Strand House 67–70, RP; Standing Committee 17 April and 22 May 1969.

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The Summer term had begun on 21 April. The special committees investigating the charges against Bateson and Blackburn had just reported (the Harris hearing was postponed) and the Standing Committee on 17 April accepted the recommendations and agreed their appointments should be terminated forthwith. As a direct consequence there were numerous attempts at disruption during the early part of term, including picketing of classes, heckling of lecturers, blocking deliveries of supplies and visits by militants to the Senior Common Room. At one of the ‘customary pilgrimages’ to the SCR Paul Hoch took down the Coldstream portrait of Robbins (Hoch and Schoenbach 1969, 137–45). There was also serious opposition from a large section of the academic staff. Lionel had received a statement on 27 February from John Griffith and forty others (not including Glass or Wedderburn this time) that the charges against Bateson, Blackburn and Harris even if proven would not justify dismissal. Now he was to receive many letters and statements, following meetings in several departments, the mildest asking for an explanation of the Standing Committee’s decision, others also calling for an appeal by an independent tribunal (Letters (Internal) 68–69, RP). On 25 April the Academic Board also supported the idea of an appeal tribunal. The previous day the Standing Committee had been considering a possible explanatory statement drafted by Finer. Lionel claimed he would have to get the support of the whole Court for an appeal tribunal, though ‘a review by a distinguished individual of the machinery by which the Standing Committee’s decision had been reached such as was proposed in Mr Finer’s draft statement could, he thought, be accepted by the Standing Committee without reference to the Court’. As he admitted to Harmer on 9 June, he was unwilling to agree to making any concession to the opposition (Court Correspondence up to 1970, RP). According to Basil Yamey, ‘Three of us decided that there was only one man who could change Lionel’s mind, Lord Goodman, the School’s solicitor. We phoned Lord Goodman, who could only fit us in for breakfast at 7.30 a.m. He said, “Of course you’re right. Leave it to me, I’ll talk to him.” That evening at five Lionel came in and said he had changed his mind.’ (As Drogheda commented [1978, 310], Goodman ‘believes that few problems are incapable of solution, given only patience, goodwill and a willingness to compromise. Intransigence, he believes, does not pay. Humour is among his most powerful weapons, and he is brilliant at taking the heat out of situations.’) After its next meeting on 29 April the Standing Committee announced the setting up of ‘an ad hoc independent appelate tribunal of one eminent legal member and two non-legal members . . . to give a reasoned judgment on all the matters at issue including the appropriateness or

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otherwise of the dismissals.’ Thanking him for his help, Lionel told Goodman on 1 May (Legal 68–69, RP) that he thought ‘the statement which emerged has probably done the trick so far as the loyal staff is concerned. I had some difficulty with some of the lay-governors who felt that it might appear to be a capitulation to pressure. But in the end we agreed unanimously to issue it.’ On 30 April LSE was investigated by the House of Commons Select Committee on Education and Science which came to take evidence – in the afternoon from members of the Standing Committee including Robbins and Adams – providing Soc Soc with another opportunity for disruption. As usual Hoch and Schoenbach’s amusing account (1969, 147–9) of the proceedings squares with Lionel’s (to Goodman on 1 May): we had a fine old shindy at L.S.E. yesterday afternoon. . . . As we entered the room with Fred Willey [chairman of the select committee] and his friends, we were greeted with a fine swell of booing and other forms of abuse, and this continued with every sentence uttered on our side for more than an hour. I have seldom enjoyed myself more. It was clear that, provided I kept my head and answered in cool terms, with every interruption the evil elements were exhibiting themselves in their true light to members of the committee. In the end, Willey’s patience was exhausted and after about five warnings he suspended the sitting and we repaired to a more private session elsewhere. . . . The police came of their own volition – they had a man stationed there to observe – to see that we got out safely and there was more or less a riot. But on the whole I am sure it did nothing but good.

(Hoch and Schoenbach describe Robbins as ‘in effect reading off the LSE Calendar . . . for about forty-five minutes, with intermittent heckling and groaning’ before the first adjournment.) Lionel told Jacques Kahane the next day (Personal Correspondence 1966–70 G-L, RP) that he found the experience ‘exhilarating’ and felt better than he had done since February. From the official minutes it is clear he was often playing to the gallery. On 7 March the Director of Public Prosecutions had taken out criminal summons against eight students and two lecturers, Bateson and Harris, accusing them of wilful damage on the night of the gates. The charges were heard the day after the ‘shindy’. The cases against Bateson, Harris and three of the students were dropped, three other students acquitted and three, including Hoch (who was not an LSE student because he was registered at Bedford College), convicted and conditionally discharged. Harris’s solicitor not surprisingly asked whether the School would drop its charges against his client; Goodman Derrick advised that would be wise, but some members of the Standing Committee were reluctant to do so, at least not before the tribunal heard Blackburn’s appeal. Two weeks later Paul Hoch, John Rose and David

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Slaney appeared in court accused of breaching their injunctions by taking part in various incidents, including disrupting lectures (Rose and Slaney) and taking down the Robbins portrait from the wall of the SCR (Hoch). The judge was ‘quite satisfied that the evidence is not sufficient to warrant any order against Dr. Hoch. . . . The only incident in which he was undoubtedly a protagonist was the lowering of Lord Robbins’ portrait. That is clearly not a matter for attachment.’ He was equally satisfied the other two were in breach of the injunction. But he was reluctant to send ‘two young men to prison during their university career’ and accepted their undertaking not to interfere with lectures, examinations or other academic proceedings.17 There was by now considerable pressure for an independent enquiry into the troubles at LSE, which Lionel strongly resisted. He claimed it would take too long, citing the (not very convincing) example of his enquiry into the problems at the London Opera Centre in 1964 (see Chapter 25). He claimed the Standing Committee, and the ‘loyalists’ among the academic staff, were far more capable than any outside body of solving the problems. Moreover, as he told Logan on 3 June (Constitutional Changes, RP), ‘the setting up of such an enquiry would be regarded as a great victory for the dissident minority of staff and by the militant students, and a vote of censure on the governing body and the loyal majority.’ Robbins may have been defensive but he had support from his senior colleagues. Four of the loyalists defended him, and his interpretation of the aim of the promoters of an enquiry, in responding to a letter in The Times from Bernard Crick on 13 May. Lord Chorley talked to Lord Shackleton, the government spokesman on education in the Lords, and wrote to the Minister of State at the DES, Shirley Williams (Letters (Personal) 68–69, RP). The distance between Lionel’s Standing Committee and the rest of LSE was not just a problem for the revolting students. After the ‘interesting and revealing’ discussion on 29 April, Harmer wrote to Lionel on 6 May (Court Correspondence up to 1970, RP). The decision on the immediate issue [the appeals tribunal] was of course inescapable because there was no good alternative to propose. . . . But the reactions of the academic members of the Committee seemed to me to illustrate the real problem only too well. . . . . . . The academics . . . have power without responsibility, and the Governors responsibility without power. Very bad for the former morally, and intolerable for the 17

Goudie to Goodman Derrick & Co, 29 May, Goodman Derrick & Co to Edey, 2 June 1969, Ben Roberts to LCR, ‘Wednesday’, and Judgment in London School of Economics v Adelstein & Ors 16 May 1969, Legal 68–69, RP.

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latter. It seems to confirm the view that in present circumstances the lay governors no longer serve a useful purpose. I can’t accept your view that they can act as a shield for the academic community against the intrusions of the state, which pays the bill and increasingly demands the right to intervene in policy making and control how the money is spent. They can’t do that, certainly not when they are so demonstrably unable to govern – probably not anyway in the present climate.

Alan Day had suggested in March that some other members of the GPC should join him (Day) in attending Standing Committee meetings. Lionel responded with the suggestion that the vice-chairman of the Academic Board should be an ex officio member of the Standing Committee; Day thought the vice-chairman’s loyalties could then be impossibly split.18 So Lionel made another suggestion, the addition of one or two more academic members to the Standing Committee. On 22 May the Standing Committee, and then the Court on 12 June, agreed to two, to be elected by the Academic Board. This implied equality in the number of academics and lay governors on the Standing Committee so that the chairman would have the deciding vote. Lionel would not go a step further: he still thought, contra Harmer (who was not persuaded), that lay governors had to have the final say in order to prevent government control of the universities; furthermore, at the School in 1969, as he told Harmer on 9 June (Court Correspondence up to 1970, RP), ‘I am pretty sure that if we were to hand over outright to the academics, the result would be almost catastrophic. The outside world would right [sic] off the institution as hopeless, and internally it would be a tremendous reinforcement of the dissident element on the Academic Board, which would like nothing better than the opportunity to filibuster until they had driven the loyalists into a state of acquiescence or positive resignation and migration elsewhere.’ The ad hoc tribunal chaired by Mr Justice Ackner met in August and upheld the dismissals of Blackburn and Bateson (Dahrendorf 1995, 470). As for Harris, the Standing Committee on 3 June decided notwithstanding Goodman’s advice to go ahead with the special committee to consider his case. When that met on 25–26 September it decided Harris had been guilty of misconduct during his chairing a meeting of the Rhodesia ‘teachin’ in January but ‘not misconduct of sufficient gravity to warrant the termination of his appointment’. The special committee having made no recommendation, the Standing Committee on 30 September could take no action other than to issue a press statement to that effect on 1 October. 18

Day to LCR, 7 March and 18 April, LCR to Day, 21 April, Day to LCR, 11 May 1969, Standing Committee Correspondence 69–70, RP.

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Adams had warned the Court on 12 June that the militants might take ‘even more extreme measures’ in the next academic year. But the revolt at LSE had petered out and did not resume in the Michaelmas term, except for another attempt, successful this time, at disrupting the Oration. The trouble Lionel was confronted with was once again with Adams. He told his sister Caroline on 18 July: I went to see him twice before the June meeting of the Court yet he didn’t tell me that resolutions about the composition of Boards of Discipline [in an apparently innocuous paper on Membership of Committees for the year 1969/70] concealed an intention to introduce student members – which I don’t necessarily object to – and when this came out in the course of the actual discussion I had to promise an extraordinary meeting for explicit discussion.[19 ] Then, if you please, the paper on all this which was the work of a subcommittee of the Standing Committee of the Governors was circulated to all & sundry on the Academic Board without me or other members of the S.C. having a sight of it. And so on. So I wrote to him and said quite frankly that I just did not know what to do – that he did not tell me things when I came to see him & did not answer when I wrote.

(He had in fact written five increasingly exasperated letters to Adams since the Court meeting [Adams, RP].) He now thought Adams was ‘a complete disaster. And the trouble is that, because he has been publicly attacked so unjustly, one just cannot get rid of him as one would try to do otherwise. So it is likely that my extra preoccupations will persist for quite a long time! It must be said, however, that I am learning to live with them – I don’t worry nearly as much as I did.’ On 26 June the Standing Committee approved Lionel’s recommended rules of procedure to prevent occurrences such as that at the Court meeting: ‘(a) No issue of this degree of importance to be presented to the Court without full prior discussion by the Standing Committee (b) Equally no resolution of this sort to be presented without a reasoned statement of its implications.’ Lionel also pointed out that it was ‘most unfortunate’ the committee had not seen the draft regulations for students prepared by its working party before the draft went to the Academic Board. Adams and Edey, well aware of the continuing tension between the academics and the Standing Committee, defended the Academic Board discussion by ‘emphasiz[ing] the importance of the Committee carrying the academic staff with them in any proposals for revised regulations’. On 1 and 7 July the Standing Committee considered new regulations – and discussed 19

Adams’s paper included a proposed resolution: ‘the said Board [of Discipline] is hereby authorised to add to its number persons who are not members of the Corporation.’

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them with the GPC – before a special Court meeting approved them on 21 July. Lionel and Iris retreated to Lyme for most of the summer, where Lionel continued to work on his autobiography as a welcome distraction from the troubles: ‘my Recherche du Temps Perdu . . . becomes more and more of a sort of private obsession which I rush back to whenever opportunity offers’. In August they also enjoyed ‘a quite perfect holiday’ in Italy. After Lionel had given a couple of lectures at the Johns Hopkins Bologna Center, they met Richard and Brenda in Florence and drove with them to stay in Poole’s villa at Asolo in the Veneto. They came back via Vicenza and Bergamo and Milan (LCR to ICR, 18 July and 16 August; ms The Atlantic world – problems and prospects 1969, Bologna Lectures, RP). Lionel was in good health again, having almost completely recovered from his apparent heart attack.20 When Lionel went into LSE after his vacation he found that although the Standing Committee had agreed on 3 June to invite Sir Mortimer Wheeler to give this year’s Oration, Adams had done nothing about it. Lionel wrote to Wheeler himself. His friend was very willing to help but he was going to India. Lionel turned to Sir William Armstrong, who agreed to give the talk he had been going to give as a Special University Lecture, on ‘Professionals and Professionalism in the Civil Service’, on Oration Day, Thursday 4 December (Wheeler to LCR, 10 September, Armstrong to LCR, 19 September 1969, Correspondence (General) up to 1970, RP). The disruption was worse than the year before. Chanting and other interruptions prevented the Oration from starting and after two non-students had rushed on to the platform and seized the microphone, Lionel closed down the proceedings – having sent a message to the local police station only to be reminded that the police would not intervene unless there were actual violence. As he told both Goodman and Armstrong, the militants had cleverly made sure the actual disturbers of the peace were not LSE students. He also told Armstrong on 10 December (Correspondence (General) up to 1970, RP) that ‘Having lived through the whole business again and again in imagination, I cannot believe that in similar circumstances I should do other than what I did. But is it not a paradoxical situation when the Home Office is prepared to detail hundreds of police to safeguard a rugby match before any violence begins, but are not prepared to detail any police at all to safeguard an important statement of public policy by the head of the civil service? I cannot help feeling that there 20

In 1973 an eminent heart specialist ‘categorically stated that your [LCR’s] heart could never have suffered any ischaemic episode at all and agreed that the symptoms were doubtless due to your hiatus hernia’: David Carrick to LCR, 13 April 1973, FT, RP (emphasis in original).

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is some inconsistency of policy here.’ Goodman agreed with him (Goodman to LCR, 9 December 1969, Legal 68–69, RP). LSE swiftly obtained injunctions against Paul Hoch and two other outsiders. By this time it had offered to drop the earlier injunctions on terms that each party would pay its own costs and almost all the defendants (including Hoch) had accepted. The old injunctions were still technically in force but the advice of the School’s solicitors was to start fresh proceedings against Hoch (Montgomerie to Pike, 10 December 1969, Legal 68–69, RP). Hoch subsequently broke his injunction and was jailed for a month, but a threatened occupation of the School in protest drew no support from the current students (Standing Committee 5 May 1970). Hoch was eventually deported. (As Lionel later commented (1980b, 57), ‘Dr Hoch certainly had the courage of his convictions.’) For the next Oration, in December 1970, the School invited Arthur Lewis, who spoke on ‘Socialism and economic growth’, and moved the event to the Friends Meeting House in Euston Road. At the beginning of the Michaelmas term 1969 there was ‘still nothing definite to report’ with respect to Strand House. Max Rayne’s colleague, W. Millsom, a chartered surveyor, had contacted W.H. Smiths but they had not yet agreed a figure. But there had been one very favourable development: Rayne had undertaken that, if agreement could be reached on a suitable figure, then if LSE could not raise the money within three years his firm would buy the building (LCR to Baumol, 24 October 1969, Preliminary Correspondence Library American Appeal, RP). By December the School could tell the University that Millsom had told Smiths he would recommend LSE to offer £31/4 m for purchase in three years’ time and that Smiths’ agent had made it clear this was unacceptable. Rayne was, however, prepared to extend his undertaking to a price of £31/2 m and a completion period of four years – which helped to persuade the UGC to let negotiations continue. Rayne advised Lionel personally to approach the chairman of W.H. Smith to try to clinch the deal at £31/2 m. Lionel saw him on New Year’s Day 1970: ‘I acted on your [Rayne’s] advice and went to see [C.H.W.] Troughton. . . . I decided that there was no point in beating about the bush. . . . I simply said that I gathered his agent had indicated that an offer of £31/4 million would be unacceptable, that having regard to personal relations between myself and the firm of Smith I thought it just as well to put all my cards on the table at once, and would therefore tell him that I had managed to secure underwriting for an offer of £31/2 million.’ When Lionel made the School’s formal offer after a second meeting with Troughton, Smiths came back and asked for £4m; Lionel replied this was too much but suggested

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the District Valuer should now be brought in, to which Troughton agreed. Agreement was eventually reached on £3,780,000.21 On 18 November LSE announced it had agreed to purchase the building between December 1973 and March 1975, and would be launching a public appeal. On 8 December the Standing Committee ‘agreed that Lord Robbins was indisputably the only person capable of successfully guiding the Library appeal’. Harmer took the opportunity of the ending of the ‘troubles’ to resign the vice-chairmanship in December 1969. The ‘firm, thoughtful and compassionate’ Morris Finer succeeded him in January 1970 (and later succeeded Lionel as chairman) (Dahrendorf 1995, 484, 487). But Lionel’s troubles with Adams were far from over. On 3 February 1970 he found himself again in the embarrassing position of not being fully informed about a paper discussed by the Standing Committee. In this paper Adams recommended the appointment of a selection committee to appoint a new Pro-Director in place of Harold Edey who did not want to continue; the Standing Committee decided there should be a review of the functions of the position before any decision to appoint a selection committee. The next day Lionel learned that Adams’s recommendation was the result of a discussion in the General Purposes Committee. He was, justifiably or not, annoyed that it was discussed by the GPC before the Standing Committee; he was rightly incensed that Adams had not even mentioned the discussion before or during the Standing Committee meeting. He was ‘disagreeably reminded’ of the earlier incidents in June 1969 and repeated what he had written to Adams then (LCR to Adams, 6 February 1970, Adams, RP). Adams apologized, and suggested a joint meeting of some members of the GPC, the Appointments Committee and the Standing Committee, but it took him a fortnight to do so (LCR to Adams, 16 February, Adams to LCR, 16 February 1970, Adams, RP). At the meeting Lionel got his way and a working party undertook the review before a selection committee was appointed, which recommended Arthur John (Standing Committee 3 March and 6 October 1970). A few months later, at the time of the announcement of the purchase of Strand House, when Adams had dealt with a suggestion of Lionel’s he did not like simply by ignoring it, Lionel, having often told his sister he would like to resign the chairmanship if it would not do damage to the School, told Adams that himself, first to his face and then in writing on 17 November. ‘Put briefly, I have never before been 21

Adams to Logan, 10 December, Logan to LCR, 31 December 1969, LCR to Rayne, 2 and 6 January, LCR to Troughton, 7 January, Troughton to LCR, 9 January, LCR to Troughton, 26 January 1970, Trougton to LCR, nd, Library – Strand House 67–70, RP; Standing Committee 5 May 1970.

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engaged in any such collaboration in which my partner so obviously wished at critical moments to keep me at arms length and in which, in important differences of opinion, he showed such complete intransigence of attitude.’ He listed all the episodes since Christmas 1968 which exemplified this – which included the fact that Adams had never contacted him while he was ill in March 1969, ‘not even [to] enquir[e] whether I was alive or dead’. He concluded: ‘I put this on paper . . . [because] I think it is only right to let you know what I should have to say to the governing body if in future a situation arises in which I feel it is totally impossible to carry on.’ Adams did not reply, but the letter survives in his files as well as Robbins’s, and both John Pike and Arthur John told Lionel that Adams was worried Lionel would resign (Adams 9/36; Adams, RP). While it is hard not to have some sympathy for Adams, caught between the rock of Robbins and the hard place of the academic staff, it is clear that he had brought it upon himself, first with the dilatoriness over the material for the Ford Foundation and then with his general administrative incompetence. At the beginning of 1970 three professors in the Sociology Department asked (a very reluctant) Lionel to intervene when Adams had not replied to complaints: as Ernest Gellner wrote on 6 February (Sociology Dept, RP), Adams’s ‘somewhat high-handed and evasive manner . . . gives one the humiliating impression of being subject to an authority capable of arbitrary and . . . absurd decisions, rather than one accessible to argument and deserving of support’. As Ben Roberts put it, ‘Lionel was fed up with Walter because he dragged his feet, ultra, ultra cautious. He was often perceptive and sensible but he lacked all strategic thinking, reluctant to stick his neck out. . . . Anything [he received] that caused him to worry he put in the safe’, leaving it there until he could ignore it no longer. Basil Yamey recalled that Adams resented Lionel’s dominance but emphasized that Adams was ‘a very indecisive man [who] kept his cards close to his chest’, in complete contrast to Lionel. Lionel finished (the first draft of) his autobiography in the spring of 1970. He and Iris had not been to Lyme during the winter while Anne was ill after the birth of her fourth child, but LSE had been quiet apart from the Oration and he had been able to use the book to take his mind off the frustrations of working with Adams. He revised it at Lyme in the summer and delivered the manuscript to Macmillan in the autumn. Macmillan also suggested a new edition of his 1954 collection of essays, The Economist in the Twentieth Century. He took the opportunity to omit the title essay and two other papers, to rearrange the remainder with three papers added, and to write a long introduction to put the papers in context (LCR to ICR,

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13 March and 31 August 1970; Robbins 1971a, b; ts A General View, Reviews & Drafts etc, RP). In the summer he went to the States to see his sister and to give the first Walker Foundation Lecture sponsored by the Economic Club of Pittsburgh, which had offered him ‘an absolutely fabulous fee’ ($2000 plus expenses up to $750) to address the club at a dinner meeting on ‘some aspect of the American-world economic relations during the near to mid-term future’. The invitation came via Mark Perlman of the University of Pittsburgh, who met Robbins while he was doing research in London in 1962/3. In his talk, which later appeared in the Congressional Record, introduced by Representative William Moorhead of Pennsylvania at the request of the Economic Club, Lionel recalled his wartime visits to the USA and the hopes and fears then entertained for the postwar world, emphasizing the wartime fears of postwar deflation.22 Lionel was soon very glad he had accepted the invitation: it gave him an opportunity to visit the Viners; Jacob Viner died on 12 September. He spent the rest of that month writing a long tribute to his oldest economist friend and mentor (1970c). In November, returning to the USA for a symposium organized by the FT, he went to see Frances Viner: as he told Caroline on 6 December, ‘Princeton was a touch melancholy. . . . it is sad to be at [13] Newlin Road without Jack: and we spent much time sorting his papers.’ With Frances he visited the Haberlers and the Machlups. He and Baumol and Machlup tried to arrange for the publication of some of Viner’s unpublished manuscripts: discouraged by Princeton University Press, they were unsuccessful until Donald Winch, who had been a graduate student of Viner’s after his first degree at LSE, took on the task (Correspondence re Jack Viner, RP; Melitz and Winch eds 1978). Robbins’s term of office as chairman of the governors was due to expire in December 1971, Adams’s as director in September 1972. The selection committee for a new director recommended asking Adams to stay on until he reached sixty-seven in 1974, primarily to allow plenty of time for choosing his successor. The Court on 10 June 1971 also agreed to establish a selection committee for Robbins’s successor, which met a week later. Finer wrote to Lionel the next day (LSE Letters re Chairmanship 1971, RP): ‘We adjourned, after some discussion, to a date to be fixed in October to enable “discreet enquiries” and “suggestions from members” to be made and received. But 22

LCR to Lady Harmer, 23 February 1970, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 G-L, RP; Perlman to LCR, 31 January 1970, Perlman Papers Box 6; ts Pittsburgh 16.6.70, and Remarks of Hon William S. Moorhead of Pennsylvania in the House of Representatives Monday, November 23, 1970, Congressional Record Proceedings and Debates of the 91st Congress, Second Session, Conferences etc 70–1, RP.

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the Committee was unanimously of the view that if you were prepared to make the very considerable personal sacrifices involved, it would wish, in due course, to recommend that you continue in office for another two years.’ Lionel would make the sacrifice, but only for the sake of the Library Appeal because he had no desire to go on working with Adams. Naturally there was opposition within the School, from staff and students, to the reappointment of Lord Robbins, the man who had closed LSE in 1969. When the gossip columnist of The Times reported on 23 October that thirty-nine members of the staff had told the selection committee they thought he must be replaced, Lionel told Finer on 25 October that his willingness to serve must be regarded ‘as being in suspense’ (Adams 8/34). But almost as many members of staff wrote to assure him of their support (LSE Letters re Chairmanship 1971, RP). The Court reelected him chairman on 16 December 1971. He gave notice that ‘if the appeal succeeded during the year he might ask the Court to release him’, a warning he repeated more strongly a year later.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Retirement

Lord Robbins retired from LSE three times: first, when he reluctantly gave up his chair in 1961; secondly when he reached the age at which he would otherwise have retired and his parttime appointment came to an end in 1966; and finally when he gave up the chairmanship of the governors in December 1973. But as far as he was concerned his retirement began when his ten-year term of office as chairman of the Financial Times finished at the end of December 1970. Then, as he had told his sister three months earlier, ‘I shall have to think out new ways of living.’ Robbins said his farewells to the staff at Bracken House on 31 December 1970, and on 4 January 1971 Garrett Drogheda (who succeeded him as chairman) gave a dinner for him and Iris with the board and a few senior staff: ‘All very agreable & friendly. . . . I couldn’t have fallen among nicer people and the whole episode has meant a widening of experience and contacts which I could never have hoped for in any academic life . . . I shall miss all this a good deal.’ But he had plenty to keep himself occupied: the House of Lords, which he began to attend most days it was in session, the Royal Opera House, on whose board he remained until 1980, the National Gallery, his own writing and, most immediately, from the day after the FT dinner, the organization of the Library Appeal. He suspected, correctly, that for the next two and a half years he would be ‘quite as fully stretched as ever I have been by FT business & only a little less than I was with the report on higher education’.1 Lionel ran the Library Appeal with his customary vigour. At the outset he proposed both a subcommittee to supervise the whole operation and report 1

LCR to ICR, 27 September 1970 and 3 January 1971. The FT also gave him a painting by Ceri Richards, one of Richards’s La Cathedrale engloutie series (S.F. Kelly, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, to LCR, 17 September 1981, 1981 Correspondence, RP), from the collection at Bracken House.

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regularly to the Standing Committee, and a group to carry out the practical work, with a chairman, a member of the governing body, who was prepared to devote two or more days a week to initiating plans, making contacts with potential major donors and supervising the general public relations policy. He admitted he might have to volunteer himself as such a chairman. The Standing Committee on 8 December 1970 appointed a subcommittee and a working party – Lionel chaired both – but the subcommittee fell into desuetude while the working party, originally comprising only Robbins, Adams, Donoughue and Yamey, expanded its activities. David Kingsley (a governor and director of an advertizing company) and Ben Roberts were immediately coopted and Harold Edey was persuaded to become a nearly fulltime organizer.2 As Lionel told his sister on 16 January, ‘The Court of Governors has put me in charge, so I can do a great many things without any entanglement with W.A. Gott sei Dank.’ Lionel moved into a new office at LSE on 5 January and thereafter spent three or four mornings a week there. In the afternoons he went to the Lords if he was not attending meetings of other bodies. He drove himself around in the Mini bought for the purpose. Ben Roberts recalled: ‘He loved his Mini. He was allowed to keep it in the School garage. We used to have to see him out. He would hit every other bollard from Houghton Street to Hampstead Garden Suburb.’ As Lionel reported to the Standing Committee on 5 January, he had started talking to ‘a number of eminent and well informed persons’ – friends and acquaintances he had made in the City and business world – in order to identify potential donors and the best way of approaching them. The working party met almost weekly and by the middle of February had drafted a plan of campaign, written by Robbins but based on notes by Adams and Kingsley (The Library Appeal: a draft plan of campaign). According to the plan, because the library was not ‘a subject of universal concern like famine relief or research into killing diseases’ but nonetheless had a unique international reputation, the appeal would proceed in two stages: in Stage I individual approaches would be made to foundations, possible large individual donors and the heads of major corporate enterprises and trade unions, and probably also to members of the academic staff and the governing body; in Stage II, there would be a wider appeal to past and present students and other users. Stage I had already begun; Stage II should be underway in nine or twelve months’ time. 2

The minutes and papers of the working party and the subcommittee are in Working Party of the Library Appeal Minutes, Working Party of the Library Appeal Agenda & Papers and Working Party Papers Library Appeal 1973, RP.

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He wrote to old School friends in other countries to enlist their help in setting up Friends of LSE or other organizations overseas. As he ‘had been impressed by the number of those he had consulted who had emphasised the necessity of improving the public image of the School’, the Working Party created another small working party on public relations, chaired by Ben Roberts, which arranged for a series of lectures on the academic disciplines represented at the School in 1971/2 (Robson ed 1972) and a series of dinners for distinguished persons. By the spring Lionel’s influential friends (such as Drogheda and Goodman) had begun to try to arrange meetings with possible benefactors; at the end of March he learned the Rayne Foundation would give £50,000. Another early promise, the outcome of his meeting with the Governor, was ‘a modest subscription’ (£5000) from the Bank of England (Working Party 14 June 1971). The response of friends overseas, notably G.L. Mehta in India and Louis Rasminsky in Canada, was encouraging, and Baumol agreed to give a lecture at LSE as a pretext for discussing the appeal with the working party on 7 June; Mehta was in London in April (Standing Committee 4 May 1971). These visits were the enjoyable parts of Lionel’s fundraising activities; as he told Caroline on 17 December, ‘the actual business of begging [is] distasteful’. The Appeal involved Lionel in extensive foreign travel, though he combined LSE business with trips for other purposes. On his November 1970 visit to New York he lectured at NYU and met a gathering of Friends of LSE arranged by Baumol before opening the FT symposium on Europe.3 He did not combine a brief visit to Bologna for another Claremont-Bologna conference in April 1971 (Hinshaw ed 1972) with fundraising, but when he went to an economics conference organized by Herbert Giersch of the Institut for Weltwirtschaft at Kiel in June he tackled Otmar Emminger, the Governor of the Bundesbank who had been a student at LSE in the 1930s, and made a valuable contact in Christian von Weizs¨acker, Professor at Heidelberg, who was an adviser to the Volkswagen Foundation (Standing Committee 6 July 1971). In October, on his way to lecture at the Claremont Graduate School, he flew via Montreal to see Professor Ian Campbell of Sir George Williams (now Concordia) University who had agreed to head a Canadian Friends of LSE, Ottawa to see Rasminsky, and New York to talk to the American Friends and, with Baumol, the Rockefeller Foundation. He had further talks with Emminger and Weizs¨acker when he presided at 3

LCR to Tarlok Singh, 3 November 1970, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 S-Z; tss New York University 30.11.70 Inflation and The Challenge of Europe, Miscellaneous Speeches on Public Affairs 1970–, RP.

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a conference organized by the List Gesellschaft in Basel in February 1972.4 The time taken up by this conference and chairing an FT conference in London (Robbins 1972a) a few days later were ‘a frightful subtraction from the time available for fund raising and all that’ but, as he told his sister on 18 February, he ‘liked the conferences nevertheless: it is nice to feel still an economist.’ Later that month he went to Turin to see Dr Agnelli of Fiat; later in the year he paid another visit to New York and one to Stockholm, both purely for fund-raising purposes (Ambrosine Hurt to members of Working Party, 14 March, 6 July and 12 October 1972). In 1973 there were visits to the USA and Canada, Japan and Hong Kong, Italy, Germany and Spain (Appointments Diary 1973, RP). In March 1972 Lionel and Iris went for the first time to Israel. Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, had invited him to give one of the annual Joseph Wunsch lectures, which Wunsch intended to be ‘a contribution toward bridging the gap . . . between man’s mastery of science and technology . . . and man’s cultural and spiritual involvement in the arts and humanities’. Robbins, after rehearsing his usual arguments on the distinction between technology and economics, speculated on the relation between technology and social welfare, concluding that technical progress was not necessarily inimical to social welfare (Robbins 1972b). When he was also asked to give a public lecture to the Van Leer Jerusalem Foundation, to meet with the Jerusalem Group for National Planning and, as the end of the visit coincided with the beginning of Passover, to a seder at a kibbutz, he asked Evelyn de Rothschild, who was chairman of the governors of Technion, what he should reply. His friend assured him on 26 January that he could decline the lecture invitation but he and Iris should certainly go to the seder (Israel March 1972, RP). Thus, after staying three nights in Haifa, Lionel and Iris went to Jerusalem for two days. There Lionel lunched with the economists of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, met the Minister of Education Yigael Alon and talked with the Jerusalem Group for National Planning. The itinerary included ‘two peaceful hours of talks’ with Don Patinkin, who found the conversation particularly useful as he was revising his Dennis Robertson lecture, on Keynes and the Cambridge 4

Working Party 22 September and 28 October 1971 and 17 February 1972; ts Political Economy in the Present Age, Claremont Lectures 1971; ms Opening Remarks Basle February 1972, Conferences etc 70–1, RP. In California he also gave a speech at a luncheon meeting of the Town Hall General Forum in Beverly Hills: ‘The Bretton Woods System and the I.M.F.’, Town Hall Journal, Los Angeles, California – November 16, 1971, 328–30, Miscellaneous Speeches on Public Affairs 1970–, RP.

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tradition, that he had just given at a Money Study Group conference in England (Yehuda Elkana to LCR, 2 and 26 March, LCR to Elkana, 6 April, Patinkin to LCR, 28 April 1972, Israel March 1972, RP; Patinkin 1974). From Jerusalem the Robbinses went north to Safed, for the seder at the Kibbutz Lehavot Habashan followed by a day’s sightseeing in Upper Galilee and the Golan Heights. Lionel (1976a, 140n) commented that he was impressed by what he had seen but thought kibbutzim could hardly be a model for worker cooperatives elsewhere. By the end of 1971 several LSE governors had agreed to act as ‘emissaries’ to various companies on behalf of the new library and Lionel himself was engaged in talks with UK foundations and corporations, but he had ‘no positive news to report’ to the Standing Committee on 7 December; he claimed to be ‘neither pessimistic nor optimistic about the outcome’. But the working party minutes reveal impatience and frustration on his part and a general feeling of discouragement: as Ben Roberts remarked on 14 December, ‘because they had not so far succeeded in attracting any major donation they were being forced by considerations of timing into what was essentially a second-best strategy.’ As well as asking the ‘emissaries’ to approach likely smaller donors, they had better seek the support of the academic staff as soon as possible. The timing of the launch of the public appeal was also still unsettled. In the new year things began to look up. The Nuffield Foundation offered a substantial donation, albeit conditional on the £1.8m target being reached by October 1973, and other smaller offers were coming in. Lionel obtained a statement endorsing the appeal ‘as a matter of national importance’ from the leaders of the three main political parties (Edward Heath, Harold Wilson and Jeremy Thorpe). The academic staff were asked to contribute and so were the governors and the honorary fellows – the response from the first was underwhelming. By October a little over £1/2m had been promised, leaving another £11/4 m still to be raised. A month later the Wolfson Foundation had offered £50,000, the Pilgrim Trust £10,000 and Hicks had donated most of his share of the 1972 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics (Standing Committee 8 February, 7 March, 2 May, 3 October and 7 November 1972). And so, as Lionel commented to his sister on 4 November, ‘the dreary round at L.S.E goes on. . . . Not too bad but not good enough to offset any prospect of speedy relief from this chronic disease of a three legged race tied to a corpse. I have said more severe things to the person in question [Walter Adams] . . . than I have ever said to any human being of like standing before. It works for a few days & then wears off.’ Six months later he was still having problems with ‘inexplicable behaviour by the usual chap’

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whose ‘insensitiveness secretiveness and downright incompetence could scarcely go further’: Adams had again failed to answer a letter from the Ford Foundation and John Pike had to be sent to New York (LCR to ICR, 20 July 1973; information from Ben Roberts). The public appeal was launched on 5 February 1973 with a press conference and lunch at LSE and a dinner at the Mansion House. Lionel then set off, with Iris, for a fortnight in North America, combining the fourth conference in the Claremont-Bologna series, for the first time held at Claremont (Hinshaw ed 1975), with seeing Caroline in Philadelphia, meetings in New York with David Rockefeller, Will Baumol and several foundations, and alumni events there and in Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa (Note on trip made by Lord Robbins to the USA and Canada 11–25 February 1973). He took part in four more Claremont conferences but his annual visits to Bologna came to an abrupt end. After lecturing there in February 1972 he agreed in June 1972 to lecture again the following May, requesting a Monday morning lecture: he had to pull out when he learned it had been scheduled for the afternoon and would not be changed. After that, as he told Randall Hinshaw on 20 June 1973 (Day File 1973, RP), he was disinclined to go back. After another trip to the USA in November to visit foundations with Baumol, when the Baumols entertained him warmly and took him to opera at the Met (LCR to Baumol, 19 November 1973, Day File 1973, RP), his last ‘official’ overseas visit on behalf of the Library was to attend a conference in Madrid in December organized in aid of the Appeal: he and Alan Day and Alan Prest were all going to speak and his former student Pedro Schwartz to chair it. Iris accompanied him and ‘as this will permit visits to the Prado, I do not greatly resent this extra job.’ In the midst of all this he celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday at a lunch given for him at the FT (LCR to ICR, 10 December 1973; Appointments Diary 1973). As chairman of the governors Robbins chaired the selection committee for a new director of LSE. The committee received an extraordinary number of suggestions: some names would have been anathema to Lionel and did not appear on the many A and B lists of possibles drawn up in 1972.5 Apart from an agreed preference for a younger man, there were differences of opinion about the desirable qualities of a director. Harry Johnson (a member of the committee) argued strongly to Lionel on 11 March 1972 for ‘an academic entrepreneur, and not just another caretaker’, someone to rebuild 5

The minutes and papers are in Selection Committee to Consider the Appointment of the Director Minutes & Agendas, RP.

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the School as a predominantly graduate institution and make it ‘the centre for the advanced study of the social sciences for the whole of Europe’ – a view Lionel shared, as he told Johnson on 23 March. But in the committee’s discussion on 19 June ‘some members thought that academic distinction was the primary qualification, others were inclined to think other qualities important, including the ability to deal with staff and students, administrative capacity and familiarity with the world outside the universities.’ Lionel suggested William Armstrong. Several senior Labour politicians were suggested, but only one (Roy Jenkins) made it to an A list. Lionel was, as he told Michael Swann on 9 April 1973 (Day File 1973, RP), opposed to appointing heads of academic institutions with political ambitions ‘unless they have other qualities which render them almost supreme in their generation. But this view is not shared by all my friends.’ These differences were nothing like as acute as those among the academic staff: as Lionel commented to Maurice Allen (another member of the committee) on 12 December, ‘opinion within the School is so divided that the name of almost any leader is cancelled out. The only one which doesn’t arouse controversy is someone whom we all respect and esteem but whose external contacts count nearly zero.’ Ernest Gellner, the philosopher and anthropologist who was a professor in the Sociology Department, was also on the selection committee. In a letter to Robbins on 23 October 1972 he put forward the name of the German industrial sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf. A doctoral student of Tom Marshall’s at LSE in the 1950s, he had been on leave from his professorship at the University of Constance since elected to the Bundestag in October 1969 and after a spell as a junior minister in the Federal Government was currently a member of the Commission of the European Communities in Brussels: a ‘scholar-politician’ in his own words (Dahrendorf to LCR, 28 August 1973, Selection Committee to consider the Appointment of the Director, RP). Lionel was very doubtful, and other committee members unenthusiastic, and Dahrendorf’s name dropped off the list for a while. He was considered more seriously after two committee members (Johnson and Frederic Seebohm) heard him speak at a conference in May 1973. By 28 June, Lionel told Seebohm (Day File 1973, RP) there had ‘emerged a fair degree of consensus’ that Lionel should talk to Dahrendorf to find out what his reaction would be to a definite offer; ‘in spite of certain lingering reservations’ he was ‘inclined himself to think that it is worthwhile trying to get him. He certainly seems to inspire more confidence, and indeed enthusiasm, among the academics than any of the other names.’ Robbins asked Dahrendorf ‘in the course of a lunch in the less-thanintimate grandeur of the Reform Club’ on 12 July (Dahrendorf 1995, 486).

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Lionel was persuasive. On 18 July Dahrendorf wrote Robbins that he was seriously considering the detailed questions that would arise if he accepted the job. He wondered if they could talk again. On Saturday 18 August Lionel showed Dahrendorf round a deserted School and treated him to lunch at a ‘very agreable steak house’ nearby. A month later Dahrendorf came over again for the special meeting of the Court on 18 September and the public announcement. (A month later still Lionel took him and his family to Covent Garden, an evening of mainly Jerome Robbins ballets.)6 In his remarks to the Court Lionel listed the desiderata which Dahrendorf clearly satisfied as ‘(a) academic standing (b) administrative experience (c) not least leadership involving health and vigour of youth’. Lionel received many personal letters of congratulation on this ‘immensely distinguished’ appointment. Noel Annan wished Lionel could have ended his autobiography on this note.7 The Court meeting on 13 December 1973 was Lionel’s last as chairman. The sum raised by the Library Appeal now stood at £3.4m and approaches to the Kresge and Volkswagen Foundations were still outstanding. But he had told the Standing Committee on 4 December that while he was prepared to complete the negotiations in which he was currently involved, he was not prepared to run the Appeal after he retired from the chairmanship. On 10 December he presided over a banquet at Skinners’ Hall in aid of the Appeal. Adams was away ill, as he still was at the black tie dinner for Lionel at the Reform Club a month later: ‘a splendid farewell party with the Standing Committee & members of my team – W.A. fortunately out of the way so no need for hypocrisy’ (ts Draft Statement to be made by Lord Robbins at the Skinners’ Hall on 10 December 1973, LSE Speeches etc, RP; LCR to ICR, 26 January 1974). Lionel sent his apologies for Adams’s last Court meeting on 27 June. The banquet, its costs paid by the generous anonymous benefactor (Max Rayne), raised £5620 and a concert by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the Banqueting Hall, Whitehall, attended by HM The Queen Mother (Chancellor of the University of London) in February 1974 raised £7000. The Kresge Foundation declined to support the Library Appeal but the Volkswagen Foundation offered £100,000. The School had come near enough the target to use reserves to cover the remaining gap, receive the government grant and buy the freehold site and building, Strand House, at the end of 6 7

Dahrendorf to LCR, 18 July 1973, New Director: Professor Dahrendorf; LCR to Dahrendorf, 14 August and 24 October 1973, Day File 1973, RP. Ms notes Extraordinary Court 18.9.73, Annan to LCR, 19 September 1973, New Director: Professor Dahrendorf, RP.

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1973 (LCR to Rayne, 13 September 1973, Day File 1973, RP; LCR to ICR, 5 March 1974; London School of Economics 1978). Robbins had – to state the obvious – little time for serious reading or writing in 1971–3. He gave, however, the British Academy’s second Keynes Lecture on 26 October 1972 (Robbins 1973a). Austin Robinson had given the first and spoken about Keynes himself. Lionel chose to speak on the international monetary problem, with which Keynes had been particularly concerned in the last decade of his life. It was a current topic: on 15 August 1971 US President Nixon had ‘closed the gold window’, that is suspended the convertibility of the US dollar into gold, the lynch pin of the Bretton Woods system. The major European currencies and the Japanese yen floated until December 1971, when the G-10 members of the IMF tried to reestablish the Bretton Woods system under their ‘Smithsonian Agreement’. This devalued the US dollar by raising the official price of gold from $35 to $38 an ounce and allowed wider margins within which other currencies could vary against the US dollar under IMF rules. But the forces which led to this breakdown of Bretton Woods were still operating: the Vietman war, expansionary US monetary policy, rising US inflation, a large US current account deficit, speculation against the dollar and in favour of other currencies and gold. In June 1972 the British pound was floated – other major currencies following suit during 1973. As Lionel had often done before, he explained in his Keynes Lecture why he did not believe in general floating – pointing to the Smithsonian Agreement as yet another example of central banks’ reluctance to tolerate it – although he had no objection in principle to individual countries resorting to floating for an experimental period: as he had said at the time (1972c, 100), ‘If I had been, as I was in the last war, a public servant giving advice to Ministers, I certainly would have advised them last week to do what they did.’ He had also expected the Smithsonian Agreement would not last. After outlining the deficiencies of Bretton Woods, he indicated his preferences as to what should follow it: a return to stable exchange rates between major currencies but with wide margins for fluctuations of exchange rates and, eventually, a return to the convertibility of the US dollar into gold. With respect to the European currencies, because he was ‘a Common Market man chiefly for political reasons’, he agreed with the long-term objective of a European Monetary Union though it might take twenty-five years to achieve and be sustainable – as he had argued before at a conference on the future of the Common Market in Frankfurt in October 1970 (Robbins 1971e).

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The House of Lords gave Lionel the opportunity to speak and vote in favour of Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community (HLDebs vol 323 cols 443–51 and vol 335 cols 1159–62). The Conservatives under Edward Heath had unexpectedly gained a majority of 330 seats to 288 for Labour in the general election of June 1970. But Heath’s government is remembered not only for UK accession to the EEC on 1 January 1973 (and hence the introduction of Value Added Tax) but for disastrous domestic economic policy (the ‘Barber boom’). Inflation reached 10 per cent a year before the oil price shock of 1973/4; a new approach to monetary control (‘competition and credit control’) introduced in 1971 was a spectacular failure; the budgetary policy of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Anthony Barber, was highly expansionary in 1972/3 in an attempt to prevent unemployment from rising; there was an explosion of wage demands and major strikes, especially in the public sector (Blackaby ed 1978, 52–76; Howson 2004b, 152–5). Robbins frequently inveighed against government policy in the Lords and in the FT, to which he contributed articles and reviews now that he was no longer chairman.8 He deplored the failure to control monetary growth, repeatedly warning of the dangerous consequences of rapid inflation, and came, in desperation, to support the introduction of a statutory freeze on wages and prices in November 1972 because a deflationary financial policy by itself would produce unacceptably high unemployment. After the government was defeated in the February 1974 general election, Lionel commented to Caroline on 3 April: ‘It really serves Heath right despite his integrity & courage, for the sheer stupidity of his fiscal policy. . . . [He] has landed himself & his party in a position which may well give us Labour for years to come.’ Wilson formed a minority government in February and won a working majority in another general election in October. Heath was overthrown and Margaret Thatcher elected as leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975. Lionel was not surprised. As he told R.S. Malone on 24 February (Day File Jan 1975-Dec 1976, RP), ‘In a way it is sad about Ted Heath but his past was so devilled with responsibility for inflation that it was clear that the majority of his party were not prepared to go with him any longer. That being the case I personally have no doubt that Margaret Thatcher is probably the best of the candidates for the leadership. 8

His FT articles included ‘Inflation: the position now’ (23 June 1971), ‘The bicentenary of David Ricardo’ (17 April 1972), ‘The fall in the value of money’ (20 June 1972), ‘The economics of counter-inflation’ (12 December 1972), ‘Crisis for the free economy’ (24 April 1973) and ‘A crisis of intellectual error’ (14 December 1973); among the many books he reviewed were JMK 1–8 and 13–16 and the correspondence of Lord Overstone edited by Denis O’Brien (Financial Times Feature Articles 1971– and Reviews FT, RP).

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She has great intellectual qualities and personal courage: whether she has the strength and the vision to lead her party out of the wilderness is of course a matter which only the future will decide’. Robbins was often asked to chair lectures or seminars of the Institute of Economic Affairs, for instance those on inflation (Robbins 1972d, 1974c). While he was still chairman of the FT he had contributed only an address to mark the tenth anniversary of the Institute (1966g) and forewords to a selection of Harold Wincott’s writings (1968) and to the first Wincott Memorial Lecture given by Milton Friedman (1970). He gave the fifth Wincott Memorial Lecture himself in October 1974 (Robbins 1974a). His title, ‘Aspects of post-war economic policy’, ‘allow[ed] him to talk about almost anything’ but he focussed on those aspects of policy which he thought had contributed to the difficult economic position in which the UK found itself. While he mentioned in turn the burden of taxation, the lack of investment, industrial policy and restrictive practices, all of which had reduced productivity, these ‘in themselves they would not have led us to the troubles characteristic of the period’ which were due to inflationary government policy. As for the factors leading to inflation, ‘they are all subject to one underlying condition, namely, that the supply of money or the credit base – call it what you will – is allowed to increase so as to permit their operation.’ Press commentators the next day chose to emphasize different parts of his argument: the Daily Telegraph thought he had delivered a ‘most scathing attack . . . on trade unions’, which he had not; William Keegan in the Financial Times emphasized his point that the monetary brakes could not be put on suddenly; The Times that the government bore the ultimate responsibility for inflation. His colleague Frank Paish justly criticized him for downplaying the external factors dominating the early 1970s: worldwide inflation and rising import prices (Wincott, RP). Lionel persuaded the Institute to publish a collection of Arnold Plant’s essays (1974), offering to contribute £100 out of his own pocket for a guarantee to the publishers against loss (IEA Box 197 Folder Selected Econ Essays & Adds Prof Arnold Plant). But he refused to become a trustee of the Institute, telling Ralph Harris that he wished to avoid commitments which might be time-consuming and would appear to label him (Seldon to LCR, 16 December, Harris to LCR, 31 December 1970, IEA Box 199 Folder Fund Raising). Even when he wrote an appraisal of the IEA after twenty-five years (1981b) he tried to distance himself as ‘someone not officially connected with the Institute’, commending its publications for their readability, empirical approach, courage (to argue for unpopular positions) and, especially, catholicity. When he had become ‘at last a free man’ he was, he told Caroline on 26 January 1974, ‘finding my new way of life very agreable: there were no

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transitional difficulties at all – and I have already written two prefaces & two articles. I work at home in the morning & then go down to Westminster for the afternoon & early evening – leaving the end of the day for home again or entertainments. We are going to South Africa in March & early April; and since my expenses at least will be sustained by lecturing, there is quite a lot to do by way of preparation which perhaps will eventuate in the end in another book.’9 He had already told Harry Johnson (28 March 1973, Day File 1973, RP) that he did not want his LSE History of Economic Thought lectures published as such for the material in them might provide ‘the easiest way back’ into serious academic work. Lionel had been happy to take up a longstanding invitation from Sheila Van der Horst – one of Arnold Plant’s doctoral students at LSE in the 1930s (Van der Horst 1942, vii) – to lecture at the University of Cape Town. He had wanted Iris to see South Africa ever since a visit for the FT in February 1968. He had been attracted by the country (LCR to ICR, 27 February 1968): ‘South Africa is heavenly, at any rate as regards the climate and the landscape. If one could anaesthetize oneself against political anxieties, it would be lovely to live there. As it is, I think there must be many frustrations for sensitive people.’ He had made friends, notably Dr Anton Rupert of Rupert Tobacco Corporation Ltd who shared his interest in art, and hoped to return soon. An intended second visit in February 1969 had fallen victim to the troubles at LSE and one in February 1970 kept to the shortest possible because of his daughter Anne’s illness (LCR to Rupert, 29 April and 27 May 1968 and 30 January 1970, Personal Correspondence 1966–70 M-R, RP). Lionel also accepted an invitation to spend a week at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg: he hoped he and Iris could explore the Kruger National Park and see friends he had made on his previous visits. After a week in Johannesburg, which included two nights at a guest cottage outside the Kruger National Park, they flew on to Cape Town. While they were there they visited Dr Rupert at Stellenbosch. Before they left South Africa on 3 April Lionel summarized ‘one of the most splendid trips we have ever had’ to his sister: We started in the Kruger Nature Reserve & Johannesburg – in the former seeing all sorts of wild beasts lions leopards girafes elephants etc in freedom, in the latter lecturing a couple of times[10 ] & meeting prominent people including the attractive & intrepid Helen Suzman the leader of the socalled progressive party the chief opponent of discrimination. 9 10

The prefaces were for Embling (1974) and Preston (ed 1974); the articles were one for the FT and a piece on Keynes for the Credit Suisse Bulletin (1974d). A lecture to students on ‘Prices and incomes policy’ and a public lecture on ‘The Philosophy of International Monetary Relations’ (ms notes in South Africa Tour March 1974, RP).

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Then we came here [the Vineyard Hotel, Newlands] for nearly three weeks, lecturing twice a week &, with a splendid car & chauffeur at our disposal, exploring the incomparable – repeat incomparable – landscape. Cape Town is a fine university with very distinguished & dedicated academics maintaining high traditions amid the manifold threats & disturbing laws & customs of this complicated country. The more one sees of the socalled separate development, the less possible it is to believe in its viability, let alone its humanity & justice. . . . I can’t see how it will all end. But I am sure that it is fundamentally important to maintain all possible links with the fine people who are trying to change it in constitutional ways: & I guess from the attitude of the young that they have some chance of eventual success.

Robbins had been asked to lecture at Cape Town on the development of economic thought linking theory with policy. He accordingly offered (LCR to Van der Horst, 23 October 1973, Day File 1973, RP): ‘a review of various aspects of 19th century classical theory of policy with a survey of the modifications, which a 20th century neo classicist like myself would wish to introduce’. This ‘could be done in six or eight lectures’ depending on the time available. According to his appointments diary and his notes he gave four lectures, plus an evening lecture on inflation and a speech at a dinner in his honour given by the Economic Society of South Africa, and participated in three seminars. When he started to turn the lectures into a book, he told Sheila Van der Horst on 6 June (1974 Correspondence, RP) that it was going to take quite a long time. ‘As I look at my manuscript it all seems much too superficial so that on the new plan, whilst the general argument is unchanged there will be something like twelve chapters. . . . I do not fancy I shall finish much before Christmas, especially as there is a conference in Greece in September and a couple of lectures in Mexico early in December.’ The next day he spoke at a ‘World Symposium on Energy and Raw Materials’ in Paris (1975a) and the following day he and Iris went to the USA for a week, when he saw Caroline, spoke at a party for LSE alumni in Washington and attended a reception in his honour in New York. The Evening Standard on 19 June reported of the Washington event that Lionel had railed against the new Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, as ‘a menace to academic freedom’, ‘whose closing of tax loopholes for Americans resident in England had lost LSE the services of a Professor from the University of Chicago’: Harry Johnson had sent his letter of resignation two weeks earlier (Johnson to LCR, 22 May 1974, 1974 Correspondence, RP). These activities were immediately followed by a weekend at the Aldeburgh Festival with the Harmers, the annual Graduation ceremonies at Stirling and ‘a round of parties etc to say farewell to Drogheda’ when he retired from the chairmanship of the

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board of the Royal Opera House. Lionel was glad to get back to the book at Lyme. He told his sister on 11 August: ‘It is, in a way, a synthesis of my chief interests in recent years in the economic sphere, history of thought & contemporary application & will bear the title (with due explanations of its limitations) Political Economy: Past & Present. It sounds a little pretentious. But I think that in the Essay form in which it will be presented without any claim to exhaustiveness it will not read too heavily; and certainly I am finding it enjoyable, painting with a broad brush my general economic & political Weltanschauung.’ The book (1976a) appeared two years later. The proofs had been full of incorrect editorial insertions, changing the names of some of the economists mentioned and adding the wrong publishers of some of his own books, for which the copyeditor apologized, as well as numerous typographical errors many of which Lionel did not spot until it was too late. When he also learned his typescript had been destroyed, he copied his letter of complaint to the publishing director to Maurice Macmillan. Macmillan was good enough to send a long and detailed reply on 22 December, apologizing for the publisher’s errors, though he pointed out the proofs had only been a day late.11 Lionel had taken his closing remarks in his Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy (1952, 206) – ‘How interesting it would be, having surveyed the Classical contribution to the solution of these problems [economic and social] problems, to proceed to examine to what extent, according to our lights and our ethical postulates, these contributions are in any sense valid’ – as the rationale for his new book. He outlined the classical views and his own on such matters as the provision of public goods and services, the organization of production (the role of private property, competition, monopoly and trade unions), the need for macroeconomic policy (monetary and fiscal), taxation and distribution, collectivism and international economic relations. As academic reviewers noted (for instance Gordon 1977, Schwartz 1977), the book added little to the examination of the ideas of the classical economists in the earlier book. But it was generally sympathetically reviewed as an exposition of Robbins’s own liberal views on fundamental issues of economic policy. He also received a letter from Karl Popper on 10 July 1976 (Political Economy Past and Present, RP), which, he told Caroline on 12 August, ‘would keep me happy even if the book had no further circulation’. Popper’s generous 11

LCR to Keith Povey, 30 December 1975, and subsequent correspondence in Political Economy Past and Present, RP.

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comments included: ‘you remain, basically, an optimist. . . . I too believe, as I feel you do, that optimism is almost a moral duty – as it was during the dark days of the war. It is a humane book, and a gracious book.’ The first minister for the arts in Heath’s government had been Lionel’s former student David Eccles, now Viscount Eccles. His promising ministerial career had faltered in 1962 when Harold Macmillan ‘summoned [him] to Downing Street to offer him a further spell at the Board of Trade [where he had been President 1957–9 between two stints as Minister of Education]. . . . Eccles overplayed his hand, declining the offer and reportedly insisting, “It’s the Exchequer or nothing”’ (ODNB). Lionel first encountered him in his new role on 30 September 1970 when he went with Garrett Drogheda and John Tooley, who had just taken over as General Administrator, to see Eccles to discuss the plans for redevelopment of the Royal Opera House. Eccles accepted the need for redevelopment and the argument that the government should acquire some of the land owned by the Covent Garden Market Authority for this purpose (Notes of a meeting and FSC 22 October 1970). (The land was eventually purchased but not until 1974.) Of more immediate concern to the finance subcommittee were current finances. At first (Donaldson 1988, 151–2) ‘the change of government appeared to bode no obvious difference in the policy for the arts . . . the promise of Lord Eccles’ appointment was fulfilled by the announcement that the Arts Council grant for 1971/2 would be increased by £2.6 million to £11.9 million. . . . Yet the long inflationary period lay ahead, and the days when a Chancellor of the Exchequer made personal undertakings to the Chairman of Covent Garden were long past.’ Before the change of government the Arts Council had provided a grant to write off the bank overdraft and the ROH had managed to keep its expected deficiency for 1970/1 within the annual grant (£1.4m), mainly by raising seat prices (FSC 22 January and 19 March 1970). By November 1970 the estimates for 1971/2 showed a deficiency of nearly £1.9m. As Robbins told the board on 24 November another increase in seat prices was ‘virtually inevitable’. With an increased grant from the Arts Council the administration balanced the budget for 1971/2 only to find that the actual deficiency for the previous year was much higher than estimated. Claus Moser urged improvements in financial accounting, including the preparation of a triennial ‘rolling’ budget on the basis of constant prices, to which the expected cost of inflation would be added in submissions to the Arts Council; John Sainsbury, who had joined the finance subcommittee in November 1970, argued for better management

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accounting as well (ROH Board 23 March 1971; FSC 17 March and Special Meeting on 2 June 1971). But a report on the House’s operations by the accountants Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co in October 1971 (copy in RP) concluded there was ‘no substantial under utilisation of resources’ and hence little scope for economies. For the rest of the decade, ‘the Opera House would be kept going by the Arts Council, but only just.’ The grant, rising from £1.6m for 1971/2 to £7m for 1979/80, could not keep pace with accelerating inflation, especially wage inflation (Donaldson 1988, 158, 214). Finance subcommittee meetings were increasingly preoccupied with labour relations and negotiations with the unions (the Musicians Union, Equity and the National Association of Theatrical Television and Kine Employees [NATTKE]). Before Lionel retired as chairman of the subcommittee in September 1975, when Sainsbury succeeded him, he was a member of a special labour relations committee with Moser, Sainsbury and Mark Bonham Carter: this was not a formal subcommittee but, in Moser’s words, ‘4 of us being available on call when there is a problem’. Lionel was ‘often there [the ROH] three times a week for anxious and delicate business’ (FSC 19 May 1975; Moser, The work of the board, 23 June 1977, ROH; LCR to ICR, 19 July 1975). Eccles replaced Lord Goodman as chairman of the Arts Council in 1972 with Patrick Gibson (of Pearson Longmans and the FT). Drogheda immediately asked Goodman to join the ROH board (Goodman 1993, 306). When Drogheda’s term as chairman was due to end in January 1973 Robbins, Bonham Carter, Goodman and Moser formed the search committee for his successor. According to one report (Lebrecht 2001, 310, which is confirmed by letters in 1973 Correspondence, RP), Moser nominated Noel Annan, while Goodman and Bonham Carter suggested John Pope-Hennessy, then director of the Victoria and Albert Museum: ‘Robbins donned a worried look and wondered whether it would be fitting for the chief executive of a publicly-funded museum to be chairman of a state-funded opera house. He wrote to the head of the civil service, William Armstrong, seeking clarification. Armstrong . . . wrote back that this would be technically improper since the money for the V&A and the ROH came from the same source. As a matter of principle, however, he added that this had nothing to do with Pope-Hennessy being a civil servant. If, for example, the committee were to pick Claus Moser, who was director of the Central Office of Statistics, there would be no grounds for objection. “At this point,” said Moser, “I was removed from the committee.”’ In June the search committee recommended Moser and the board agreed unanimously on 26 June; Moser took over a year later.

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Pope-Hennessy, on the board since 1970, shared Robbins’s continuing concern about the design of ballet and opera, pointing out in November 1975 that ‘design is generally regarded as the weakest feature of current operatic policy at Covent Garden’ (‘A note on stage design at Covent Garden’, CG Board Minutes, RP). Lionel argued to the finance subcommittee on 20 September 1976 that ‘Covent Garden’s greatest mistakes had been in the field of design. Many productions had been extravagant. Some of the most successful productions since the War had also been highly economical.’ (A recent example of the latter was the 1975 Peter Grimes produced by Elijah Moshinsky.) There was ‘considerable support’ for his view but ‘it was argued that the nature of the work being produced often dictated the style of production.’ When the board had accepted Colin Davis’s choice of G¨otz Friedrich to produce a new Ring, Pope-Hennessy reported on 25 July 1972 that he had heard such a ‘distressing’ report on a new production of Tannh¨auser at Bayreuth produced by Friedrich and designed by J¨urgen Rose that he wondered whether it was wise to entrust them with the Ring. Lionel, chairing the discussion in Drogheda’s absence, ‘said that Covent Garden had so far failed to evolve a visual style. The new Ring was an opportunity, which if at all possible should not be missed, to present a visually beautiful cycle. He could not but regret that Friedrich had . . . been unwilling to work with a painter or a sculptor.’ Tooley defended the decision and said he would see the Tannh¨auser. Lionel asked Tooley to ‘bear in mind their reservations’ when he went to Bayreuth and when he talked to Friedrich. On 26 September the board accepted that Friedrich wanted his own design team and endorsed the earlier decision. In the event Rose withdrew as he was too busy and Friedrich chose Josef Svoboda as designer. The production received mixed reviews for Friedrich’s and Svoboda’s work but almost nothing but praise for Colin Davis (Donaldson 1988, 161–2; Lebrecht 2001, 316–17). The 1970s Ring was affected by the recurrent financial crises. The Arts Council offered a grant of £2m for 1973/4 but the escalating cost of new productions suggested this would not be enough (ROH Board 25 September 1973). The finance subcommittee tried to introduce tighter controls on the cost of new productions but as Tooley commented to the committee on 18 September, ‘all the overseas opera houses he had visited found it difficult to get their designers and producers to relate designs and ideas to costs.’ At an extraordinary meeting on 5 October the majority of the committee, but not Lionel whose dissent was recorded, was reluctant to raise seat prices, which had just been raised (partly to cover the net cost of the new Value Added Tax) and also restructured, following an analysis

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of opera attendances by Moser. When Lionel ‘invited the Board [on 27 November] to consider the even more serious outlook for the financial year 1974/75’, it agreed to the further price increase. On 22 January 1974 he told the board it ‘must be prepared to consider some radical changes to meet the deficit . . . [for example] the possibility of either cutting out The Ring entirely, or putting on the old production’. On 19 February the finance subcommittee recommended producing Die Walk¨ure alone in 1974/5. At a special meeting on 16 May, following receipt of the designs which raised the estimated cost, the board, led by Moser, decided to go ahead, starting with Rheingold and Die Walk¨ure in the autumn of 1974, with the help of private donations. Lionel ‘would not oppose the decision . . . but he could not regard it with contentment, having regard to the . . . financial position’. In the autumn the board agreed on 26 November to postpone Siegfried from May 1975 to September/October 1975 and G¨otterd¨ammerung and the full cycle to September/October 1976. In the autumn of 1975 Moser decided to hold a full day meeting of the board to discuss both the artistic future of the Royal Opera House and the current economic, social and political problems facing it (briefly, inflation including wage demands and exchange-rate depreciation, decline of audiences for live performances, growth of anti-elitism). At the meeting, held at Winchester College on Saturday 22 November, ‘the Board’s discussion . . . revolved around the twin themes – of the economic (more than the political or social) threats facing Covent Garden and of the necessity . . . to ensure that artistic standards are, at the least, not allowed to slip.’ Several innovations were suggested which came to pass later (such as priority booking for the Friends of Covent Garden, improved advertizing and an ROH newsletter) (Moser, The economic, social and political pressures facing Covent Garden, and Summary Minutes of a Special Meeting, CG Board Minutes, RP). Further weekend meetings which Lionel attended were held at University College Oxford (where Goodman was now Master), in July 1977, December 1978 and November 1980. The mood was less gloomy in 1977 than in 1975, following a good season for both opera and ballet, but there was more discussion of financial control, of design and of development. The 1978 meeting concentrated on issues of artistic policy, especially in relation to the Royal Ballet, of which Norman Morrice had recently succeeded Kenneth MacMillan as director (minutes in CG Board Minutes, RP). MacMillan had decided to resign in 1976, fed up with lack of support from the board – and the continuing influence of Ninette de Valois (Anderson 2006, 200). He remained principal choreographer (but within a couple of years his muse, Lynn Seymour, left the company).

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When Robbins gave up the chair of the finance subcommittee he took on the chair of a new development subcommittee. By 1975 the government had acquired the freehold of a large site to the west and south of the House, leaving the ROH to find the money to redevelop it. Robbins’s committee was responsible for general strategy, relations with the government and legal aspects, but not for fundraising: it asked Sir Marcus Sieff to chair a separate Appeal committee; when he declined Drogheda agreed to chair it jointly with Moser (ROH Board 27 January, 24 February and 27 April 1976). Early meetings were mainly concerned with the issues of valuation and purchase of the leases of the properties on James Street and Mart Street which would have to be demolished in the first phase of redevelopment for the extension to the rear of the House (CG Development Committee Agenda & Minutes, RP). The cost of Phase 1 was then estimated at £3m including the cost of the leases. Meanwhile the ROH had applied for planning permission for the whole development. When the GLC unexpectedly postponed consideration of the whole development and asked for detailed plans of Phase 1, the board decided on 28 September 1976 to go ahead with buying the leases while waiting for the results of the resubmission; it asked the development committee ‘to consider further the nature and timing of further approaches to Government departments, both for finance and for moral support; the question of links with local residents; the problem of what to do with the empty buildings . . . ; the timing of the commissioning of detailed drawings and the inviting of tenders’. From January 1977 there was also a small working party, chaired by Robbins and including the ROH’s solicitor Anthony Rubinstein, which met fortnightly in addition to the monthly development committee meetings (ROH Board 25 January 1977). Lionel was involved in numerous other meetings with Rubinstein, the architects, the Arts Council and the GLC. Planning permission was obtained in March and the development site transferred from the Arts Council to a new trust administered jointly by the Arts Council and the ROH: Robbins was one of the two ROH trustees (ROH Board 29 March 1977). Some of the existing buildings were soon occupied and used by the ROH: the adjacent Floral Hall on the south side of the House was converted for use as a scenery store and for orchestra changing rooms. In December 1977 a project manager, Robin Dartington of the National Building Agency, was appointed: Lionel told the board on 31 January 1978 that this had ‘transformed the situation’: Dartington (who had told the development subcommittee on 19 January that he was ‘already sceptical about the building programme shown to him by the Architects’) had ‘developed friendly relations with the architects while establishing what needed to be done’.

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In January 1978 it was hoped that building work on Phase I could commence early in 1979 and be complete by the end of 1981. The estimate for the work, which had already risen to £7m, was revised to £9.4m in March 1978. Lionel told the board on 31 March that the development subcommittee had agreed there ‘could be no question’ of increasing the £7m figure and the architects had been asked to find ways of keeping the cost within that limit. There followed months of discussions in the development subcommittee and the working party on what exactly should be provided in this first phase of building, which were further complicated by the aspiration of Norman Morrice and others to include a ‘Dance House’ within the (whole) new development. The board agreed to a £7.8m cost limit on 25 July. By the autumn the board had to make a decision if work was to begin in 1979; it approved the outline proposals, which provided an opera rehearsal studio, dressing rooms for opera principals, two ballet studios and dressing rooms for the dancers, though not the much needed staff canteen, on 28 November. At this point some £3m had been raised by the appeal committee. The ROH launched its campaign for the remaining funds for Phase I with a banquet at the Guildhall in the presence of HRH The Prince of Wales on 14 February 1979. The Labour government announced a special grant of £1m the same day. The GLC provided another £1m. Prince Charles also made a film of the inadequate backstage conditions at the House, which was widely shown in the United States as well as in Britain; HRH The Princess Margaret visited five American cities on behalf of the appeal in October (ROH Board 30 January 1979; Donaldson 1988, 168–9). Lionel told Caroline on 5 June not to miss the film if she had the chance to see it: ‘It is far the best presentation of the creation of magic in the most unpromising circumstances that you could imagine.’ Meanwhile further planning permission had to be sought and obtained, contractors chosen and a management contract negotiated. On 30 July the ROH board authorized Lionel as chair of the development subcommittee to sign the contract with the contractors, and at a special meeting on 10 August it agreed to start the work without the full cash in hand because of the effects of increasing inflation on the cost. The £7.8m limit had allowed for 121/2 per cent inflation, which was raised in September 1979 to 18 per cent for 1979 and 15 per cent thereafter. In February 1980 the final cost of the first programme of development was estimated at just under £9m. By April the 15 per cent inflation expected for 1980 and 1981 had to be raised to 171/2 per cent. Construction was ten weeks behind schedule and estimated completion now early 1982 (February). Fortunately the result of an appeal to the new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, by Moser and Drogheda was a further government contribution

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of £1m which also helped the ROH to obtain bridging finance to cover the rest of the £3m gap (ROH Board 25 March and 27 May 1980). When Robbins retired from the board in July 1980, he remained on the development subcommittee (though not its chair) and the chair of the development working party while the work on Phase I was proceeding. The subcommittee began to consider the next phases of development, including the possibility of financing them by commercial development within the site. Lionel actively participated in (and usually chaired) an ‘ad hoc financial development group’ during 1980 and explained the resulting options to the board at its 1980 Oxford meeting (Development Ahead A paper for discussion by the Board at the Oxford meeting on 22 November 1980, CG Board Minutes, RP). As the board minutes of 29 July recorded, Lionel’s involvement in the redevelopment was ‘not just a matter of taking the chair at meetings of the [Development] Sub-Committee: he had taken a close interest in all the discussions and negotiations concerned with development, and had made himself constantly and unsparingly available as a source of guidance to the staff involved in the enterprise.’ Colette Clark, a fellow member of the development committee, told Iris Robbins on 18 June 1984 that he was ‘wonderful over the development . . . with such a grasp of the smallest as well as the largest point’. By the early 1970s Robbins was the longest serving trustee of the National Gallery. According to Conlin (2006, 198), ‘The admission charges episode, a central one in the Gallery’s history, began with Paymaster-General David Eccles’ announcement on October 27, 1970 that the [new] government aimed to collect £1m per annum in charges.’ At the next National Gallery board meeting, on 8 November, the trustees’ first reaction to the announcement (which was made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the House of Commons)12 was to decide not to make a public statement but that John Witt write privately to Eccles to express ‘their dismay at this retrograde step’, pointing out the possible adverse effect on attendance and the likely administrative complications. Lionel argued that ‘the tone of protest should not be too strong’. The trustees had held mixed views about entrance fees for decades: at their next meeting on 3 December they ‘reiterated . . . [their] disapproval of the imposition of entrance fees’ and discussed details of implementation. There should be at least one free day a week, preferably Saturday, an entry charge of no more than 2s (10p), free admission for 12

Lord Jellicoe read the Chancellor’s statement in the Lords (HLDebs vol 312 cols 47–62).

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children on all days and, if possible, season tickets. They decided not to join the Tate in making a public protest, ‘Lord Robbins question[ing] what was likely to be the Government attitude to any application for funds if a public protest was made’. The director (Martin Davies) wrote to the DES accordingly (NG Board 3 January 1971). In the spring of 1971, after the Minister of Education and Science (Margaret Thatcher) had issued a white paper on the subject, Eccles stated in the House of Lords that legislation would be introduced to enable the British Museum and some other museums to charge entrance fees, commenting that admission charges were not being imposed on any museum. Some trustees, especially Denis Mahon, argued that the National Gallery should therefore refuse to implement the government’s policy. Others, notably Playfair, Robbins and Witt, thought it a better strategy to comply with government policy, while making clear their objections, and to press for tax reforms to facilitate acquisitions. The trustees also agreed to press for a free day each week and free admission for children, old age pensioners and students (NG Board 3 June and 1 July 1971). When Alan Prest, who had taken over the editorship of the Three Banks Review from Richard Sayers, asked Lionel on 27 November 1970 to contribute an article on the subject of government and the arts (Personal Correspondence 1966–70 M-Z, RP), he seized the opportunity. As he wrote in July 1971 (1971d, 3), ‘The export of an important Velasquez, the continual uncertainty regarding the destination of the even more important Titian, the imposition of entry charges to public museums and galleries and the fantastic anomaly of the tax system revealed by the fate of the Hart bequest [of £500,000] to the National Gallery [which received only £100,000] have all contrived to make discussion of the principles of state support for the arts a matter of urgent importance.’ In January 1971 Eccles had declined a request for a special grant to purchase Velazquez’s Juan de Pareja and ‘the greatest Velazquez ever to leave these shores’ went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Verdi 2003, 39). As Witt reported to the NG board on 4 February, Eccles had told him that ‘he thought it unlikely that the Government would be prepared to make a large special grant for any picture’ including Lord Harewood’s Titian, Death of Actaeon, which had been on loan to the gallery and which the Harewood trustees now intended to sell. The trustees doubted a public appeal would succeed, given the likely amount required (£2m). Lionel gloomily remarked that ‘cases like those of the Velazquez and the Titian imperilled the whole Waverley Committee system since the stipulation of

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fair compensation for owners – something he had himself always been much in favour of – was now making the Gallery’s position virtually impossible.’ The trustees did, however, agree to enquire if the NACF would sponsor an appeal. The NACF immediately offered £50,000. It was also prepared to participate in a joint appeal, which could not succeed without the prospect of a government contribution. Lionel went on the joint deputation to Eccles on 24 March, telling him of the proposed appeal, to which the fund had pledged £50,000 and the Gallery £500,000, and asking for the government to provide £1m and to match any contribution from the public. Witt reported to the board on 1 April: ‘Lord Eccles’ response had been unsympathetic in the extreme.’ The most he would do was pass on the request for funds to the DES. In May Eccles wrote to say none would be forthcoming; the Prime Minister (Heath) wrote himself to Lord Crawford (chairman of the NACF) on 26 May to confirm this (T227/3400). The painting was auctioned on 25 June and bought for £1,763,000 for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The trustees resolved on 1 July ‘to do everything in their power to obtain the Titian’: to oppose the application for an export licence, to pledge all their available purchase funds and to ask the government for an advance against future purchase grants, and to launch a public appeal. When the case came before the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art on 28 July, the committee recommended a period of twelve months for the Gallery to raise the money. In his article (1971d) Lionel first repeated the arguments he had made in ‘Art and the State’ in 1958 in favour of government support of the arts in general; he added an argument against charges for admission to galleries and museums, which was that museums and galleries are analogous to publicly provided parks and libraries. Unlike theatres and opera houses, there is (except for special exhibitions) no problem of excess demand which needs to be reduced by price so as to prevent long queues or overcrowding. He noted the Conservative government was not proposing admission charges for libraries, let alone parks. ‘Thus there is no question of principle compelling the application of charging to all types of cultural provision whatever the demand for them. The most that can be said for it is that it is a matter of financial expediency – of getting a little more for the arts than can be otherwise squeezed out of a reluctant Chancellor.’ Charging would merely restrict access without raising a significant amount of revenue. Then, having commended the Treasury ministers who raised the annual grants-in-aid in 1959 (see Chapter 21) and the first Minister of the Arts for her swift and generous response to the request for a grant to purchase Giovanni

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Batista Tiepolo’s Allegory with Venus and Time when it was about to be sold at Christie’s in June 1969,13 he vigorously attacked her successor. ‘It is his contention that what is chiefly needed in the world of visual arts in this country is not acquisition of great works of art but better and larger accommodation for existing collections. And with characteristic vigour, even before the sale of the Titian, he announced his sentiments in his respect.’ Eccles had recently secured the promise of £36m for a new British Library but building work could be postponed, whereas once a work of art was exported it was lost forever. It is really not sensible to believe that the public collections have all that they need by way of precious possessions; and that what remains in private hands of the heritage of the past can be allowed to be dissipated without cultural impoverishment. And in saying this, I am not thinking of a handful of aesthetes and art historians – as Lord Eccles sometimes appears to argue – I am thinking rather of the millions who yearly visit our national museums and galleries and get obvious pleasure and inspiration from their contents – such as the Titian until recently.

He concluded by advocating the proposals for changes in the tax system to encourage private gifts to museums and galleries which he and Witt had put to the Treasury in the 1960s. He dismissed the objection that there was an overriding need to cut government expenditure: ‘What is at stake in the matter of the Titian is the possibility of retaining in this country one of the finest works of one of the greatest masters of painting, a work of superlative intrinsic beauty. . . . A tiny fraction of what has been spent on the Concorde [supersonic passenger aircraft] for instance, provided either by increased grants or tax remissions of the kind suggested, would be sufficient to solve all the problems discussed in this article and many more besides.’ A second meeting with Eccles on 3 August was as unfruitful as the first. But Eccles was aware, as he told the Chief Secretary of the Treasury on 30 July, that he was ‘in increasing trouble with the mandarin group of museum trustees, curators, art historians and critics’ and that there would be ‘an outcry if the Government return a completely negative reply’ to the National Gallery. He suggested he might offer to advance whatever the NG would be prepared to forgo in its next three years’ purchase grants. The Chancellor agreed, and Eccles sent a copy of his draft letter to the NG to Heath ‘in view of his personal interest in the matter’ on 13 August (T227/3400). Meanwhile 13

‘With a warm word of recommendation from Miss Jennie Lee, the Gallery’s application had been sent . . . to the Treasury, from whom a verbal assurance was received via the D.E.S. three days before the sale that a grant of up to £225,000 would be forthcoming’ on the assumption that the gallery contributed £175,000 and would obtain further funds from outside benefactors if necessary (NG Board 3 July 1969).

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Crawford had organized a deputation to Heath on 24 August; Witt was told afterwards that an answer from the Chancellor would soon be coming. Eventually Eccles wrote on 13 October offering to advance £600,000 out of the next three years’ annual grants (as well as to match donations from the public) but insisted on repayment within three years; Witt persuaded him to extend it to four years. At the November board meeting ‘Lord Robbins spoke strongly in favour of a launching date [for the appeal] as soon as was administratively possible’ (NG Board 7 and 18 October and 4 November 1971). As he commented to his sister on 17 December when the appeal was underway, ‘a little over £1/4 m to be raised by July [1972] . . . [was] a crusade less arduous than the L.S.E. business’. Eccles moved the second reading of the Museums and Galleries Admission Charges bill in the House of Lords on 22 November 1971. He claimed that Robbins in his article had misunderstood the analogy between the fine arts and the museums: ‘Charging has nothing to do with keeping people out, of equating demand with supply’ but was a way of raising money for the museums and galleries. Responding, Lionel admitted there were arguments both ways on admission charges (HLDebs vol 325 cols 822–4, 852–7). As he put it in his notes for his speech (Museums Bill 22.xi.71 Second Reading, Speeches H of L, RP), The n[oble] v[iscount] is right when he argues that what is done so widely elsewhere & also sometimes at home cannot be regarded as a a great social crime or indeed a tremendous financial burden on the majority of users of the galleries. I don’t agree however with his lumping together of the National Gallery with Covent Garden instead of with parks & other such amenities which are not overused at a zero price – which seems to me dubious economics. But chiefly I regret the disappearance of a freedom which we were proud of . . . the freedom of all dustmen & Dukes to enjoy together the delights of a great spiritual heritage – given or bequeathed chiefly by private donors for exactly that purpose. But that my Lords has gone.

While Eccles had listened to the Gallery’s representations, they had not ‘had the slightest impact on his resolution’ and the gallery had had to capitulate. Hence Robbins made a plea for some flexibility in charging so as to permit a free day. A charge which was less than the price of a pint of beer would not deter any who already loved art but it would, he claimed, deter those ‘who on a free day might stroll in, experimentally so to speak, and so discover the life-enhancing stimulus which this sort of interest confers. And I don’t want them to be deterred.’ He realized Eccles would not abandon charging but ‘it would be a great comfort to me personally to be able to say to my friends, Well we don’t agree with his policy but we must admit that what

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we have said has not fallen on entirely deaf ears and at least he has done his best to meet our more modest supplications.’ The bill became law in November 1972. The National Gallery chairmen, first Witt then Playfair, had continued to press Eccles to allow a non-paying day. Lionel was characteristically optimistic they would succeed but Eccles was, Lionel admitted in June, ‘arrogant and unyielding’ (NG Board 6 January, 3 February and 1 June 1972). The trustees fell back on a scheme whereby the loss of revenue from a free day (Wednesday) would be made up by higher charges on other days (Mondays and Fridays), to be introduced on an experimental basis and reviewed after one year. Eccles agreed ‘with reluctance’ in August 1972. Given a delay caused by the government’s counterinflation programme, the first paying day was 3 January 1974. The gallery soon found that the cost of collection absorbed nearly half the amount collected. The charges were abolished in March 1974 by the new Labour government.14 The Titian Appeal succeeded. In March 1972 it had raised only £73,600 of the £231,000 needed, but in April the Rayne Foundation offered £25,000 and in June another anonymous gift of £75,000 assured the trustees the appeal would succeed. A smaller anonymous donation came via Lionel – from Walter Annenberg, US Ambassador since 1969 (NG Board 2 March, 6 April and 1 June 1972). Lionel had admired his collection of pictures when they were shown at the Tate in 1969 and had met him at a FT lunch, finding him (as he told his sister on 6 September 1969) ‘a really tough egg if ever there was one’. Annenberg left it to Lionel’s discretion how to use $25,000. On 9 July 1972 Lionel could tell his sister that ‘the Titian is now national property – the money came romping in at the end’ after the £75,000 donation. Lionel’s and Caroline’s American friendships brought the National Gallery another painting in 1972. On 12 May Caroline wrote her brother: ‘the real reason for this letter is that last night the Cliffords supped with me – they are in the process of moving and finding it trying – and Henry [Clifford] said Annenberg had told him the one [person] he liked in London was Lord Robbins. . . . as he was leaving Henry said you might tell Lionel that [the Cliffords’] Rousseau is too big for our new quarters and I don’t think the museum here now cares well for paintings and we might talk or write about it. Now I imagine he is thinking of sale . . . but since you had expressed interest in it for the National [Gallery] I thought I should let you 14

Copy of a letter from the Paymaster General circulated to the Board 7th August, 1972, Director’s Report for 3 January 1974 and Keeper’s Report for 7 March 1974, NGA.

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know. For all I know you may be bankrupt.’ Lionel saw the Cliffords when they were in London in July (and took them to the ballet) (1972 Appointments Diary; Clifford to LCR, 14 August 1972, 1972 Correspondence, RP). In November their painting, which is now known as Surprised!, came to the National Gallery for four weeks so that the trustees could look at it: Lionel, as he told his sister on 4 November, was ‘clear himself that most of us will want it very much. But the trouble is that we haven’t enough money until next April & constitutionally we can’t borrow or make firm pledges in advance. However there are other possibilities.’ One such possibility was Annenberg. According to his biographer (Ogden 1999, 456), After a 1970 tour of London’s National Gallery, Walter told board member Lord Robbins to let him know if the art museum . . . ever needed help in buying something exceptional. Two years later the gallery could not afford Henri Rousseau’s Tropical Storm with a Tiger put up for sale by Pennsylvanian Henry Clifford for $900,000 and took Walter up on his offer. ‘A great painting’, said Walter, who had been negotiating for six months to add the work to his own collection. He immediately withdrew his offer and made good on his promise, giving $325,000 to the gallery to buy the painting, now worth an estimated $15 million.

On 7 December Lionel explained to the board that ‘he had for some time been aware that the American Ambassador . . . wished to present a picture to this country as a parting gift. He had therefore approached Annenberg about the Rousseau, only to learn that the Ambassador himself had earlier this year made an offer for it. However, he was willing to stand aside for the National Gallery and, at the same time, was prepared to give £150,00 towards its cost. In the Ambassador’s view a price of about £400,000 would be reasonable, but his gift would still stand if the Trustees decided to pay Mr Clifford’s price. . . . It was agreed that Mr Clifford should be telephoned immediately’. A few days later Lionel heard from Caroline that ‘Henry C called THRILLED that Martin Davies had called him this am about the Tiger. . . . He is delighted to be in one of the best galleries in the world. He said they never appreciated it here! so I said you did anyhow. . . . Hurrah for Tigers.’ Annenberg was proud of his contribution. Richard Robbins recalled that at a dinner in his honour at the gallery in 1988 Annenberg told his fellow guests that they should know ‘had it not been for him [Robbins] you would not have Titian’s death of Actaeon hanging [in] your Gallery: When Robbins told him of Getty’s purchase ‘I went to Paul and said “don’t up your bid, the National Gallery London needs that painting!” Paul did not up his bid. Then again I had been negotiating with Henry Clifford for the Douanier Rousseau . . . when Lord Robbins came to see me and asked whether I could

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help. . . . So I backed off and made a contribution . . . and that’s how you have that painting because of Lord Robbins!’ Lionel finally left the board in July 1974. The Renaissance historian John Hale had just succeeded John Witt as chairman, and Basil Yamey, whom Lionel had suggested in 1967, was appointed in place of Henry Moore, who had retired in April. On 4 October Michael Levey wrote to Lionel (NG26/87): Next Thursday there will be a Board meeting here and it is extraordinary to think that we shall not have the benefit and pleasure of your presence at it. It would be absurd of me to try and pay tribute adequately to all your services to the Gallery. What I feel I may attempt is to say something of my own long-standing personal debt to you for great kindness, great patience and sagacity. I very much hope I have learned something from your ever-humane example; I have never ceased to be touched by your friendly interest, sympathy and encouragement. It is now many years, I suppose, since Philip Hendy first told me that you had ‘hopes’ of me, and I still feel very proud at the recollection.

He noted Lionel’s consistent concern with the staff as human beings, which he thought had ‘fostered a splendid spirit in the Gallery. . . . What you initiated is carried on happily today.’ Harold Wilson, recently reelected Prime Minister, also wrote on 4 December (Special Letters, RP): ‘Dear Lionel, I understand that you have recently come to the end of your third term of office as a Trustee of the National Gallery. I would like to thank you most warmly for all the service you have given to the Gallery for this remarkable period. I hope you have enjoyed it.’ Lionel replied on 6 December that he had indeed enjoyed it: ‘The responsibilities are heavy but the rewards are almost incomparable. To walk round the Gallery when the people have gone in company with these marvellous masterpieces is as near to heaven as I expect to get in this world or the next; and it is inspiring in a different way to go round when all the people are there and see them enjoying themselves without doing any harm to anybody. It makes me feel like an aged Faust.’ As an ex-trustee Lionel retained his Gallery pass allowing him to visit the exhibition rooms outside their opening hours. He once felt obliged to surrender it, having been taken to task by Levey for, on a visit with Hendy, entering the Conservation Studio to see a Rembrandt still in the process of cleaning. When he explained it had not been on his initiative, but that he had met someone else who had asked if he wanted to see the picture and he had said yes and gone along, Levey was ‘more rather than less disturbed’. Lionel wrote again, admitting he was hurt by Levey’s comparison of a visit by David Crawford and Kenneth Clark, who were ‘excellent people in their way but hardly peace makers at the Gallery’, and sending in his pass. It was

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then Levey’s turn to be apologetic and he returned the pass, for which Lionel was very grateful (Levey to LCR, 18, 23 and 25 February 1976, and ms draft replies, Exchange with Michael Levey, RP). The Nafplion Colloquium on Research Programmes in Physics and Economics was held in September 1974, its purpose to examine the applicability of the methodology of scientific research programmes conceived by the LSE philosopher Imre Lakatos, who had died earlier that year (Latsis ed 1976, vii). It was organized by Spiro Latsis, who had been a student in the Philosophy Department at LSE, and financed by his father, the Greek shipping magnate John Latsis. The participants were economists or philosophers of science. Lionel accepted his invitation even though the conference was focussed on scientific method, for he and Iris had never been to Greece and it was an opportunity to meet academic friends (LCR to ICR, 11 August 1974). He did not participate intensively in the conference discussions, but he found them stimulating and they led to one of the more important of his late writings when he reviewed one of the conference volumes. As he told a correspondent in 1976 (and had already admitted in his autobiography [1971a, 147–50]), ‘my essay on The Nature and Significance of Economic Science is one of the few books I wrote before the war with which I am still in tolerable agreement’ but ‘I am clear that if I were to write the chapter on method again it would be substantially different’ thanks to Karl Popper (LCR to A. Bevan, Day File Jan 1975-Dec 1976, RP). In his review article (1979c) he indicated where his own views on economic methodology had got to. On the old question of whether economics was a science in the same sense as the physical sciences, his answer was still yes. As regards the logical status of the respective propositions concerned, there can surely be no dispute in either case to Hume’s distinction between ought and is. I certainly believe that in what I call Political Economy as distinct from pure economics . . . there is, or should be, much normative appeal to matters of ethics or social philosophy involving judgements of value rather than judgements of fact. But on the positive analysis of the implications for behavior of the fact of scarcity – Economics – I see no reason to recognize any difference between such generalizations and the generalizations of Physics or of Biology. . . . Generalizations about physical or economic phenomena are essentially conjectures, capable of deductive development, but, while exposed to refutation by appropriate testing, incapable of final and definite proof. In this respect I am a convinced Popperean. . . . I regard the broad conceptions of The Logic of Scientific Discovery as generally applicable, whatever particular scientific discipline we practice.

He regarded Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programmes, ‘his “hard core” propositions, his heuristic postulates, his “protective belt,”

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and his insistence that broad programmes of research should not deterred by incidental failure as a distinguished spelling out of implications of the main body of Popper’s contribution’. But he thought that only a few episodes in the history of economics could be described in Lakatosian terms. The Nafplion conference produced another holiday in Greece for the Robbins family. John Latsis, ‘an extraordinarily nice & generous man’, invited Lionel and Iris to return to Greece as his guests. They went for a fortnight in August 1975 with Richard and Brenda and Richard’s sons William and Philip. As they were to stay in Athens and to be ‘taken to Crete & other famous places’ including Delphi and Olympia, Lionel thought it was a wonderful prospect for his grandsons as well as a much needed holiday for Richard and Brenda (LCR to ICR, 17 August 1975). During the previous year William had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He had spent six weeks in a mental hospital as well as having to try various drugs, one of which now seemed to be working. Philip, who had just done well in his A level examinations (both boys were at Bradfield School), remembered that he only once ever saw his grandfather get angry, when William (incorrectly) accused him of jumping the queue at Heraklion airport (information from Richard Robbins and Philip Robbins). Otherwise the holiday was a great success. In Britain, meanwhile, ‘The political situation doesn’t improve a bit. All the chickens of leftwing socialism are coming home to roost. Inflation – due partly to Heath & Co – 26% borrowing £9 billion plus. Millions of money promised & spent keeping totally inefficient industries alive. The Labour Party only kept together by Wilson’s tightropewalking.’ A year later, when Callaghan had succeeded Wilson as Prime Minister, the economic situation was still ‘menacing’ (LCR to ICR, 17 August 1975 and 12 August 1976). The government had been faced with an unexpectedly deep economic recession while inflation was running at over 15 per cent: unemployment reached the million mark in the summer of 1975 with inflation accelerating to a peak of 26.9 per cent in August. A ‘very un-Keynesian’ budget began to try to reduce the fiscal deficit and the deficit on the balance of payments. A £6 per week limit on pay rises introduced in July and a slower growth of the money supply helped to rein in inflation (Britton 1991, 25–7). Nonetheless the pound fell sharply in the first half of 1976 despite large-scale exchangemarket intervention by the Bank of England. In spite of additional support from other central banks, public expenditure cuts, the adoption of a target for the rate of growth of the money supply (M3) in July and sharp rises in interest rates, the government had to apply for a loan from the IMF. The strings attached to the loan in December included a target for domestic credit expansion (which is roughly equivalent to the growth of M3 less

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the balance-of-payments deficit), but the government stuck to its money supply target for the next two years. The latter – for £M3, that is M3 less foreign-currency deposits – was also reduced from 9–13 per cent for 1977–8 to 8–12 per cent for 1978–9. In his comments on these developments in the House of Lords Robbins made clear his own position on ‘monetarism’. On 30 July 1975 he thought it was ‘highly paradoxical for my friend Milton Friedman to say that all inflation is caused by monetary influences, just like that. If that is what is meant by . . . monetarism, I certainly would not call myself a monetarist, and certainly would not go all the way with Professor Friedman in repudiating supplementing monetary policy with fiscal policy, . . . But if monetarism means simply that inflation, however initiated, whoever the culprit, cannot go on if the rate of increase of money supply is held properly in check, then certainly I modestly admit to that degree of monetarism.’ He was worried that the government had not yet specified a money supply target as well as by the size of the public sector borrowing requirement. He asked on 9 June 1976: ‘Why should he [the Chancellor] not say that in the next few months the level of M1, of M3, of domestic credit expansion or of what-you-will will not be allowed to rise above a certain level?’ (Robbins 1979a, 86–7, 96). After the IMF loan (which he welcomed for its explicit conditions) and the January 1977 Basel Agreement which finally put an end to the problem of the sterling balances he had been so exercised about in the 1940s, he was concerned that ‘a state of euphoria’ might develop in which the continuing danger of inflation would be ignored – a fear he was to reiterate for the rest of the year (1979a, 101–4, 79–84, 108–11). Lionel thought it rather unjust when Friedrich Hayek published an article in the Daily Telegraph on 26 August 1976 criticizing British economists for a failure to realize the danger of inflation, and protested to the editor on 9 September (clippings in 1976 Correspondence, RP). In January 1978 he looked over his Lords speeches and chose a score of those on economic policy since the mid-1960s which he thought would make a coherent collection. Appropriately entitling it Against Inflation, he suggested it to Macmillan on 15 February. Tim Farmiloe, reading the foreword on the day Britain returned to single-digit inflation for the first time since 1972, readily accepted the book (Against Inflation, RP). It appeared a year later. The EJ reviewer (Pemberton 1979) admitted he did not approach the book with enthusiasm, for ‘reading transcripts of speeches, even those of an eminent economist, is not guaranteed to be a rewarding task’, but he was pleasantly suprised, finding the book ‘a highly readable, if informal, commentary on British macroeconomic policy over the period’. He also found it ‘fascinating to

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detect the subtle shifts’ in Robbins’s attitude towards incomes policy, but he thought Robbins had overstated the dangers of inflation – which perhaps confirms Hayek’s views on at least Cambridge-trained British economists. On the board of The Economist until July 1975, Lionel as deputy chairman often took the chair in the absence of the chairman, Evelyn de Rothschild, who had succeeded Crowther in 1972. He stepped down when Drogheda retired as chairman of the FT in order to make room on the board for Drogheda’s successor Alan Hare. But Lionel was also on the board of the Economist Intelligence Unit, which was running into difficulties: the Pearson group (and de Rothschild) wanted Lionel to stay on and offered to continue the £1000 a year Lionel had been receiving as deputy chairman of The Economist (plus fees of not less than £250 a day for special undertakings for the EIU); this was in addition to his £4000 pension from the FT, which was also raised to £5000 (Gibson to LCR, 22 January 1975, de Rothschild to LCR, 23 February 1976, History of Past Employment, RP). As he had commented to Pat Gibson, when the FT pension had been raised to £4000 (ms draft reply to Gibson to LCR, 6 August 1970, History of Past Employment, RP), ‘I count my association with the Pearson group in general & with you, Oliver [Poole] and Garrett [Drogheda] in particular as among the most lucky & rewarding incidents of my life.’ Robbins’s role as elder statesman extended to the Royal Economic Society. In 1975 he was a member of a special committee appointed to review its future administration, the editorship of its journal and its financial arrangements (RES Council 27 November 1974, RES 2/1/8). The current editor of the EJ was Brian Reddaway. Lionel had ‘not [been] enthusiastic’ about his appointment and agreed with Harry Johnson’s persistent criticisms that the society and its journal were too Cambridge-dominated (LCR to Alec Cairncross, 13 November 1969, RES 5/2/2; Moggridge 2008, 320–5). In 1974 Kaldor, recently elected president, suggested Reddaway continue as editor with the assistance of David Champernowne and Francis Cripps, and Reddaway, against the wishes of the other members of the search committee, approached Cripps. The secretary-general (Charles Carter) and the treasurer (Alan Prest) offered their resignations, mentioning also the discovery of unrecorded large publishing debts (Carter and Prest, The Royal Economic Society, October 1974, Kaldor, Editorship of the Economic Journal, and Agenda for Council 7 November 1974, RES 2/1/9). The special committee, taking as its ‘starting point that the Society is a national learned body and that it must be regarded as such’, argued its administration should be in London. It recommended the establishment of a new executive committee for the society and a managing editor for the journal, backed by a board of

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editors (Report of the Special Committee, March 1975, RP). The Council ‘generally approved’ the idea of an executive committee in March; in June it approved the committee’s further recommendations of John Flemming of Nuffield College Oxford as the managing editor, Ronnie Tress (Birkbeck College London) as secretary-general and Tad Rybczynski (also London) as treasurer, and a Keynes Committee to oversee the publication of Keynes’s Collected Writings, which the society had instigated as a memorial to Keynes in 1954 (Council 13 March and 26 June 1975, RES 2/1/8; Supplementary Report of the Special Committee to the Council of the Royal Economic Society, RES 2/1/9). Lionel continued to travel widely. He and Iris went to the USA in March and again in October 1975 followed by a week in Hong Kong. The first trip was for a Bologna-Claremont conference at Claremont (Hinshaw ed 1977). Hinshaw had suggested the topic of recent experience with floating exchange rates, but Lionel argued for ‘a rather wider canvas on which the general financial imbalance should provide the landscape and the floating exchange as one of the consequential problems to figure in the foreground’. The resulting discussion covered an immense range of material – the effects of oil price shocks, the causes of worldwide inflation, the policy dilemma posed by simultaneous inflation and recession (stagflation), the effects of high taxation, floating exchange rates and optimal currency areas – and Lionel was dissatisfied with his attempts at summarizing it. His fellow participants thought he had done it very well. He and Iris then took up a standing invitation to visit the Annenbergs ‘to renew your relationship with our [Annenberg’s] pictures’ before leaving California for New York. There they spent, Lionel told Hinshaw in April, ‘two days in piercing cold winds rushing round to galleries and such like entertainments’ with the Baumols.15 The second trip comprised a fortnight in New England, a week at Claremont and a week in Hong Kong. Willard and Clarice Thorp had arranged for Lionel to lecture at Amherst College in Massachusetts and at other colleges nearby (Smith, Mount Holyoke and Williams). At all four he lectured on the economics of the arts, concentrating on the case for public support as in his earlier writings on the subject (1963a, 1971d) and adding some factual information about government support in Britain.16 The Williams College lecture was sponsored jointly by the college’s economics department 15

16

Hinshaw to LCR, 22 November, LCR to Hinshaw, 27 November 1974 and 3 April 1975, Walter Salant to LCR, 10 April 1975, Annenberg to LCR, 5 February 1975, Claremont Material 73 75 77, RP. Clarice Thorp to LCR and IER, 3 June, LCR to Clarice Thorp, 12 June 1975, ms notes The Economics of the Arts Amherst etc, Amherst 75, RP. At Amherst he also lectured on

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and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and held at the institute, so that his audience comprised ‘economists, art historians, and museum administrators, plus students heading for one of those noble professions’. As he told Joseph Kershaw on 3 November (Amherst 75, RP), he had ‘rarely spoken to a more sympathetic and receptive audience’. Lionel had agreed to speak to the Friends of the Claremont Colleges at their annual dinner in Los Angeles on 15 October, when he spoke on the international monetary situation, and to chair an FT conference in Hong Kong on 21–23 October. The days at Claremont were otherwise taken up with seeing friends. The week in Hong Kong was, as Lionel told Hinshaw on 27 October, ‘a non-stop performance’. There was the three-day conference on ‘Asian Business in 1975’, a party at the Hong Kong Country Club given by the chairman of the council of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a memorable excursion to the New Territories. Once back in London, Lionel (with Iris) was off to Spain, to lecture in Barcelona and Madrid: he gave the same talks he had given in California and Hong Kong.17 He discovered for the first time the artistic glories of Barcelona, ‘home of Romanesque frescoes and marvellous Gothic buildings’, but because the visit was partly on behalf of the LSE Library, it was strenuous, as he told Sonia Drake on 20 November (Day File Jan 1975-Dec 1976, RP): ‘while Spanish hospitality is incomparable, the arduous days and parties going on into the small hours of the morning, while immeasurably stimulating, made us both feel that we were glad not to be travelling again before Christmas.’ After Christmas, however, Lionel was back in the US for a long weekend. The purpose of this visit was to spend a day in talks at Dillon, Read & Co in New York on behalf of the Economist Intelligence Unit. It gave him a chance to spend twenty-four hours with Caroline in Philadelphia and to see a couple of people about the LSE library.18 The Library Appeal was taking up his time once more. W.H. Smith were about to vacate Strand House and another working party, composed of the new director, Lionel, Ambrosine Hurt who had been secretary to the

17

18

Britain’s recent economic problems and on ‘The economist in politics’ in response to a request for something in the history of economics (ms notes in Amherst 75, RP). Francis H. Lindley to LCR, 15 May, Hinshaw to LCR, 26 June, LCR to Hinshaw, 27 October 1975, Claremont Material 73 75 77; Marc Lee to LCR, 3 and 20 June 1975, 1975 Correspondence; LCR to Sir Yet-Kueng Kan, 27 and 31 October, LCR to Kenneth Toplay, 20 November 1975, Day File Jan 1975-Dec 1976; ms notes International Monetary Situation L.A. 15.x.75, International Monetary Situation Madrid, Trends in the World Economy Hong Kong 21.10.75 Barcelona, 7.xi.75, Recent Speeches on Public Affairs 1975–, RP. LCR to Baumol, 11 December 1975, LCR to Michael West (EIU), 8 December 1975 and 7 January 1976, Day File Jan 1975-Dec 1976; Hugh Eaton (Dillon Read) to LCR, 29 January 1976, 1976 Correspondence, RP.

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Library Appeal from the outset, Jennifer Pinney (secretary of the public relations committee) and John Pike, was engaged in raising funds for the conversion of the building from a warehouse and offices to a library. It involved Lionel in many lunches and dinners and other meetings with friends and potential donors. The working party also organized a huge reception in Strand House to celebrate its acquisition on 21 June 1976. Lionel was also an active member of a new external relations subcommittee of the Court, whose terms of reference included maintaining contacts with alumni and other potential donors to the School as well as LSE’s public relations more generally.19 As Dahrendorf (1995, 481) commented, ‘Finding the . . . funds for the conversion turned out to be difficult; the objective was less likely to appeal to donors. However, in the end Lord Robbins achieved this feat as well, and conversion work began [in November 1976].’ When the conversion was complete the building was renamed the Lionel Robbins Building. In order to concentrate on the conversion appeal Lionel decided to give up two chairmanships to which he ‘attached very considerable sentimental importance’, those of the Courtauld Institute Committee of Management and the Bentham Committee, although he agreed to retain the latter until Herbert Hart could take over in July 1978 (LCR to Max Beloff, 28 January 1976, Day File Jan 1975-Dec 1976; Bentham Committee 24 May 1976 and 12 July 1978, Bentham Committee, RP). While he was chair of the Bentham Committee, the first two volumes of the edition (two volumes of Bentham’s correspondence) had appeared in February 1968, followed by two edited by Hart in June 1970 and a third volume of correspondence in April 1971. Lionel used his contacts in the press and elsewhere to make sure the volumes received widespread publicity (letters in Bentham Committee Correspondence, RP). Thereafter, as with all large editing projects, progress towards publication was disappointingly slower than anticipated. The sixth volume did not appear until 1977, causing funding problems for later volumes. Under Hart’s chairmanship Oxford University Press agreed to take over publication from the Athlone Press once the next two volumes had appeared (in 1981). OUP is still publishing the edition. At the Courtauld, Lionel proposed, seconded by the director, his successor John Witt at the Committee of Management meeting on 14 November 1975. Witt was ‘honoured to follow Lord Robbins in the chair . . . [and] would do his best to follow his example.’ The director and staff of the Institute gave 19

Minutes of Working Party and External Relations Committee in Library Appeal Working Party 1976 and External Relations Committee, RP.

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Lionel a painting by John Piper, a scene from Britten’s last opera Death in Venice which Piper had designed. Lionel remained on the committee until 25 June 1981. On 18 May 1978 he was, with Anthony Blunt, made an Honorary Fellow of the Institute which gave him ‘great delight’ for the Courtauld had given him ‘lifelong friendships and much intellectual and aesthetic delight’. 1976 was the bicentennial year of the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Lionel received many invitations to speak. He had declined to speak at the conference in Kirkcaldy to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Smith’s birth in June 1973 because of the Library Appeal (LCR to H. Alleyne Nicholson, 25 February 1972, 1972 Correspondence, RP). For the same reason he had not contributed to the bicentenary volume of essays (Skinner and Wilson eds 1975). He told Tom Wilson on 21 May 1973 (Day File 1973): ‘You will see in the Financial Times a metricious article which I have written at their request to accompany the Kirkcaldy celebrations [1973b]. Writing that caused me to sweat blood for a couple of weekends and in the end it is just pat-ball journalism. At present to do anything of a really scholarly nature . . . would require more time than is available to produce anything compatible with self-respect.’ He agreed, however, to speak at the banquet of the bicentenary conference held in Glasgow in April 1976 (Wilson and Skinner eds 1976).20 A month earlier he attended the University of Toronto’s bicentenary celebration on 9 March, at the invitation of the economist Vincent Bladen; his attendance at the dinner in his honour hosted by the Master of Massey College, the writer Robertson Davies, was noted by the Globe & Mail ’s gossip columnist. The previous night there was ‘a splendid party’ for him by the Globe’s publisher and editor-in-chief, R.S. Malone, a friend since his 1964 visit to Canada. He also spoke to the history of economic thought seminar of his former student Sam Hollander; and he conscientiously attended a meeting of the Canadian Friends of LSE before he flew back to London.21 In his remarks on The Wealth of Nations at Glasgow he mentioned first its literary merit, then its scientific contributions – it had ‘put economics on the map as a systematic study . . . shap[ing] the questions we have been asking ever since’ and ‘perhaps its most outstanding achievement 20 21

He also reviewed the bicentenary volume of essays along with the new Glasgow edition of the Wealth of Nations in the FT (‘Homage to Adam Smith’, 9 July 1976, Reviews FT, RP). LCR to Bladen, 17 September 1975 and 12 March 1976, LCR to Malone, 13 March 1976, LCR to Hollander, 27 January, LCR to Arthur Earle, 12 March 1976, and Report on Visit to Canada (Toronto) 7th-10th March, Day File Jan 1975-Dec 1976, RP; Zena Cherry, ‘After a Fashion: Massey Mixes Many Moneymen’, Globe & Mail, 10 March 1976.

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demonstration of evolution of social relations as the unintended result of system in which liberty [is] maintained by apparatus of justice and state action’ – and lastly its political economy: ‘For me general political philosophy most important. A great mistake to regard attacks on unwise collective action a recommendation of an anarchic free for all – laissez faire & all that.’ At the Toronto celebration he particularly emphasized the last point: ‘Smith’s demonstration of the allocative functions of the market operating via incentives to individuals or small groups of individuals is wellknown and at the time it was promulgated it must surely be regarded as a most important sociological discovery. But to regard it without its framework of law and other necessary functions of the state to regard it as a pure free for all is a grave misconception.’ At the seminar he discussed instead critics of the Wealth of Nations such as Ruskin, List, Schumpeter and Menger, using some of this again at Birkbeck College London in May. To the Political Economy Club in November he spoke of the book’s continuing relevance in 1976.22 Iris had not accompanied Lionel to Canada, nor to Normandy in the summer to visit his old friend Roger Truptil, as her two younger sisters were both unwell (LCR to Truptil, 27 July and 16 August 1976, Day File Jan 1975-Dec 1976, RP). In October he and Iris were travelling further afield again. An invitation from the Mexico City Chamber of Commerce to visit in December 1974, which had fallen through, had been renewed (Gustavo R. Velasco to LCR, 24 April, LCR to Velasco, 21 November 1974, 1974 Correspondence; LCR to Velasco, 26 April and 26 July 1976, Day File Jan 1975-Dec 1976, RP). He gave two lectures there: one on ‘The mixed economy’, the other ‘Liberty and equality’ which he had given at the University College at Buckingham on 30 April (Robbins 1976c and 1977). In the latter he indicated his preferred concepts of liberty (‘essentially . . . personal freedom from coercion by other people’), which he shared with Isaiah Berlin and Friedrich Hayek, and of equality (equality before the law and equality of opportunity), discussing this on the same lines as he had in his ‘Equality as an objective’ paper in 1957 (see Chapter 21). With the ‘mixed economy’ he described the different meanings of the term and then expatiated on the disadvantages of nationalized production (especially excessive bureaucracy and the possibility of political interference). From Mexico City Lionel and Iris flew to Philadelphia to attend the University of Pennsylvania’s 22

His notes for the talks are in Adam Smith, RP. His comments at the Toronto celebration were sufficiently provocative to lead David Laidler to write a paper (1981) on Adam Smith as a monetary economist (Laidler to LCR, 14 February 1980, 1980 Correspondence, RP).

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Bicentennial Convocation and a Colloquium in Communications at the Annenberg School of Communications on 15 October 1976. He received a honorary degree, presented by Walter Annenberg, and spoke at the ceremony and the colloquium. At a seminar in the economics department he provided some ‘reflections on the history of economic thought’ (on which see page 1069) (Convocation and Colloquium programme and ms notes in Philadelphia 1976, RP). Ralph Harris wished to publish the Buckingham lecture as an IEA Occasional Paper (as Robbins’s Wincott Lecture had been), but he and Arthur Seldon also decided they would like Lionel to add an epilogue ‘of perhaps not more than several pages applying the general principles to some matters in the public attention – the welfare state, the trade unions and perhaps two or three more’. Seldon offered to extract passages from Political Economy Past and Present to save Lionel the trouble of writing such an epilogue himself. Lionel was not keen. Harris and Seldon agreed to his alternative of publishing the two Mexico lectures together in one pamphlet, but when Seldon again asked him to add specific topical policy recommendations he firmly told Seldon he could not expect a rewritten version of The Mixed Economy ‘much before the end of the year [1977]’ (Seldon to LCR, 1 July, 4, 12 and 19 November 1976, 18 March 1977, LCR to Seldon, 28 March 1977, IEA Box 300 Folder OP 52). Liberty and Equality appeared on its own. In Mexico the Director General of the Banco de Comercio, under whose auspices Lionel was lecturing, ‘took [Robbins’s] breath away’ by asking him and Iris if they would like to come back for a holiday during a university vacation. They went for two weeks in the 1976 Christmas vacation. After a week in Mexico City, during which they visited Redvers Opie and his wife, they were taken to Oaxaca, Cancun and Merida before flying back to Mexico City and then home. Lionel told his host in Mexico City that he had ‘never thought that, at my time of life, I should have had the novel experience of coming into contact with these truly remarkable evidences of an ancient civilisation so unlike anything with which I had before been acquainted and so deeply moving both architecturally and aesthetically’ (LCR to Manuel Espinosa Yglesias, 20 October 1976 and 11 January 1977, Mexico 1976, RP). Lionel and Iris also returned to South Africa. The vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand had asked the British Council to finance a visit ‘to advise the University on Higher Education, Teacher Training, Economic Theory and Finance’; Lionel agreed once he had made sure Iris could accompany him. He agreed also to visit the University of Cape Town, the University of Natal at Durban and Pietermaritzburg and, more

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briefly, the University of Pretoria, and to talk on a wide range of topics including higher education, the international monetary situation, the mixed economy and the history of economic thought, in May and June 1977. In Johannesburg he also spoke (on inflation) as the guest of honour at the annual banquet of the 1926 Club of businessmen and industrialists, and (on monetarism) at a seminar for honours students.23 When Lionel returned from their month-long visit he reported his impressions to Miss Gore-Symes of the British Council on 6 July (1977 Correspondence, RP) and, incidentally, justified his decision to go: May I make [a] further observation . . . I do regard the universities, especially Witwatersrand and Cape Town, as being centres of most impressive enlightenment and courage in a political atmosphere which is often most anxious; and I personally think that British academics who refuse to go to South Africa on the ground of their disagreement with the political regime there are wrong. If they have any conception of duty in that respect it is a duty to maintain academic connections with people of quality equal to their own who, often at some personal risk, are upholding standards of integrity and civilized decency which are an example to us all.

After spending the summer at Lyme Lionel was as active as ever in the academic year 1977/8. As well as lecturing on the history of economic thought twice a week at LSE, he gave several lectures or talks outside the School, notably an IEA seminar on trade unions and a Financial Times conference on world banking, where he spoke on the inflation problem yet again (Robbins 1978a, c). His grandson Philip, now an undergraduate at New College Oxford, remembers him going up to talk to students at a meeting of the Fisher Society in March. Lionel presided over his last graduation ceremony at the University of Stirling on 30 June 1978. Since 1970 he had been up to every graduation ceremony in June and from 1976 in February as well. He attended other ceremonial occasions such as the visit of HM The Queen on 12 October 1972, the unveiling of a tapestry as a memorial to the first principal, Tom Cottrell, who had died of a heart attack in June 1973, the introduction of his successor, Dr W.A. Cramond, in April 1975 and the tenth anniversary celebration of Charter Day in December 1977 (Stirling Addresses, RP). As chancellor he was not involved in the student troubles at Stirling in 1972/3 though Cottrell kept him informed; he blamed the troubles for Cottrell’s death (LCR to ICR, 12 August 1976). He tried to vary the theme 23

Major D.W. Brandon to LCR, 30 April, and LCR to Miss Gore-Symes, 26 July 1976, Lectures and Talks: South Africa May/June 1977, ms notes University Education Pretoria June 16th, Higher Education Johannesburg 2nd June, Johannesburg 1926 Club The Future of Inflation, Monetarism Johannesbury 3rd June, South Africa 1977, RP.

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of his graduation addresses, choosing as leitmotifs: ‘68 Examinations, 70 Expansion, 71 Planning & versatility, 72 Duties & relevance, 73 Research & Privileges (Cottrell) 74 Elites’. In 1975 and February 1976 he turned to the position of the universities in the current economic crisis, in June 1976 to Adam Smith, in 1977 to the purposes of university education. For his penultimate graduation ceremony he chose to talk about current general anxieties, taking as his text ‘The future’ by Matthew Arnold, his favourite Victorian poet. At his last he reflected on the achievements of the university – most notably its buildings and its innovative degree structure – and its future prospects (Stirling Addresses, RP). He and Iris paid two later visits to Stirling: in October 1979, for the presentation of his portrait by Lawrence Gowing (which he much preferred to the Coldstream at LSE), and two years later for the first Robbins Lecture given by Sir John Hicks (ms Stirling October 11, 79, Campus no 8, November 1979, Hicks, Are there economic cycles?, Stirling Addresses, RP). In October 1978 Lionel and Iris went to the seventh Bologna-Claremont conference at Claremont, for once flying directly to Los Angeles and back as Caroline was in London for an eye operation (LCR to Baumol, 2 August 1978). (The sixth had been held in Frankfurt in April 1977: Hinshaw ed 1980.) The participants’ divided views over floating exchange rates were widely reported in the Wall Street Journal and elswhere (Hinshaw ed 1981). On 22 November 1978 LSE gave Lionel a large dinner at the Skinners’ Hall to celebrate his eightieth birthday. Caroline made a second trip to London to attend; among the many friends who came from across the Atlantic were the Baumols, for whom the ‘added treats of the opera, the theatre, the art gallery, and seeing our friends was just much so icing on the cake’ (Hilda Baumol to LCR and IER, 7 December 1978, Misc Corresp Oct 76-April 78, RP). Dahrendorf gave a speech for which he had obviously dug in the School’s files to mention some of the episodes in Lionel’s long career at LSE: beginning by describing Lionel’s life as a Gesamtkunstwerk he ended by emphasizing that the strongest feeling of his friends for him was love. Lionel responded by emphasizing the extraordinary luck he had in his life and career: his encounter with his father in the Lyons teashop in September 1920 which allowed him to enter the School in the first place; his encounter with Lord Lee which led him into the world of art administration; the unnamed benefactor, among the guests, who enabled the National Gallery to acquire the C´ezanne Bathers; the interventions of friends which got him onto the boards of the FT, BP and Covent Garden (mimeo speeches and guest list in 80th Birthday, RP). But, as Dahrendorf had hinted, ‘au fond . . . I still think of myself as an academic, and an LSE

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academic, with all the privileges and international affiliations which that implies’. On 27 April 1979 it was Lionel’s turn to attend Hayek’s eightieth birthday dinner at the Skinners’ Hall. Hosted by the Institute of Economic Affairs, this also marked the publication of the final volume of Hayek’s Law, Legislation and Liberty. (Lionel had found the second volume ‘most thoughtprovoking – a truly masterful performance – [which] should arouse much needed discussion’, as he told Hayek on 25 December 1976 [Hayek 46–25]: he still disagreed with Hayek over utilitarianism). Afterwards Fritz wrote on 1 May (Letters from Old Friends, RP): It was a matter of great regret to me that after last Friday’s pleasant occasion I had no opportunity to thank you for what you had said or a general quiet conversation. But I admit I was dead tired at the end and had reserved the first half of Saturday for Karl Popper . . . and the second half to my children. . . . Apart from anything else I also regretted this because I had much wanted to ask you whether you would contemplate accepting our invitation to come as a guest to the European meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society at Madrid, September 2–7. . . . It would give me great pleasure if you could come and if you are willing to consider it, I shall see that you get an official invitation.

Lionel thus attended his first Mont Pelerin Society conference – apart from the founding meeting in April 1947 – in September 1979. The participants included several old friends: George Stigler, Alan Peacock and H.M. Robertson, as well as Lionel’s former student Pedro Schwartz. Lionel combined the conference with a meeting of the council of the Instituto de Economia de Mercado, of which thanks to Schwartz he was a member, and a couple of days in Barcelona (programme for MPS conference and Schwartz to LCR, 2 April 1979, Instituto de Economia di Mercado, RP). Another Hayek celebration took place four months later, when Hayek gave a lecture at LSE on the fiftieth anniversary of his first lecture there. It was held in the same room as the Prices and Production lectures, and introduced by Lionel, who recalled his reactions to the first lecture and the consequences for him and Hayek (quoted in Chapter 7). In May 1979 the Conservatives were returned to power after five years of Labour government. The Callaghan government’s efforts to contain inflation had run aground on the trade unions’ unwillingness to accept wage increase guidelines of 5 per cent: the months preceding the 1979 election were a ‘Winter of Discontent’ with numerous strikes and industrial disruptions. For Lionel the result of the election was a ‘great relief’: ‘I didn’t think the Conservative manifesto was very good and Callaghan . . . was undoubtedly very popular: indeed I would say that apart from him the Labour Party

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would have suffered a colossal disaster comparable to that of the Conservatives in 1945. But personally I expected a much narrower win indeed a position in which the minority groups would have had the say.’ As for the new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, ‘I suspect that we shall be surprised. She is clever and sincere and sensible. . . . The first sign of the latter capacity – in her new position – is her appointment of [Lord] Carrington [as Foreign Secretary] and leaving out Ted Heath whose personal rudeness to her I have witnessed with my own eyes. Anyway politics are going to be interesting for the next year or so.’ When she put together a ‘goodish cabinet’ he thought she was ‘obviously in command. But she has inherited a very difficult situation with the rate of inflation going up again and so far as I can see . . . no way of bringing it down but measures which will tend to increase unemployment’ (LCR to ICR, 6 and 21 May 1979). Although Lionel missed the debate on the first Queen’s Speech of Mrs Thatcher’s government, he had plenty of opportunities to comment on her economic policies in the next three years. In April 1979 William Baumol was elected president of the American Economic Association, which carried the obligation to organize the annual meetings in Denver, Colorado, in September 1980. On 31 May he asked Lionel to give the Richard T. Ely lecture, giving him a free choice of topic but telling him that the theme of the conference was ‘applied theory, i.e. work which is based on theory that proceeds toward application’ and adding: ‘It has also been suggested that everyone would be delighted to hear you speak on The Nature and Significance of Economic Science after 48 years.’ With Iris’s proviso that he had ‘not gone gaga in the meantime’, Lionel accepted on 12 June and thought he might talk on ‘that part of The Nature and Significance which deals with welfare economics and the difference, as I conceive it, between welfare economics and political economy’, referring to the distinction he had made in Political Economy Past and Present. Baumol replied on 12 July that the topic was ‘ideally suited for the occasion’ (Baumol Papers). The Ely lecture was a year hence. More immediately Lionel had another public lecture to prepare, the second Mais Lecture at the City University on 8 November 1979 (Robbins 1980a). The lectures, ‘to be given by a distinguished practitioner or theoretician in the field of money, banking and finance’, were in honour of Lord Mais, who as Lord Mayor of London had launched the appeal to establish the City University’s Centre for Banking and International Finance; the first Mais lecturer had been the Governor of the Bank of England, Gordon Richardson. Lionel’s lecture on the ‘Objectives of monetary policy: past and present’ was highly topical. The early years of

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Thatcher’s government are known for its ‘monetarist’ attack on inflation. As Britton (1991, 45) put it, ‘The proposition that “money matters” was by this time common ground for most commentators, for the Treasury, the Bank and backbench MPs. But for the first twelve or fifteen months of the new government, economic policy was governed by the far stronger proposition that “only money matters”.’ The first Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, reaffirmed the previous government’s commitment to achieve a target for £M3 (and reduced it to 7–11 per cent for 1979/80) but reduced the basic rate of income tax and raised value added tax to 15 per cent in his first budget in June 1979. Inflation – at the time of the election 10.3 per cent and rising – reached nearly 22 per cent by May 1980. As well as distancing himself from the current ‘monetarist’ attitude, Lionel ended his lecture with the peroration of his Stamp Memorial Lecture in November 1951: ‘“Stop the inflation . . . that is the paramount need of the moment in the economic sphere: if we meet it . . . we have still a future of high promise. If we do not, then I fear that our days are numbered, certainly as a great power, perhaps even as a stable society.” These words . . . are still applicable. Indeed they are much more urgent and the problems involved are much more complex.’ In the 1970s Robbins frequently gave speeches or talks on education to many different audiences (Speeches on Education and Speeches H of L, RP). Having been asked so often what he thought of developments in British higher education since the Robbins Report, he decided to answer in a series of letters to an imaginary correspondent. He told his sister on 30 July that the book (1980b) was ‘as unlike an official document as I can make it – informal, controversial, overtly critical’. The questions which ‘X’ was supposed to have asked included the raison d’etre of universities in the first place, the desirable curriculum for undergraduates, the justification of the ‘Robbins principle’ that places should be available for all who have the ability and willingness to benefit from them, the financing of such places (loans versus grants), the old ‘more means worse’ claim, the appropriate size of university institutions, the causes of student militancy and unrest, the role of the academic staff (research versus teaching), the (self)government of universities and the role of the state. Robbins’s answers reflected the beliefs he had held at the time of his Higher Education Committee – on, for instance, the need for broader undergraduate degrees and an expansion of postgraduate education, and the virtues of the UGC (see Chapter 23) – and experience since. After a penultimate chapter attacking the ‘binary system’ separating polytechnics from universities introduced by Crosland in 1965, he ended by looking forward, taking as his starting point a recent government white paper, Higher Education into the 1990s. As he had noted

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in the FT (1978d), this admirably ‘clear and candid’ document described the problems created by the probable rise in the demand for places in higher education in the 1980s and decline in the 1990s. Lionel’s strongly held view was that the ‘Robbins principle’ should be maintained but on the condition he had repeatedly coupled with it that there should be less premature specialization in the schools preparing pupils for university and in first degree courses. He also hoped that in the long term the participation rate would rise: ‘that the intensification of secondary education and the general spread of knowledge concerning the superior advantages for those with the ability, would sustain the growth in participation rates, so that even when the population bulge of the early 1980s had begun to decline . . . there would still be an upward trend to numbers in higher education’, especially women and young people from lower income families. Higher Education Revisited came out in May 1980, not long after the surviving members of the Robbins Committee had been asked to give evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Education (Elvin to LCR, 17 March 1980, 1980 Correspondence, RP). The other surviving member, Lionel Elvin, reviewed the book for the Times Educational Supplement on 8 May (clipping in Higher Education Revisited, RP). He admitted that on some matters when he had disagreed with Lionel in the Higher Education Committee, he now agreed with him (for instance on the impracticability of manpower planning). Other reviewers were equally complimentary: as that in the EJ put it (Dunworth 1980), Robbins had ‘select[ed] those issues which are of contemporary importance and so avoids the pitfall that faces any architect reviewing the outcome of his own plans – that of selfjustification. In these letters he combines the wealth of a lifetime’s experience of higher education with a refreshing sense of continuing personal interest and involvement.’ Overall 1979 was an enjoyable year for Iris and Lionel Robbins – apart from the continuing worries over their eldest grandson William’s mental health and the physical health of Iris’s sisters Gwen and Phyllis. The spring and summer included ‘all sorts of diversions’, in addition to visits to Lyme, plays and concerts – some with his younger sister Nancy who had retired from her work in India and lived in Cambridge – and the trip to Spain (LCR to ICR, 6 and 21 May, 5 June, 13 and 30 July 1979). In June, First was the celebration of Fonteyn’s 60th birthday when the evening at C[ovent] G[arden] was devoted to ballets in which she had been famous and she herself danced in arrangements by Ashton which did not demand dancing on points. This was the Garden at its best & there was a party afterwards at which she herself & Princess Margaret made speeches.

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Then there was the long delayed opening of the extension to the Tate Gallery – poor architecture but at last affording elbow-room for the exhibition of the main purchases since the war. All art London was there – or seemed to be – which made it very difficult to see the pictures & sculptures. But it was exciting & the firework display over the Thames was easily the most beautiful I have ever seen. . . . This week the great event was the private view of a film designed to raise money for the extension of the Royal Opera House.

In July: I have been three times to Oxford – once to participate in the launching of a book on 100 years of New College [Buxton and Williams eds 1979] – quite interesting history – once with Iris to the Encaenia with John & Ursula Hicks at All Souls – and then this last weekend to the New College Gaudy to celebrate the 600th anniversary – with marvellous singing in the Chapel & a good sermon by the Visitor, the Bishop of Winchester. . . . Then this week the L.S.E. Library was officially declared open by H.M. the Queen Mother & yesterday Iris & I went to the Garden Party at B[uckingham] Palace – not interesting as regards people – at least 1500 of them – but enchanting as regards the grounds, looking more splendid than ever on a truly lovely afternoon – one of the few this year. Then there has been a Bentham Conference at University College – quite first class as regards the scholarship of most of the papers & much larger than we expected – 90 dedicated Bentham students from all over the world – and as one expects at this time of year all sorts of foreign visitors whom one wants to see but who are difficult to fit in. . . . And then a wonderful performance of Luisa Miller and the Stravinsky-Auden Rake’s Progress – the first time I had heard it – not in the least like Hogarth but very impressive particularly at the end.

A fortnight later ‘we have been (with the Tugendhats) to Congreve’s Double Dealer and (we two) to a splendid performance of Mozart’s Idomeneo – at least musically splendid – the production by Friedrich being fussy and visually poor. The afternoons and early evenings have been chiefly taken up by the House of Lords where the debates on government policy have been very interesting. Apart from that my portrait by Lawrence Gowing is now finished so I shall have two mornings more to spare and R.O.H. Development continues to be very preoccupying.’ In the autumn there were more foreign visitors, including Hayek, the Machlups, Helen Suzman and Sheila Van der Horst (Appointments Diary 1979; Machlup to LCR, 21 August 1979, Machlup 61–1; Sheila Van der Horst to LCR, 4 November 1979, Letters from Old Friends, RP). On 15 November 1979 Prime Minister Thatcher read out a statement identifying Anthony Blunt as the ‘fourth man’ from Cambridge who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s – the other three being Guy

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Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby, who defected to Moscow in 1951 (Carter 2001, 472–3). One can only imagine Lionel’s private emotions. Six months later, when a group of members of the British Academy, led by the Cambridge historian J.H. Plumb, put down a motion to deprive Blunt of his fellowship, Lionel strongly objected. He proposed an alternative motion for the Academy’s general meeting on 3 July 1980, which Isaiah Berlin managed to have postponed to enable others of his own and Lionel’s view to attend. As well as Basil Yamey and John Hale whom Berlin had talked to at the National Gallery board meeting on 5 June, those who agreed with Lionel included Helen Gardner (who seconded Lionel’s motion) ‘& Herbert Hart & [Hugh] Trevor-Roper & doubtless many others, good men (& women) and true’, as Berlin told Lionel on 5 June. Moving his resolution, Lionel made it clear he did not underestimate what Blunt had done (ms British Academy 3.vii.80, The Blunt Episode, RP): ‘I am bound to say that there are aspects of what has been revealed that I find it impossible not to condemn. That is why my resolution says that we deplore his conduct.’ He also admitted that if Blunt were ‘now responsible for teaching the young and attracting recruits for a university society, . . . consideration of his position in that respect would seem to me to be incumbent on those in authority’. But the Academy’s function was ‘to advance learning and to give public recognition to academic excellence, and I see grave difficulties of principle if we go beyond that function. . . . Thus, confronted with this truly depressing situation, I do not think that we are called upon to do anything more than make it quite clear that we dissociate ourselves from Professor Blunt’s action falling outside our own terms of reference.’ As regards those terms of reference, Blunt deserved his fellowship, for his contribution to the history of art and for promoting the advancement of learning in that subject. ‘That is why, having deplored his conduct in other connections, I suggest [in the motion] that we proceed no further in this matter.’ The Academy did not deprive Blunt of his fellowship. There were ‘hours of fractious debate, at the end of which an exhausted member suggested that they vote merely to pass on to the next item on the agenda’ – which they did, by 120 votes to 42, with 25 abstentions, after the suggestion was seconded by three fellows. But Plumb and his allies threatened to resign if Blunt remained a fellow. There were nasty attacks on Blunt, and the Academy, in the press. When Blunt wrote to the president, Sir Kenneth Dover, apologizing for the attacks on the Academy, Dover suggested he ‘give serious consideration’ to the possibility of resigning. Blunt reluctantly decided to do so on 17 August, and was followed the next day by A.J.P. Taylor, who had threatened to resign

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if Blunt were forced to do so (Carter 2001, 492–3; Burk 2000, 340–2). Before the public controversy broke out, Blunt had written to Lionel on 4 July (The Blunt Episode, RP): I hardly know how to thank you for your support over the British Academy Fellowship problem. My first moment of delight was when I received the agenda and read your motion, but my delight was greatly increased when I heard reports of what you had actually said at the meeting, and, of course, when I knew the result of the vote. I know that I have caused you and many of my friends great distress. It would be futile simply to apologise, but I think you must know what my motives were, even if – like myself now – you heartily disapprove. Thank you again, and for all your support during the 27 years I was at the Courtauld.

Lionel did not reply. He told his son later (information from Richard Robbins): ‘Were I to meet him on the street I should not consider it consistent with our previous relationship to cut him but I should walk up to him, stare past his shoulder and say “and did you write your book on Poussin?” Perhaps such a question would have been more utterly scathing than to cut him.’ Robbins’s lectures on the history of economic thought had become something of a rite of passage for all LSE students interested in economics. In 1979/80 his grandson Philip, then an MSc student in economics, taperecorded most of them. Since he recorded a couple more of the lectures the following year, the transcript, which has since been published (Robbins 1998), is an almost complete record of the thirty-eight lectures. When Lionel first gave them, in 1953/4 (see Chapter 20), they covered the period 1700– 1930; in the later years pre-scientific anticipations (from Plato onwards), eighteenth-century French economic thought, English classical economics and post-1870 analysis received almost equal treatment, with Marx and the Historical School fitted in between the classics and the marginal revolution. He always reached Marshall; when he got behind, as in 1979/80, he caught up by omitting planned lectures on minor figures. His enthusiasm for his favourite authors comes across very strongly and he enlivened his discussion of those he found less interesting by using the work of his many former doctoral students. His ‘outside’ interests appear too: when he came to Carl Menger he enquired whether any of the students had seen the MacMillan ballet Mayerling – ‘quite an exciting ballet, rather horrible, but with splendid choreography’ – Menger having been tutor to the Crown Prince Rudolf who died at Mayerling. A related incident revealing of the man is that he had never divulged that his grandson was at LSE: when he took Philip to lunch

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in the Senior Common Room at the end of the year, the colleagues who had taught him were completely surprised (information from Phil Robbins). At the beginning of his lectures Lionel devoted some time to the question of the value of the study of the subject – as he had also done in his ‘Reflections on the history of economic thought’ at the University of Pennsylvania in 1976. Apart from the utility of the study of history in general, and the possibility of greater understanding of current economic theory (which he did not mention in the LSE lectures), he also contended that study of the history of economics was ‘some substitute for certain disadvantages under which economics in general, together with other social studies, inevitably labours’, the absence of laboratory experiments. We have to scrutinize our conjectures by examining situations usually subject to influences other than those on which we wish to concentrate. The history of attempts at problem-solving in such contexts affords, as it were, a wider area in which to pursue our investigations. To discover how a certain theory showed up in circumstances different from the contemporary situation affords new insight into the scope of its application and the extent of its limitations. The history, for instance, of the disputes between the so-called Currency and Banking Schools of the mid-nineteenth century, surely, throws illuminating light on many of the discussions of internal and international monetary discussions of our own day.

By the end of the academic year Lionel had written his Ely Lecture for the AEA meetings in Denver and sent a draft to Baumol on 18 June: Baumol responded on 26 June that it was ‘magnificent – precisely what I had looked forward to’. Baumol found several points to criticize, especially on welfare economics, where he thought Lionel had gone too far in his condemnation (Recent Lectures, RP). After spending August at Lyme Regis as usual, Lionel and Iris set off for the States, spending three days with Caroline in Philadelphia before arriving in Denver the day before his lecture (LCR to ICR, 8 August 1980). Baumol described the occasion (Robbins 1984, viii–ix): ‘on the appointed evening, before some 2,000 persons, Lord Robbins rose to give an overwhelming demonstration of the exquisite use of language, of the lecture as an art form, and of the amount of insight and thought one hour can be made to encompass. His re-exploration of the terrain of The Nature and Significance elicited a standing ovation such as I have never seen at a professional meeting.’ Lionel was pleased too, as he told Caroline on 22 September; he found the meetings ‘intensely interesting and, to the extent that my paper went reasonably well, gratifying’. The day after the lecture he was interviewed for the New York Times (‘At economics talks: Lord Robbins in Denver’, 9 September 1980), ‘his tall figure sprawled in an armchair in the lobby of Denver’s Hilton Hotel, his eyes peering intently through

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black-rimmed glasses that contrasted with his mane of white hair.’ The interviewer (Karen W. Arnson) had been impressed: ‘Prominent economists and lesser ones all had stories to tell of their previous encounters with Lord Robbins, recollections of books he had remembered, pronouncements at a seminar or lecture, strolls through art galleries and literary discussions over lunch, tales they had obviously treasured over many years. . . . And his many and varied statements at the meetings here are sure to provide further fireside tales.’ As well as his current, rather optimistic views on the US economy she noted: ‘When it comes to the limits of economics, Lord Robbins becomes somewhat defensive. During one of the sessions last week, Lord Robbins rose to give an impassioned argument on how much the discipline had progressed from the time he started studying it.’ As Robbins said, his Ely lecture was ‘a good opportunity to gather together some reflections on the subject of that essay [Nature and Significance] and perhaps to put things in such a way as to make peace with some of my critics’. First he ‘resume[d] his position on the definition of the subject matter of Economics’, where he still held to his scarcity definition. He also, secondly, still believed that economics was a science, but now on Popperean lines. Economics ‘conforms fundamentally to our conception of science in general: that is to say the formation of hypotheses explaining and (possibly) predicting the outcome of the relationships concerned and the testing of such hypotheses by logic and by observation. This process used to be called verification. But, since this way of putting things may involve an overtone of permanence and nonrefutability, it is probably better described, as Karl Popper has taught us, as a search for falsification’. On the other hand, he remained sceptical (too sceptical for some of his friends) of empirical testing of economic hypotheses. His position on interpersonal comparisons of utility (and hence his ‘somewhat adverse’ view of welfare economics) was unchanged, but he made it clear he was not saying such comparisons could not be made but that there can be no objective measurement of such comparisons. Hence ‘the practical use of such judgments which it is legitimate to make . . . is incomparably less than the claims made for Welfare Economics with capital letters. . . . I am not against such discussions. . . . But with the best will in the world, I cannot help thinking that John Chipman and John Moore [1978] are right in their verdict that what they call the New Welfare Economics . . . has broken down in the strictly scientific sense and left us with the fundamental implications . . . [pointed out by Jevons in 1871] that all recommendations of policy involve judgments of value.’ He was in ‘emphatically in favour of such discussions’ as long as they were acknowledged to be ‘political economy’ rather than economics, as he went

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on to argue in the fourth and last part of his lecture. The lecture was published in the American Economic Review in May 1981. His sister, who was nothing if not candid, told him on 2 July that she ‘like[d] the . . . offprint as well as anything of yours I’ve read. Very lucid and persuasive.’ It was to be his last article in a major journal, though not his last published work. From Denver Lionel and Iris drove with the Baumols into the Rockies for a couple of days, before they flew to their ‘beloved Claremont’ for five days. There Lionel had ‘comparatively light duties, two lectures – easy ones [at least one on inflation] – and a seminar.’ They took the opportunity to visit the Huntington and the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena. Lionel had seen both collections before but particularly wanted to see again Gainsborough’s Blue Boy in the Huntington Art Gallery, which he ‘found as moving as before’ (LCR to ICR, 22 September 1980; ms Notes for a talk on inflation Claremont 10.ix.80, Claremont 78-, RP). A month later Lionel and Iris were in Hamburg for the eighth BolognaClaremont conference. It was on the usual lines, with the theme ‘In search of stability and development in an unbalanced world’ (ms notes in Claremont 1980-, RP; Hinshaw ed 1983). Afterwards Hinshaw wrote to say ‘how much I admire the way you performed your role as Moderator . . . a role which seems to me by far the most taxing of all, certainly during the conference itself. As always you did superbly, despite being ill when you arrived.’ He was already planning the next conference, which he then thought might be a smaller one at Claremont, and agreed to holding it early in 1983 rather than late 1982 because of Lionel’s LSE lectures (Hinshaw to LCR, 1 December 1980 and 12 March 1981, LCR to Hinshaw, 30 June, Hinshaw to LCR, 8 July 1981, Claremont 1980-, RP). In the event Lionel could not participate in the conference at Bologna in April 1983. Richard Cooper replaced him and Willard Thorp, combining the roles of moderator and chairman. When its proceedings were published they were dedicated to Lionel (Hinshaw ed 1985). Later conferences included a Lionel Robbins Memorial Lecture, the first given by Milton Friedman (1988). Lionel and Iris’s 1979–80 expeditions led to two more overseas trips in 1981, to countries they had not visited before, Argentina in March and Taiwan in December. At the Madrid Mont Pelerin Society meeting Lionel had met Alfredo Esposito, director of the Argentinian central bank. In January 1980 Lionel received a letter asking if he would be interested in coming to Buenos Aires for about ten days in order to ‘give 4 conferences at the Stock Exchange, as well as attend various meetings and talks to businessmen, academics and authorities of our country, presenting and exchanging ideas with the participants’. Lionel replied on 16 January that

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the earliest he could manage would be the Christmas vacation of 1980/1 and enquired about the duties and expenses of such a trip. He subsequently met Esposito in London and the formal invitation from the Fundacion Bolsa de Comercio de Buenos Aires which followed on 13 August suggested as dates either 22–29 March or 29 March–5 April 1981, as topics for lectures ‘The main ideas contributed by economists during the past 50 years’ and ‘Present economic, financial and monetary situation’, as other events ‘lunch or dinner with important official and private economic centers’ and as for expenses firstclass airfares for Lionel and Iris, accommodation at a luxury hotel and a fee of US$2500. Lionel agreed on 29 August to the second week (BA Argentina, RP). By the time this was settled, Tsiang Sho-Chieh, who had been a graduate student at LSE in wartime Cambridge and later worked for the IMF (Tsiang 1989, 1) and had talked to Lionel and Iris at the AEA meetings, wrote on 19 January 1981 both to ask Lionel if he would write a preface to a collection of Tsiang’s papers and to invite him to attend a conference on the economic development of Taiwan at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research in Taipei in December 1981 followed by ‘two days field trip around the island’. If Lionel were prepared also to deliver a public lecture and attend a seminar, there would be a $2000 honorarium in addition to firstclass airfares and accommodation. When Lionel accepted Tsiang asked him on 19 February to give one of the two keynote speeches (the other would be by Simon Kuznets) at the opening of the conference (Taiwan Lectures (1981), RP). Lionel chose to contribute a talk on ‘Stagflation’ as the keynote speech and also gave a public lecture on ‘International Economic Problems’ at the Institute of Economics (Robbins 1982a, b). In Buenos Aires Lionel lectured on ‘Keynes as a political economist’ and ‘The present economic, financial and monetary situation’ on 31 March and 2 April 1981. The first is still interesting to read as it reviews his own changing views of Keynes – from the hero who wrote the Economic Consequences of the Peace through their disagreements of the 1930s to the leader whom he admired and loved in the Second World War. After an enjoyable week in Buenos Aires Lionel and Iris flew home via Rio de Janeiro so that they could spend a day with the Gudins (Robbins 1981e; tss Keynes as a political economist and The present economic, financial and monetary situation, LCR to Julio Juan Bardi, 19 January and 3 February 1981, BA Argentina 1981, RP). Iris’s account of the opening of the conference in Taiwan is amusing. We set off for Taiwan miraculously, L with the use of [a] quarter of a vocal chord and I just prayed that 15 hours silence in the plane would restore him to normal.

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However we had such a nightmare of anxiety on the way that we both forgot to worry about his absence of lecturing voice and it returned willynilly. We had left Heathrow 4 hours late, had allowed 2 hours for changing planes in hongkong but had to spend the night involving immigration troubles no hongkong dollars finding a place to sleep changing tickets next morning having no money to pay as our bank had given us old taiwan currency and they wouldnt take it. I was fearful of L’s state – frightfully anxious but when we were truly off at 9.15 he said he never felt better and ready for anything. After an hour we were met by a man and two women at the plane door, shoved with our hand baggage in a trolley and rushed along corridors to a waiting car, leaving passports tickets and luggage behind with 500 people waiting for Lionel to open [the] conference. We drove 60 miles at 45mph (restrictions). Just in time 11am made entrance as someone was just about to read L’s address. Uproar and clapping as we came down the steps L enjoyed the excitement and giving the lecture. After that all pleasant . . . Then on to Singapore . . . Sweltering hot there came back refreshed spiritually but exhausted and seem only now to be sitting up and taking notice. Lionel is very well now and is going to give a talk at the Dame Henrietta memorial next Tuesday [4 May 1982]. Otherwise he spends much time at the House of Lords and really enjoys it there, a variety of acquaintances with all sorts of interests.

Iris was writing to Caroline after Richard had been visiting her in Philadelphia. Lionel had sent a letter with Richard, telling Caroline of his more recent activities, on 3 April: The Lent Term is always a busy time for my lectures on the History of Economic Thought as I always think of new arrangements for the XIXth century. Then the House of Lords has been active in subjects on which I feel some obligation to speak – Education and the Brandt Report [North-South, a programme for survival (1980), the report of a commission on development issues chaired by the former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt].24 On top of that I am trying to discover what shall be the subject of the last book – or books – I shall probably write and this is by no means easy. Finally in the last fortnight of term Iris and I were both laid low by the weather and the worst colds & coughs for the last ten years and lecturing twice a week in those conditions was not agreable. I have just come from a Saturday meeting of the House to hear a Government statement about the [Argentinian] invasion of the Falkland [Island]s.

(He reported that ‘all, or nearly all, the House was behind the government in their decision to proclaim their intention to see the Falklanders restored to British citizenship’ – adding on 27 April that these were ‘Anxious times about the Falklands. I’m not sure about the “paramountcy” of the inhabitants but I am reasonably clear about international law.’) 24

These debates took place on 17 February and 3 March 1982 (HLDebs vol 427 cols 580–2 and 1328–31.

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In the previous two years Robbins had supported, though not uncritically, the Thatcher government’s Employment bill to limit trade union privileges such as the ‘closed shop’. In commenting on the Finance bill each year he had emphasized the contribution of the high external value of sterling, due to the flow of North Sea oil since 1977 as well as to high UK interest rates, to the current severe recession in Britain. But he consistently criticized the conduct of financial policy for its inconsistencies and failures which had increased both inflation and unemployment (Speeches H of L, RP). As he told a Canadian journalist (Newman 1982), I agree with what she’s trying to do; I don’t agree with every item in her policy. I think that it was a mistake when they came to power to carry out this very considerable switch from direct to indirect taxation. . . . [As for ‘monetarism’], I don’t understand the meaning of monetarism any longer, it’s just a term of abuse. I personally would never call myself a full-blooded monetarist, though I believe that control of the money supply is very important. The present government hasn’t been frightfully successful in controlling the amount of borrowing . . . [for which] I blame rather the experts for not devising administrative measures which make control of aggregate expenditure, which is after all the target, easier to carry through. Mrs Thatcher is right in regarding the main enemy as inflation, even at the present level.

He particularly objected to her government’s moves on education. He spoke against the raising of overseas student fees in December 1979, because of the discrimination between domestic and overseas students and its effect on graduate education in Britain (HLDebs vol 403 cols 1312–15). When the UGC in May 1981 imposed target figures of students for individual universities, he vigorously objected to the abandonment of both the ‘Robbins principle’ and the principle that universities should be able to decide what courses to offer. As he commented on 17 February 1982, this ‘minute prescription’ of numbers reminded him of ‘no less than what I witnessed in the universities of Leningrad and Moscow’ (HLDebs vol 421 cols 1122–6, vol 427 cols 580–2). While ‘somewhat unsympathetic’ to protests that universities should be immune from public expenditure cuts and that the existing low student–staff ratios should not rise, he argued in the press that the UGC should have, as in the past, negotiated an overall figure for student numbers with the DES and the Treasury and then, after setting aside a contingency fund for those institutions injured by the increase in overseas student fees, asked the universities to take a uniform percentage cut in their grants, leaving them to decide how to adjust to reduced funding (1981c, d). When he reluctantly agreed to give the Henrietta Barnett Memorial Lecture at the 75th anniversary celebrations of Hampstead Garden Suburb which she had founded – he could not deny that he was ‘a local resident and [one]

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whose experiences in the wider world included two fields . . . education and the arts’ in which Barnett had been involved – he spoke on higher education, including his views on student numbers, excessive specialization and the current financial crisis (Dawn Orr to LCR, 24 January 1982, 1982 Correspondence; ts Thoughts on Higher Education Hampstead 4.5.1982, Recent lectures, RP). He ended with an anecdote from his visit to the USSR in 1962: I fell in with a high academic authority to whom I requested that he would explain to us the regulation of student numbers in the Soviet University system [which he did] . . . I listened to this and then, greatly daring, I put to him the question whether such precision did not involve some sense of injustice, at least of ill luck, on the part of the rejected. ‘Well you may be right,’ he said; and then, as if he were confessing a serious offence, he related that, in one of the recent examinations, a girl who had come from a very distant part from the city in which he operated was just below the line. ‘And I thought to myself’, he said, – and I could have hugged him for this – ‘Well after all people are people and so I let her in’. . . . I fear that the present membership of the University Grants Committee . . . must be forgetting that after all ‘people are people’.

Robbins started work on another book. There exist in his papers the (undated) manuscript and typed copy of the introduction and three incomplete chapters of a work entitled Famous Propositions in Economic Analysis: Their Emergence and Subsequent History. Apart from introductory observations their contents relate to Plato and Aristotle and the Scholastic philosophers. The source references include recent literature and at the end of June and beginning of July 1982 he borrowed half a dozen books from the BLPES on mediaeval and early modern economic thought (Ambrosine Hurt to D.A. Bovey, 22 June, 30 June and 29 July 1982, 1982 Correspondence, RP). He had also written to Tim Farmiloe on 11 May 1982 to raise the possibility of a third edition of the Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (Macmillan, RP). At some point in the previous year he had listed his major activities since the late 1960s, perhaps with a view to a second, updated edition of his autobiography, and put together some files of materials for possible collections of essays.25 25

There are three sets of ms notes, one beginning ‘1) Troubles . . . ’, the other two headed Articles and Files of Possible Publications, and files labelled ‘Biographical Papers No objection to the publication of any of these But beware to advise overlap in case of E. Rose & the peculiar case of Wheeler Bennett & Waverley. Some of this is in my Autobiography’, ‘Academic Reviews in the journals & periodicals Some of these may be worth publishing . . . – perhaps together with some obituaries etc’, ‘FT Articles Some of these might go with H. of Lords speeches on inflation’.

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Lionel Robbins’s active life came to a sudden end on 5 July 1982, when he suffered a severe and disabling stroke. His family remember that he had spent the previous afternoon watching the enthralling 41/4 hour long Wimbledon Men’s Final between Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe. He was taken to the Whittington Hospital in North London. Richard had been planning an exhibition of his paintings when he heard the news. He decided to go ahead, and when he told his apparently unconscious father, ‘Out of the darkness emerged, “Splendid spirit.” They were the first words that he had spoken. I sat with him some time. Then kissed his great head and went to get on [with the hanging].’ While Lionel’s left leg and arm were paralyzed his speech was relatively unaffected, but as Ambrosine Hurt told Randall Hinshaw on 3 September (1982 Correspondence, RP) she found when she went to visit him that sometimes he ‘was talking fairly clearly and coherently. . . . Sometimes he “rambles” a good deal and sometimes hardly speaks at all.’ When Claus Moser visited him he reported to the ROH board on 21 July that Lionel had been ‘thrilled that his wife had been able to attend the opening ceremony for the extension [on 19 July]. He was delighted by the appearance of the new building and had talked with enthusiasm about Phase 2.’26 He told Richard he did not want to go on living (information from Richard Robbins). In the hope that he would eventually be able to return home, his family bought a ground-floor flat in Southwood Hall near Anne and Christopher Johnson’s house in Highgate. It was a year before he could join Iris there, but he left hospital for a nursing home in High Barnet shortly before Christmas, where he could receive better attention and more physiotherapy (Hurt to Lucas Beltran, 5 October and 20 December, Hurt to Hinshaw, 9 December 1982, 1982 Correspondence, RP). From there he began to be taken out in a mini-van converted to accommodate his wheelchair and could visit the National and other galleries again as well as lunch at the flat once Iris moved in. He also began to respond at length to Richard’s questions about his life. But he felt imprisoned and his son-in-law thought he ‘lives for his daily outings to the flat or, at week-ends, to artistic and architectural sights’. The Financial Times, the Economist and the School all contributed to the cost of the nursing home and then for day and night nurses at the flat. The family also moved most of his library into a room in the flat so that he could feel he was among his cherished economics books (Christopher Johnson to 26

As well as missing the official opening of the ROH extension by HRH The Prince of Wales, he missed the Bentham Sesquicentenary Conference at UCL on 8 July (programmes in RP). He had given his last speech in the House of Lords, on the report by Lord Rothschild on the Social Science Research Council, on 30 June (HLDebs vol 432 cols 303–6).

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Alan Hare, 12 August, and Johnson to Dahrendorf, 7 September 1983, 1983 Correspondence, RP). Richard spent many hours with his father – and sculpted a bust that now sits in the lobby of the LSE library. Of those last months his son wrote (‘M & D’): ‘His warmth . . . was [still] there. His appreciation of those who tended him was great. Our own love made it hard if not impossible to face the decline of this great force in our lives. For those long months in a way he became a greater focus of attention in the family . . . as he was incapable of looking after himself.’ Many friends visited, though some, like Karl Popper, were distressed by his condition. Ambrosine Hurt reported to Debraprasad Sinha on 24 January 1984 (1984 Correspondence, RP) that ‘He spends a great deal of his time browsing over his wonderful collection of art books, and seems to have retained an excellent memory as to which artist painted which picture. But it is of course terribly sad that he is no longer able to read, or to take part for any length of time in intellectual discussion.’ Lionel died at home on 15 May 1984. His last words before he suffered a second stroke were to greet Iris as she returned from visiting her sisters with Richard while Alan and Shirley Day came to tea with Lionel and Anne (information from Alan and Shirley Day). His funeral was very simple according to his own instructions. But ‘a committee was set up’ of Ralf Dahrendorf, Christopher Johnson, Claus Moser and Richard Robbins to decide when and where to hold a memorial gathering. They decided on St John’s Smith Square, the deconsecrated church which was now a concert hall, and on 11 October though Richard would have preferred it sooner (Richard Robbins, ‘M & D’). James Meade, Garrett Drogheda, Will Baumol and Claus Moser paid tributes to a true Renaissance man. Richard read Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and Ralph Harris read extracts from Lionel’s autobiography. The music provided by the Royal Opera House orchestra, conducted by Solti, with soloists including Gwyneth Jones, Valerie Masterton and Gwynne Howell, included Bach’s ‘Air on a G string’, the trio from Act I of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte and the quartet from Act I of Beethoven’s Fidelio (Meeting in memory of Lord Robbins, CH, CB, 1898–1984 St John’s Smith Square 11 October 1984 4.30 pm). Afterwards Iris told Garrett Drogheda on 14 October, ‘Certainly if God had created Thursday the 11th he would have looked down & found it good.’ Several weeks earlier Iris, at Lyme Regis, had got up early one morning, walked alone to the end of the Cobb and thrown Lionel’s ashes into the sea.

Conclusion

I have tried to tell the story of Lionel Robbins’s life ‘as it happened’, with due regard to the fact that he was often engaged in several different activities at the same time. It is time to step back to look at what he accomplished in his varied life and what enabled him to do so. Although Robbins’s early ambitions did not include the life of an academic economist, it is that life for which he is most remembered. The route by which he became one was not straight, originating in his youthful attachment to guild socialism and the challenge to those ideas of Major Douglas’s social credit proposals. When he resumed his university education in 1920, after active service in the First World War and eighteen months working for the labour movement, he chose to study at the London School of Economics instead of returning to the study of literature. There he pursued his interests in political theory and the history of political ideas throughout his three years as an undergraduate. But he also encountered the academic discipline of economics, which attracted him because it was rational and scientific: its findings were not dictated by political presumptions and it was value-free compared with political science. When he came to criticize leftleaning economists for using an assumption of diminishing marginal utility of income to derive arguments for redistributive policies, his objection was not to the policies as such but to the claim that they were justified by economic theory, when the justification was in fact the unprovable and unscientific ‘law of diminishing marginal utility’. The emphasis on rationality was also a long way from the philosophy of Nietzsche and from ‘the queer mixture of practical politics and irrational enthusiasm which goes by the name of socialism’ (see Chapter 4), both of which had attracted him in his youth. What sort of economist did he become? That was a winding road too. At LSE he first came under the influence of Hugh Dalton, Theodore Gregory 1079

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and Edwin Cannan. He was deeply impressed by Dalton’s ability to separate economic theory from his political beliefs while not hiding those beliefs. Gregory introduced him to monetary economics and international economics, whose mixture of pure theory and practical relevance were of abiding interest to him throughout his career. From Cannan he learned the value of scholarship and erudition and acquired a permanent interest in the history of economics. He also learned Marshallian economics, in spite of Cannan’s notoriously critical attitude to Marshall. And, as he put in his autobiography (1971a, 86), he gained ‘a sense of the sweep and the power of the subject [economics] and its relevance to human happiness’. The practical utility of the subject was enhanced by the emphasis on rationality: Robbins explained to J.J. Mallon in 1926 (‘Wages’, RP) that ‘Cannan and his very guarded rationalism seemed just the thing I wanted. “I don’t say that men are rational,” he seemed to say, “or that they will become rational but there seems no doubt that they can be rational if they please, and as once we lose touch with rationality we have no criteria whatever to guide us, for the purpose of devising engines of progress we simply must assume that they will exert this faculty.”’ Under this influence Robbins became a liberal free-trade economist – a stance from which he never budged. He was not a free-market economist though: while (as he put to students in 1930) ‘there is an enormous field in which the operation of free consumers choice will secure the most adequate realization of social ends’, a pure laissez-faire system had ‘grave deficiencies’. The free operation of consumers’ choice in, for instance, the location of new housing could produce unintended and undesirable urban blight. Government economic policies had to be considered on their merits, which meant analysing all their possible consequences. This was indeed the utility of economics. To take another example (from the same lecture), ‘I might decide for agricultural protection because I think it is good for industry in general, because I do not understand the ultimate repercussions of interferences with purchases in the cheapest market. And in that case economic analysis will greatly elucidate matters’ (The Nature & Significance of Economic Science, RP). He had also told his first year students that in such analyses, ‘we are sometimes led to conclusions which look tory blue, sometimes to conclusions which look labour red’ (Elements 1929, RP). The other important influences came through reading: Philip Wicksteed and Ludwig von Mises in his last year as an undergraduate. As O’Brien (1990, 155) noted, the primary source of Robbins’s microeconomics was ‘undoubtedly Wicksteed’s Common Sense, while he drew from the Austrians precisely those elements which coincided most directly with what he had

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drawn from Wicksteed.’ As Robbins wrote of Wicksteed (1933, xii), ‘It is . . . the most exhausting non-mathematical exposition of the technical and philosophical complications of the so-called marginal theory of pure Economics, which has appeared in any language.’ This exposition included the subjective theory of value, the idea of scales of preferences rather than (un)measurable utility, the general theory of equilibrium, the concept of opportunity costs and the marginal productivity theory of distribution: all of which were also developed by the Austrians Robbins was reading at the same time. Robbins was also, of course, impressed by Mises’s powerful critique of socialism. It reinforced all the doubts Robbins had come to have about the practicality or desirability of a socialist economic system. When he began to translate it for publication in English, it led to their meeting and subsequent friendship. Robbins was always interested in labour economics and theories of unemployment (see his surviving undergraduate essays). His knowledge of trade cycle theory came through working as William Beveridge’s research assistant in 1924 – ironically, since Beveridge was an empiricist with little regard for theory. Having acquainted himself thoroughly at that time with the work in this area of A.C. Pigou, D.H. Robertson, F. Lavington and others he moved on at the end of the decade to the new Austrian theories, finding in Hayek’s work in particular an example of a highly theoretical approach with practical implications immediately relevant to the current economic problem, the developing world slump. Hence for a while Robbins became an Austrian macroeconomist and as such believed not just in the need for sound monetary policy to prevent booms developing but also in the futility of government intervention to try to counteract depression once a slump had begun – which is another irony since Robbins was temperamentally an economist who wanted to improve people’s lives. Out of all these influences came his Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932) and The Great Depression (1934). The former was not particularly Austrian, originating as it did in Robbins’s objections to Cannan’s definition of economics as the study of the causes of economic welfare. Its deductivist methodological stance was essentially that of J.N. Keynes, sharpened in exchanges with his friend Nathan Isaacs in 1931 and elaborated with reference to Austrian writers. Robbins took further account of Austrian views in the second edition when he tried to reformulate his views in response to criticisms by his friends Gottfried Haberler and Fritz Machlup. The Great Depression, on the other hand, is an Austrian work in that an Austrian monetary overinvestment theory is used to explain the

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downturn of 1929–30 and to criticize most policy reactions to the slump. At the same time, however, and as Lionel pointed out to critics, the idea of forced saving in this theory had been developed by Robertson as well as by Hayek. The remainder of the book, which explained at length and in detail why the slump had become the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1930s, is of lasting value and is independent of the analysis of the causes of the initial downturn. Neither Robertson nor Jacob Viner was convinced by that analysis. Over the next few years Lionel’s views were to move closer to theirs and away from Hayek’s. It was in his Austrian phase that Robbins famously clashed with Keynes in the Committee of Economics of the Labour government’s Economic Advisory Council in September–October 1930. But while trade cycle theories were the beginning of their differences, the dispute came to a head over the issue of Keynes’s advocacy of a revenue tariff to deal with the current UK balance-of-payments problem. Lionel was respected for that, by Keynes as well as others, even as he was attacking Keynes publicly on that issue from March 1931 onwards. The Austrian connection was important in a different way, leading to Robbins’s efforts to find academic employment outside Germany for Jewish economists. Meanwhile Robbins was building up the Economics Department at LSE, which had consisted essentially of only himself, Dalton and J.R. Hicks when he became professor of economics in 1929. Within a couple of years he had gathered together an outstanding group of economists, including among others R.G.D. Allen, Evan Durbin, Victor Edelberg, Nicholas Kaldor and Abba Lerner, many of whom were his students, as well as Hicks and Hayek, whose first appointment was as a visiting professor in 1931–2. It is all too often claimed that Robbins invited Hayek to LSE to ‘fight Keynes’ and to establish a ‘school’ of economists in opposition to the Cambridge economists. But while Lionel wanted to make the LSE department a rival to Cambridge for the quality of its teaching and research, the idea of a feud between LSE and Cambridge came from Hayek himself (Hayek 1994, 77). Before Hayek came to LSE to give four public lectures in January 1931, he visited Cambridge intending to attack Keynes’s theories at the Marshall Society. By the spring of 1931 he saw himself as battling Keynes’s ‘monetary hereticisms’ leaving Robbins to concentrate on the tariff issue. But this was not deliberately planned before Hayek met Lionel for the first time at LSE. In the later 1930s there was as much interest in Keynesian economics at LSE as there was in Cambridge, with most of the younger economists Keynesians. In different ways the slightly older Hayek and Robbins tried to remain aloof from the debates by concentrating on their own work,

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Hayek’s on capital theory, Robbins’s on international economic policy. But Lionel’s views on domestic financial policy were changing in 1936–7. He was less enamoured of Austrian cycle theory and, having observed Britain’s recovery from the slump and the effects of rearmament expenditure, he became more hopeful that governments could do something to mitigate slumps if not yet to prevent them. Recognizing that ‘old-fashioned financial orthodoxy . . . may have the effect of intensifying depression’, he was ‘happy to have something a little more cheerful to add’ (1939a, 218n). During the Second World War he was to become even more optimistic. Robbins’s grasp of the fundamental principles of economics was the basis of his input into the creation of the total war economy (and, along with his knowledge of mixed farming, of his frequent tussles with the Ministry of Agriculture over domestic food production). In his first year of wartime government service, in what became the Economic Section of the War Cabinet Offices, he initiated the discussions, wrote the memoranda and persuaded the relevant ministers (and some of their permanent civil servants) in the process that led to the introduction of points rationing for food in 1941 – ‘one of [the] big home front successes of the war’ of the coalition government (Hancock and Gowing 1949, 332). He had already backed Keynes’s proposals on how to pay for the war and helped to persuade the senior Treasury officials to facilitate the preparation of the new national income and expenditure estimates by James Meade and Richard Stone that were needed to implement the proposals. His active support of Meade’s pioneering work on postwar employment policy, from late 1941 onwards, was crucial in getting this work out of the Section and into wider circulation and discussion at the highest levels of government. He rewrote Meade’s major memorandum for the wider audience in April 1943 and then, later in the year, after two official missions to North America, defended the Section’s proposals against formidable opposition from the most senior civil servants in Whitehall. Those civil servants rightly credited him with the most significant contribution in furthering the final outcome: the 1944 white paper on Employment Policy. As one Treasury official (Proctor) wrote to him in June 1944: ‘Whatever you from the inside may think of the watering down of the Employment White Paper, . . . it is a very fine paper indeed and would stand comparison not too badly with a certain Document over the initials L.C.R. with which it all started about a year ago. It is a very great triumph and we all owe you a lot – more, I suppose, than anyone is ever likely to know. In fact the story of Points Rationing over again writ large.’ Persuasion was a critical part of Lionel Robbins’s influence on wartime economic policy and postwar plans for economic policy in peacetime, in

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Britain and in the USA. He first had to persuade fellow economists in the Section and other parts of government and then the minister responsible for the Economic Section until he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in September 1943, Sir John Anderson. Lionel was lucky in working for Anderson, as he well knew, for Anderson was an outstanding administrator who could be counted on to read his briefs and, if he agreed with the advice, to fight for it tenaciously and skilfully. As Cairncross and Watts (1989, 54) emphasized, ‘Above all, Robbins hit it off with Anderson and enjoyed his complete trust. It was this more than anything that allowed the Section to play an important and useful part as economic advisers.’ It also meant that Robbins was one of Keynes’s most powerful allies within the government machine. Robbins’s internationalism had led him before the war to argue for a federal international economic order in his Economic Planning and International Order (1937) and The Economic Causes of War (1939) and for a federal union of Britain and France in 1939–40. After the fall of France his hopes centred on Anglo-American cooperation to try to bring about a multilateral postwar international order based on fixed exchange rates and relatively free trade. He was naturally ‘strongly attracted’ to Keynes’s Clearing Union plan in October 1941; for the next four years he fought hard and persistently for it, for Meade’s complementary plan for an international commercial union and for Keynes’s commodity policy proposals. Here his talents for economic diplomacy were much needed: it was not just a matter of persuading officials and ministers in London that these schemes offered the best hope of Britain’s postwar prosperity against the pessimists such as Hubert Henderson in the Treasury and the ‘imperialists’ such as Lord Beaverbrook in the Cabinet but of trying to persuade the economists in the US Administration that these would fit in with American requirements for the postwar settlement. His personal contributions were vitally important at the first UN conference at Hot Springs in May 1943, in official discussions of monetary policy in Washington in June 1943, in the Law Mission to Washington for ‘conversations’ on monetary and commercial policy in September–October 1943 and at the UN Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods in July 1944. But while the Bretton Woods conference achieved agreement on an IMF and a World Bank the hardest task was yet to come, for there had been no progress on commercial policy since 1943 and the war ended in August 1945 with no agreement between the Americans and the British on this issue nor on immediate postwar transitional arrangements. Robbins’s liberal free-trade position also led ultimately to his most important contribution to the postwar settlement. On his last mission to

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Washington he and Percivale Liesching succeeded in October and November 1945 in finally obtaining an agreement with the US Administration on postwar commercial policy, in the form of the Proposals for Consideration by an International Conference on Trade and Employment, whose principles were incorporated in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947. As in Whitehall and in earlier Anglo-American exchanges, his frankness and honesty (and his free-trade credentials) contributed powerfully to his effectiveness. With such an agreement required as the ‘consideration’ for the British receipt of wartime lend-lease under Article VII of the 1942 Mutual Aid Agreement, it was an essential prerequisite for a postwar loan from the US government: without the commercial policy agreement there would have been no financial agreement. Furthermore, in the much more difficult negotiations led by Keynes for the financial agreement, which Lionel joined in November, his diplomacy and tact were often crucial in keeping the negotiations going. Without his interventions in the later stages of the financial negotiations there might have been no American loan. Describing his wartime position on macreconomics in his autobiography (1971a, 188), Robbins wrote: ‘It would not be true to say that then, or at any subsequent period, I had become a Keynesian in the sense of accepting au pied de la lettre all the analytical propositions of the General Theory. . . . I found . . . much that was cogent in the arguments of some of their critics – Dennis Robertson for instance. But if all that is involved by that description is a conviction that, in a free society, the fluctuations of aggregate demand must not be left to look after themselves and that it is an important function of government, national or international, to pay attention to such matters, then indeed that was now my position.’ He attributed his change of mind to his earlier recognition of the ‘catastrophic’ decline of incomes that could occur in a depression and to observation of the reduction of unemployment due to rearmament and war expenditure. It is clear from what he said – and did – during the war, that another factor was the development of national income and expenditure estimates which could be used to formulate the appropriate employment policy – as he commented in his Marshall lectures (1947c, 67–8, quoted in Chapter 18). His reference to Robertson is revealing. As Robertson noted (see Chapter 18), Lionel was more convinced after the war than Robertson of the need for the management of aggregate demand by fiscal as well as monetary policy. In this respect he agreed with the postwar consensus on Keynesian policy. But he shared some of Robertson’s doubts about some components of Keynes’s theory. He told W.H. Hutt on 30 November 1951 (Economists Correspondence 1.9.50–31/3/52, RP): ‘As I listen to the debates among the

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young people in the common room here [LSE], who do not suffer from our entanglement in ancient controversies, I have the feeling that they have transcended all this and that the view of monetary theory which is now emerging is one which includes what is valuable in Keynes as part . . . of a total structure which in its entirety is considerably nearer to (though not identical with) the classical system than Keynes himself would have been willing to allow, at any rate at the time when he wrote the General Theory.’ This structure, the ‘neoclassical synthesis’ version of Keynesianism, was one which many Keynesians (including Meade) used in their work in the 1950s and 1960s. His doubts about Keynes’s theory centred, like Robertson’s and Viner’s, on liquidity preference. They did not believe that the demand for money was a (highly elastic) function of interest rates alone and that therefore monetary policy was unimportant. Robbins’s ‘monetarism’ from the late 1940s on took the form first of warning that excess aggregate demand caused by unduly expansionary monetary policy would lead to balance-of-payments problems and that under fixed exchange rates monetary policy must be directed towards maintaining external balance. This was the theme of several of his most powerful public efforts at persuasion (such as his 1951 Stamp Memorial Lecture) and of his private advice to ministers and officials when he had the opportunity in 1952 and 1957. As in the 1930s – and unlike other monetarists such as Milton Friedman – he always preferred fixed to floating exchange rates and supported attempts to preserve the Bretton Woods system when it came under strain in the 1960s. Then and thereafter, when exchange rates were floating, he continued to warn year in and year out of the dangers of inflation and the need to keep the money supply under control, long before such views became fashionable. Lionel Robbins was always a political economist. What were his politics (after his youthful socialism)? He revealed where he had got to by 1924–5 in his early political journalism for The Outlook, abandoning the Labour Party to vote for the Liberals in the general election of October 1924. He was strongly antipathetic to the Conservative Party, for its conservative attitudes to social and economic reform, and his antipathy was increased by its advocacy of protection and imperial preference. He admired Winston Churchill (who had not always been a Conservative) for his stand against appeasement in the late 1930s and he did so even more once he was working for his government during the Second World War. In and after the war he tried to encourage sensible policy ideas among leftwing Tories who were friends (eg Alec Spearman, Peter Thorneycroft). He probably voted for Churchill in the postwar general elections – he had voted for all three major

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political parties by the time he was created a life peer – but once in the House of Lords he was pleased to be able to sit on the cross benches and to be above party politics. He remained an oldfashioned liberal. He was never a libertarian and he never followed his friend Hayek in that direction. This was not because of the rupture of their friendship caused by the manner in which Hayek left his first wife, but because he had longstanding reservations about the way Hayek’s political views were developing after 1940. He thought the welfare state in Britain had been a benefit and did not agree with the inevitability thesis of The Road to Serfdom; he also differed from Hayek over utilitarianism (see Chapter 22). He was himself a utilitarian in his political philosophy and was always willing to consider government intervention if it could bring about things not well done by individuals left to their own devices. Lionel Robbins did not rest on his laurels after the Second World War. Having returned to academic life immediately after the loan negotiations, he devoted himself first to building up the LSE Economics Department once more and then to rebuilding his own academic career. After his Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science his most important and influential book is The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy (1952), which brings together many themes in his own economic and political thought. It was a return to earlier interests: he had been interested in the classical economists since attending Cannan’s lectures and had lectured on their social philosophy at the School before the war; and his even older interest in the theory of economic policy, by which he meant ‘the general body of principles of governmental action or inaction – the agenda or non-agenda of the state as Bentham called them’, had been heightened by his service in government. Like the classical economists themselves, he shared their interest in economic reform and belief that economic science offered the best hopes of effective reform. He did not conceal that he had ‘a considerable admiration for some of these men, both as human beings and as writers’ and for their aims and methods, especially their utilitarianism: ‘On the utilitarian view no institutions, no systems of right, were sacrosanct. All were subject to the test of utility’ (1952, 6 and 178). Robbins continued to focus on the classical economists in his work on the history of economic thought in the next two decades. At the same time, as this biography has demonstrated, he was involved in many activities outside his academic life at the School, most notably in the arts. His achievements included, at the National Gallery alone, increased government funding, the reservation of the Hampton site, the resolution of the problem of the Lane Bequest and the acquisition of paintings such as the Uccello in 1959

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and the C´ezanne Grandes Baigneuses in 1964. In these the diplomatic skills acquired and the contacts made during the war obviously made a difference – especially in extracting money, in the form of purchase grants, from the Treasury. But he also used his skills as an economist, bringing the economist’s approach to the problems of the maintenance of the quality of the visual and performing arts, much of which revolve round opportunity costs. It is not sufficient to point to the (chronic) need for funding; it is necessary to consider the available alternatives, both within the arts institution concerned (for instance in choosing the balance between ballet and opera productions at the Royal Opera House) and between the particular arts expenditure and expenditure on other desirable ends of economic and social policy. He made this clear in his writings on the economics of the arts and carried it into practice in the Committee on the Rebuilding of the Queen’s Hall. He persuaded the committee to reject the proposal to build a new concert hall on the site of the old essentially on opportunity cost grounds. In the Committee on Higher Education he tackled the issue of the proposed expansion in higher education in the same way he had directed the Queen’s Hall Committee: he asked for an investigation of the potential demand for higher education from suitably qualified schoolleavers and of the supply of educational opportunities for them. As he wrote later (1971a, 275), with university expansion already underway by 1961, ‘Our problems . . . were . . . to make estimates of the numbers likely to be forthcoming and to provide some justification for the burden on the national product which would thus be involved.’ His own justification was in terms of the ultimate ends of knowledge and culture and making them accessible to a larger number of people. In the 1960s Lionel was also afforded opportunities to pursue actively some other longstanding interests such as economic and financial journalism by becoming chairman of the Financial Times. He enjoyed taking part in the business side of publishing magazines and newspapers. It also gave him, as he told his sister on 20 March 1966, ‘just that sort of focus of loyalty for practical action that has always been a stimulus to that side of my makeup’. But his greatest institutional loyalty was always to the London School of Economics. Out of loyalty and a sense of duty he took on the chairmanship of its Court of Governors at one of its most difficult times in the late 1960s and then headed the Library Appeal in the early 1970s, at the cost of not being able to do many things he would have preferred to do. The sense of duty was ingrained from his nonconformist childhood. But it does not in itself explain why he achieved so much. His sister attributed his success, in his intellectual and in his more practical activities such as

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at the National Gallery, to his power of concentration, which she thought ‘his chief intellectual asset apart from intellectual curiousity about everything. . . . Also he forgot nothing of course.’ His colleagues on the Higher Education Committee noted his concentration and his ‘absolutely photographic memory’. What lay behind his efforts, however, was, as his daughter put it in a letter to me, ‘Love’: his love for his family and his friends, his passion for the arts and his willingness to commit himself deeply to the people and things he cared about. As Robbins wrote of John Stuart Mill (1967a, xii), he ‘appears as a highly admirable figure: a man with a firm hold on the ultimate values of truth and justice and liberty, with strong principles and a strong belief in their applicability; yet, once the high spirits and arrogance of youth had been transcended, fair in argument, willing to learn from experience, empirical in practical judgement, experimental in action.’

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Index

Academic Assistance Council, 237–8, 243, 278, 323, 977 academic freedom, 259–60, 881, 884, 889–90, 998–9, 1034 Academic Freedom Committee, 3, 237–8, 242–4, 278, 497n Acheson, Dean US Assistant Secretary of State, 393–4, 441, 447–8, 454, 524, 529 Ackner, Desmond judge, 1014 Adams, Walter historian and administrator, 237, 323 director of LSE, 975–8, 983–4, 994–7, 1001–6, 1008–9, 1012, 1015–16, 1018–19, 1021, 1023, 1026, 1029 Addis, Sir Charles banker, 119, 244, 247 Adelstein, David student, 977–8, 982, 984, 1007 Adler, Solomon economist, 228, 238, 250, 264 Agassi, Joseph philosopher, 820 agricultural policy, 4, 22–4, 115–16, 208, 264–5, 367 see also National Farmers’ Union in Second World War, 358–60, 378–81, 400, 405–8, 426–7, 441, 475, 514, 542–3, 544–8, 554, 573, 575, 585, 592, 596–7, 609, 1083 Agricultural Wages Board, 22–3, 48, 55, 80, 116 Agriculture Act 1920, 23, 80, 208 Ainslie, W.L. barrister, 28, 31 Alexander, General C.H., 28, 31–2 Allais, Maurice economist, 663–4 Allen, Bobby politician, 898, 936, 938 Allen, Elizabeth student, 101

Allen, George economist, 308, 652, 702, 720, 837, 840–1 Allen, Hugh musicologist, 159 Allen, Maurice economist/central banker, 68, 171, 208, 698, 745, 993n, 1028 Allen, Rex editor, 904, 911, 985, 1009 Allen, Roy Douglas economist, 166–7, 207, 250–2, 274, 304, 308–9, 342, 549, 655, 662, 683, 702, 813, 1082 Allnatt, A.E. art collector, 967, 970–1 Alon, Yigael politician, 1025 Altschul, Eugen economist, 243 ‘Amelia’, 895 Amery, Leo politician, 209, 501 Amory, Derick Heathcoat politician, 803–4, 949 Anderson, Benjamin banker, 276 Anderson, Clinton US Secretary of Agriculture, 597 Anderson, Sir Colin businessman, 762, 791, 956, 973, 988 Anderson, Sir David professor of accounting, 860–1 Anderson, Sir John (Lord Waverley) administrator, 5, 325, 618, 696, 724, 733–4, 740, 748, 789, 843, 941–3, 948 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 473, 480, 493, 498, 501, 503, 511–13, 516, 518, 539, 543, 545, 548, 557, 563, 573–4 Lord President of the Council, 365, 372–4, 377, 380, 385, 387–8, 399, 401–2, 404–7, 409, 421, 429, 442, 463–5, 468, 1084 Anderson, Dame Kitty headmistress, 861, 876

1131

1132

Index

Anderson, Oskar economist, 296–7 Andrew, G.H. (Sir Herbert Andrew) civil servant, 591, 598–9 Anglo-American discussions on postwar economic policy, 4, 392, 411–12, 424, 439, 529–30, 542 June 1943 monetary policy, 459–61, 1084 September-October 1943 (Law Mission), 465–83, 492–3, 501–2, 505–6, 507, 591, 1084 commercial policy, 466, 472, 474–7, 534 commodity policy, 466, 472, 477–80, 481–2, 511 employment policy, 472, 482–3, 508–9 monetary policy, 466, 468–9, 472–4 December 1944-January 1945 commercial policy, 545–6, 548, 553–4, 557–62 April 1945 commercial policy, 572–5 August 1945 commercial policy, 584–5 Anglo-American loan negotiations September-December 1945, 1, 4, 588, 674, 698, 700, 921, 1084–5 commercial policy, 589–91, 593–606, 609–10, 616, 623, 626 finance, 391, 588, 593, 603–6, 610–17, 619–25, 627, 672–7, 679 Anglo-American Oil Agreement, 533–7, 614–15 Anjara, J.J. economist, 252, 254 Annan, Noel historian, 19, 869, 916, 947, 962, 1029, 1037 Annenberg, Walter US Ambassador, 1047–9, 1054, 1059 Anstey, Vera economic historian, 650, 718–19, 822 Appleby, Paul US Undersecretary of Agriculture, 421, 448, 453, 454, 465, 477–8, 481 Arakie, Ralph economist, 227, 238 Archibald, Christopher economist, 813, 820, 905 Armstrong, Robert civil servant, 942 Armstrong, Sir William civil servant, 737, 899, 1003, 1016, 1028, 1037 Arnold, Matthew writer and poet, 983, 1061 Art Fund see National Art Collections Fund Article VII, 393–4, 410–11, 424, 432, 454, 475, 505, 533, 562, 572, 588, 600, 625, 723, 1085 Arts Council of Great Britain, 890, 942–3, 949, 953, 1036–7

Ashby, Eric academic administrator, 870 Ashton, Frederick dancer, 956–7, 959–60, 1065 Ashton, T.S. economic historian, 549, 662 Asquith, Herbert politician, 21, 28 Assheton, Ralph politician, 534–5 Association of University Teachers of Economics, 194, 211, 249 Atlantic Charter, 394, 505 Attlee, Clement politician, Deputy Prime Minister, 355, 359, 368, 372, 380–1, 389, 400, 404, 439–40, 473, 480, 493, 498–9, 511, 547, 560, 562–3, 564 Prime Minister, 583, 586, 588, 608, 618, 620, 623, 726, 735 Auden, W.H. poet, 689 Austrian economics, 3, 144, 233, 236, 266–7, 300, 417–18, 1081–2 see also trade cycle theory, Austrian Austrian economists see Hayek, Mises etc Ayer, Alfred philosopher, 916 Bagehot, Walter editor, 123, 660, 827 Bajpai, Sir Girja Shankar civil servant, 459 balance-of-payments crises, 203–4, 211, 295, 578, 672–8, 701–2, 795–803, 834, 917–18, 989–90 see also devaluation Baldwin, Stanley Prime Minister, 110–11, 115, 122, 294, 308, 319, 323 Balfour of Burleigh, Lord banker, 643, 827 ballet, 56–7, 253–4, 319, 790, 794, 942–3, 945–6, 955–7, 1039 see also Royal Opera House ballet subcommittee Balogh, Thomas economist, 245, 658, 668–9 Bank of England, 227, 473, 502–4, 514, 620, 647, 673–4, 701, 745, 796, 799–800, 802, 871, 918, 1024, 1064 see also Bolton, Catto, Cobbold Bank Rate, 203, 211, 565, 660, 738, 740, 796, 799, 802–3 Barber, Anthony politician, 1031, 1042, 1046 Bareau, Paul financial journalist, 531n, 598n, 628n, 650 Barger, Harold economist, 316 Barlow, Alan civil servant, 463–4, 490, 569, 753–4 Barnes, Harry politician, 64 Barnes, William Gorell civil servant, 464–5, 667 Barton, Lt Col RFA, 42

Index Bassett, Reginald political scientist, 152–3, 880 Baster, A.S.J. economist, 396, 408, 466 Bateson, Nicholas social psychologist, 1007–8, 1011–12, 1014 Batson, Harold economist, 146, 166, 207, 233, 264, 280 Battle of the Atlantic, 348, 374, 404–5, 461 Battle of the Lys, 45–7 Bauer, Peter economist, 650, 652 Baumol, Hilda (Mrs William Baumol), 697, 995, 1008, 1027, 1054, 1061 Baumol, William economist, 642n, 649, 654–4, 685, 696–7, 706, 708, 712, 758, 819, 850, 932, 949, 994–5, 1008, 1020, 1024–5, 1027, 1054, 1061, 1063, 1069, 1071, 1077 Baxter, W.T. professor of accounting, 651, 815 BCom, 174, 196, 207, 220–1, 280, 652, 693, 695 Beales, Lance economic historian, 283n, 343n Beatty, Chester art collector, 767 Beaverbrook, Lord newspaper proprietor, 387, 404, 498, 502–5, 534–7, 1084 Beesley, Michael economist, 932 Beethoven, Ludwig Fidelio, 319, 954, 957, 1077 Bell, Clive art critic, 56, 58, 793 Bellew, Sir George Garter King of Arms, 822–4 Benham, Frederic economist, 69, 78, 82, 101, 157, 168, 171, 193, 207, 240, 281, 284, 330, 394n, 549–50, 650, 662, 822 Benn, Sir Ernest publisher, 133–4, 210 Bentham Committee, 916–17, 1056, 1066, 1076n Bentham, Jeremy philosopher, 86, 498, 707–8, 845, 914, 993, 1087 Beresford, H. 2nd Lt RFA, 44, 49–50, 101 Bergson, Abram economist, 876 Berle, Adolf Jr US Assistant Secretary of State, 458, 460, 469, 472, 536 Berlin, Isaiah philosopher, 455, 518n, 536, 947, 955, 994, 1058, 1067 Berlioz, Hector composer, 960 Les Troyens/The Trojans, 824, 944, 959, 960 Bernadelli, Harro economist, 243, 320 Bernstein, Edward economist, 461–2, 529, 543, 979–80 Bevan, Aneurin politician, 735

1133

Beven, Helen (LCR’s secretary), 648, 715, 744, 750, 753n, 759, 845, 873, 931 Beveridge Committee see Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services Beveridge, William administrator, 69, 87–8, 120–3, 135, 188, 193, 199, 202–5, 210, 231, 243, 249, 318n, 346, 349, 351–2, 357, 373, 409, 418, 430, 437, 484, 498, 686, 702, 1081 director of LSE, 3, 69–70, 85, 134, 136, 138–40, 142, 147, 152, 162–3, 165, 166, 171, 178, 195, 219–20, 237–8, 258–9, 263–4, 280, 283–6, 298, 302–3, 317–18, 693 LCR’s relations with, 104–5, 111–12, 114, 117–19, 122–3, 147, 160, 163, 165, 188–9, 219–20, 229, 236–7, 261, 263, 283–4, 328, 437 Bevin, Ernest trade unionist and politician, Foreign Secretary, 583, 588, 608, 620, 701, 735 Minister of Labour, 401, 403, 411, 463, 467, 473, 502 Birch, Nigel politician, 799, 802–3 Bird, Roland financial journalist, 207, 309 Birk, Baroness politician and journalist, 931, 991n Birley, Robert headmaster, 976–7 Black, Eugene president of IBRD, 669 Blackburn, Robin sociologist, 1007, 1011–12, 1014 Blackett, Sir Basil civil servant, 217–19 Bladen, Vincent economist, 1057 Blagburn, C.H. agricultural economist, 383 Blake, Robert historian, 918 Blech, Harry musician, 40 Bliss, Sir Arthur musician, 778 Blitz, 362–3, 374, 385 Blom-Cooper, Louis lawyer, 976–7 Bloom, Marshall student, 981–2, 984 Blunt, Anthony art historian, 670–1, 729–30, 748, 756, 962, 1057, 1066–8 Boase, Thomas art historian, 308, 669, 765 Bode, Karl economist, 278 Bohm, Anne administrator, 7, 642n, 649–50, 880, 898, 909, 999 B¨ohm-Bawerk, Eugen economist, 176 Bolton, George central banker, 501, 520–3, 527–9, 647, 739 Bonn, Moritz economist, 225, 236–7, 243–4, 284, 743

1134

Index

Boothby, Robert politician, 871 Boulding, Kenneth economist, 164, 682–3, 717, 751 Boult, Sir Adrian conductor, 777, 782, 956 Bousheri, Djabanghir economist, 706 Bow Group, 778 Bowley, Arthur statistician, 91, 113, 157, 163, 182, 193, 284, 286, 304, 306–7 Bowley, Marian economist, 200, 252, 254, 288 Boyd-Carpenter, John politician, 885, 962 Bracken House Publications Ltd, 902, 933–9 Bracken, Bracken politician and publisher, 806, 808–10, 832, 898–900 Brand, Paul doctor, 66 Brand, Robert (Lord Brand) banker, 267, 269, 276, 448, 457, 517, 521, 533, 537, 539, 541, 543, 584, 587, 589, 674, 738, 775, 828 loan negotiations 1945, 573, 603, 605, 614, 616, 619, 627 Bresciani-Turroni, Costantino economist, 277–8, 297, 744 Bretton Woods see United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference Bretton Woods institutions see International Monetary Fund and World Bank Bretton Woods system, 5, 871, 979–80, 1030, 1086 Bridgeman, Maurice oil industrialist, 614, 921 Bridges, Edward (Lord Bridges) civil servant, 958, 965, 973 Cabinet Secretary, 355–6, 372–3, 389, 401–2, 405, 421, 437, 440, 442, 464–5, 481, 500, 503, 525, 530, 548, 551, 563–4 chairman of governors LSE, 790, 828, 851–5, 975, 977–8, 981, 990–1, 1002 Permanent Secretary Treasury, 569–70, 587–8, 590, 592, 601, 606, 621–2, 627–8, 647–8, 674, 737, 740–1, 746, 751, 774 Brierley, Susan see Isaacs, Susan Brigden, James economist, 527, 531 British Academy, 419–20, 871, 875, 883–4, 914, 1030, 1067–8 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 155, 157, 210, 229–30

British Library of Political and Economic Science, 68, 656, 986, 994 see also London School of Economics Library Appeal British Petroleum, 826, 853–4, 862, 870, 874, 897–8, 912, 920–2, 939, 1004 Britten, Benjamin composer, 790, 954, 1038, 1057 Broadley, Herbert civil servant, 559–60, 582 Brook, Henry politician, 770, 776 Brook, Norman civil servant, 388–9, 399, 402, 437, 481, 501, 514, 517, 548, 569, 574, 587, 592, 628, 667, 681n, 828 Brother David see Lawson, Reginald Brown, Arthur economist, 817 Brown, Frederick economist, 650, 652 Brown, Sir Lindor physiologist, 919 Brown, Sir William civil servant, 531 Bruck, Werner economist, 242 Bruning, Heinrich politician, 226, 275–6 Bryce, Robert civil servant, 250 BSc(Econ), 66, 69, 73, 78, 81, 83–4, 103, 110, 168, 174, 207, 253, 315, 343, 519, 527, 644, 653, 685, 815, 864 reform of, 69, 692–5, 718–19, 749, 826, 837–43 budgets, 227, 343, 345, 363, 381, 563–4, 678, 686, 695, 735, 738, 745, 917–18, 926, 935, 990, 1051–2, 1064 Bullock, Alan historian, 976 Bunting, Basil poet, 64–6, 69, 75, 77–8, 86, 107–8, 145–6, 269 Bunton, Kempton thief, 965 Burbidge, Sir Woodman businessman, 217–18 Burke, Edmund politician and author, 95, 100 Burns, J.H. historian, 916 Butler, Harold civil servant, 457 Butler, J.R.M. historian, 122 Butler, R.A. politician, 545, 858–60 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 737–41, 746, 748, 770, 776, 782, 798 Butt, David economist, 401n Byrnes, J.F. US Secretary of State, 627 Byron, Lord poet, 591 Caine, Sydney administrator, 69, 78, 388 director of LSE, 790, 803, 816, 822, 832, 850–5, 892, 905–6, 975, 978, 981, 986

Index Cairncross, Alec economist, 356–7, 360, 372, 378–80, 387, 571–2, 702, 796–7, 821, 835, 1084 Cairns, David music critic, 960 Cairns, Huntington gallery director, 731 Callaghan, James politician, Chancellor of the Exchequer, 917, 923, 928, 935, 968, 990 Prime Minister, 1051, 1062–3 Cambridge economists see Keynes, Marshall, Pigou, Robertson etc Cambridge Faculty of Economics, 139–40 see also Marshall Lectures Tripos, 69, 164, 322, 343 Campbell, Colin farmer, 22 Campbell, P.J. 2nd Lt RFA, 42n, 43 Campbell, Richard civil servant, 424, 508 Campbell, Sir Ronald diplomat, 480, 539 Campion, Harry statistician, 355–6, 360, 372, 551, 569, 869 Cannan, Edwin economist, 111, 117, 119–20, 124, 127, 138, 142, 146, 163, 190–1, 194, 205, 231, 277, 301, 648, 691, 710–11, 748, 752, 993 definition of economics, 72, 144–5, 160–1, 213, 216, 231 festschrift, 136, 154, 156–7 as teacher, 81–3, 85, 90, 98, 137, 1080 writings, 76, 129, 139, 144, 156–7, 249n, 752 Cape, Jonathan publishers, 201, 210, 264, 329 capital levy, 93, 564, 567–8 Carr, Robert economist US State Department, 478–9 Carr-Saunders, Alexander demographer, 123, 138, 156, 285–6, 776 director of LSE, 306, 315, 324, 342, 352–3, 356n, 496, 549–50, 591, 607–8, 627, 643–4, 651, 652, 654, 669, 671, 691, 693, 704, 728, 747, 839, 931 Carrick, David doctor, 937, 1016n Carswell, John civil servant, 861, 886 Carter, Charles economist, 1053 Carter, Mark Bonham publisher, 960, 1037 Cassel, Gustav economist, 98, 136, 160, 164, 177, 180, 684 Catchings, Waddill economist, 119, 178 Catterns, B.G. central banker, 503 Catto, Lord central banker, 563

1135

Central Economic Information Service, 355, 360–2, 365, 367–71 Central Statistical Office, 372, 407, 549, 551, 563, 569–70, 779, 869 C´ezanne, Paul painter, 2, 57–8, 65, 88, 95, 142, 314, 471, 700, 753, 759, 765–6, 812, 956, 965–6, 971–2, 1088 Les Grandes Baigneuses, 5, 965–9, 1061 Chamberlain, Neville politician, 177, 355, 365 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 208, 227, 311 Prime Minister, 319, 322, 328, 343, 353 Chamberlin, Edward economist, 251, 653 Chambers, Paul civil servant, 565 Champernowne, David economist, 1053 Chaning-Pearce, Melville theologian, 349 Chantler, Philip civil servant, 388–9, 438n, 576 Charles, Prince of Wales, 1041, 1076n cheap money, 227, 276, 488–9, 565–8, 676–7 Checkland, S.G. economic historian, 708 Chenevix-Trench, Anthony headmaster, 861 Cherwell, Lord (Frederick Lindemann) scientist and politician, 371, 401, 430, 440, 473, 493, 503, 514, 516, 539, 563, 739, 741, 746 Chester, Daniel Norman administrator, 356, 645, 648, 681, 875 CEIS, 356, 363, 369, 371–2 Economic Section, 376, 381–2, 388–9, 396, 398, 409, 576 Chien, C.C. civil servant, 105, 696 Chorley, Theo (Lord Chorley) professor of law, 237, 260, 1013 Churchill, J. & A. publishers, 933 Churchill, Winston politician, 132, 320, 328, 343, 583, 675, 923–4, 1086 Prime Minister 1940–5, 1, 353, 362, 365–7, 371, 373, 387, 389, 394, 401, 404, 440, 446, 494, 505, 513, 517, 539, 563, 572, 587 Prime Minister 1951–5, 735, 741, 746, 789 Clapham, J.H. economic historian, 419 Clare Market Review, 86–7, 98, 100, 108–9, 145, 223, 261–3 Clark, Colette director ROH, 1042 Clark, Colin economist, 153, 157, 170, 193, 217, 227, 344 Clark, John Bates economist, 155, 159

1136

Index

Clark, John Maurice economist, 296, 643, 720 Clark, Kenneth art historian, 307, 672, 730–1, 766, 768, 772, 776, 1049 Clarke, Otto civil servant, 602, 674, 739, 777–8, 780 Clarke, Philip student, 9, 256, 315, 319 Clauson, Gerard civil servant, 445, 466, 479, 481, 493, 591 Clay, Henry economist, 72, 140, 141, 157, 163, 179, 193, 201, 219, 245, 285–6, 355, 993 Clayton, Will US Assistant Secretary then Undersecretary of State, 448–9, 453, 477–8, 572, 584–6, 589–91, 594–7, 600–1, 603–4, 610–13, 616, 619–20, 623–5 Clearing Union, 398–400, 410–11, 425, 428–9, 433, 460, 468, 502, 980, 1084 see also International Monetary Fund Clifford, Henry art collector, 1047–8 Clutterbuck, P.A. civil servant, 432, 607–8 coal crises, 408–9, 576–8, 657–8, 676 Coase, Ronald economist, 196, 280, 309, 343, 551, 569, 650, 652–3, 719–20, 751 Coatman, John professor of imperial economic relations LSE, 168, 259–60, 454 Coats, A.W. economist, 985, 1003 Cobbold, Cameron central banker, 468, 502–3, 518, 606, 737, 739–40, 746, 796, 799, 802 Cohen, Lord judge, 796 Cohen, Ruth economist, 384, 400, 406, 518 Coldstream, William painter, 759, 763, 769, 808, 931, 946, 956, 1011, 1013 Cole, G.D.H. economist, 41, 53–5, 75, 129, 169, 199 Collado, Emilio US State Department, 453–4 commercial policy, 391–3, 432–5, 440–1, 462, 507–8, 542, 544–8, 1084 see also Anglo-American discussions, Commercial Union, imperial preference, loan negotiations, Overton Committee, quantitative restrictions, tariffs Commercial Union, 421, 432–4, 462, 474, 1084 see also international trade organization Committee of Economists 1930, 179–92, 195, 265, 1082

Committee on Currency and Foreign Exchanges after the War (Cunliffe Committee) 1918–19, 77, 132 Committee on Export of Works of Art etc (Waverley Committee) 1951–2, 5, 724, 729–34, 748, 770, 774, 963, 1043 see also Reviewing Committee on Export of Works of Art Committee on Finance and Industry (Macmillan Committee) 1929–31, 181, 203 Committee on Higher Education (Robbins Committee) 1961–3, 1, 6, 693, 826, 857–62, 867–70, 874–82, 884–91, 897, 901, 908, 911, 913, 915, 918, 930–1, 947, 962, 983, 988–9, 998, 1064, 1088–9 Committee on the Machinery of Government 1943, 436–7, 681 Committee on National Debt and Taxation 1927, 568 Committee on Over-Production 1930, 177 Committee on Postwar Commercial Policy (Overton Committee) 1942, 421, 432–5, 439, 466 Committee on Postwar External Economic Problems 1941–3, 396, 410, 426, 435 Committee on Postwar Internal Economic Problems 1941–3, 396, 413–14, 426, 440 Committee on Reparation and Economic Security (Malkin Committee) 1942–3, 421–2, 429–32, 464, 571–2 Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services (Beveridge Committee) 1941–2, 396, 415–16, 426, 437, 886 Committee on the Working of the Monetary System (Radcliffe Committee) 1957–9, 796–7, 799, 802, 833–5 commodities, 361–2, 391, 509–10, 532–3, 560–1, 582–3 see also Wheat Agreement commodity plan, 412–13, 424–5, 433, 441, 443–4, 448, 451, 466, 477–8, 481, 509–11, 609, 626–7, 660, 1084 Compton, E.G. civil servant, 799 Condliffe, John Bell economist, 296, 316–17, 321, 324, 348, 497, 822 Conlin, Jonathan art historian, 2, 1042

Index Conservative governments, 90, 572 1951–60, 735, 737–8, 858, 891, 894, 926, 1031 1970–4, 1062–4 Conservative party, 132, 439, 583–4, 696, 917, 928, 990, 1031, 1086 Constable, T. & A. printers, 934–5 Constable, W.G. art historian, 307 convertibility, 543–5, 559, 581, 611–12, 615, 620, 624, 680, 741, 745–6, 749 see also balance-of-payments crises, Robot, sterling balances convertibility crisis 1947, 673–7 Coombs, H.C. central banker, 453–4, 506 Cooper, Douglas art critic, 762, 765 Copland, Douglas economist, 240 Corry, Bernard economist, 7, 813, 815–16, 817, 820, 822, 905, 910, 913, 935n, 1000 Cortney, Philip businessman, 690, 978 Cottrell, Tom Principal University of Stirling, 987, 1069 Courtauld Fund, 753, 761–2, 766, 922 Courtauld Institute of Art, 2, 307–8, 700, 755, 756, 765, 972 Committee of Management, 307–8, 655, 669, 729, 1056–7 Courtauld, Samuel industrialist and art collector, 307, 669–70, 753, 766–7, 972 Covent Garden market, 12, 17, 961 Covent Garden opera house see Royal Opera House Cox, Oscar lawyer, 524 Cramond, W.A. Principal University of Stirling, 1060 Crawford, Lord art connoisseur and politician, 670, 729–30, 747, 755n, 771, 774, 790, 808–10, 812, 865, 1044, 1049 Crick, Bernard political scientist, 839–41, 1013 Cripps, Francis economist, 1053 Cripps, Stafford politician, 404, 500 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 679, 686, 695–6, 698, 701, 724, 735, 798 President of the Board of Trade, 583, 586, 588, 590, 592, 605–6, 608–9, 616, 624 Cromer, Lord central banker, 899 Croome, Honor n´ee Scott economist, 168, 178, 353, 457, 519, 850

1137

Croome, Lewis, 417, 850 Crosland, Anthony economist and politician, 894–5, 931, 1064 Cross, Joan singer and opera administrator, 958–9 Crouch, Colin student, 996, 998, 1004 Crowther, David, 9, 903n Crowther, Geoffrey editor, 164, 702, 746, 832, 868–9, 902–4, 1053 Cunningham, William economic historian, 71 Currie, Lauchlin economist, 87, 482 ‘curse of Kaldor’, 681, 822 Curtis, Lionel writer, 346 Dacey, Manning financial journalist, 650, 817 Dahrendorf, Ralf sociologist, 1005–6, 1028–9, 1056, 1061, 1077 Dalton, Hugh economist and politician, 111, 114, 124, 134, 136, 146, 153, 158, 160, 162–5, 170, 181, 191–2, 204, 211, 216, 229, 237, 267, 269, 302, 517–18, 564, 643, 660, 666, 1079, 1082 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 583, 588, 595, 603, 605–9, 620–1, 623–4, 651, 673–9, 686, 696, 792, 942 President of Board of Trade, 404, 409–11, 421–2, 429–30, 432, 440, 462–5, 473, 490, 493, 500, 503, 505, 514–16, 548, 557 as teacher, 70, 71–3, 75–6, 79, 85–6, 93, 130, 143–4 Undersecretary FO, 165–6, 169, 195, 361 Dalton, Ruth politician and public servant, 160, 211, 729 Daniels, G.W. economist, 244 Dartington, Robin project manager, 1040 Dasgupta, A.K. economist, 252–4, 922 Dasgupta, Partha economist, 78, 252 Davenport, John journalist, 690, 700 Davidge, George schoolteacher, 20–1, 27, 35, 56, 61, 65–6, 74–5, 78, 100, 124 Davies, Martin art historian, 754, 969, 971, 1043 Davies, Robertson writer, 1057 Davis, Chester art collector, 457 Davis, Colin conductor, 945, 957, 959, 1038 Davis, Joseph economist, 459

1138

Index

Day, Alan economist, 7, 713–14, 816n, 821, 909–10, 975n, 997–8, 1005–6, 1014, 1027, 1077 Day, Shirley academic, 7, 1077 Deakin, William historian, 976 Debenham, Piers civil servant, 355, 360 de Marchi, Neil economist, 820 Dennison, Stanley economist, 356, 648, 656, 667, 672, 790, 886 in Economic Section, 372, 382, 388, 484, 498, 521, 528, 552, 576–7 Department of Education and Science, 894–5, 952–3, 973 Desai, Meghnad (Lord Desai) economist, 7, 933, 975n, 996, 1001 Deshmukh, Sir Chintaman central banker, 522 de Valois, Ninette ballet director, 943, 945–7, 956, 958, 960, 1039 devaluation, 132, 212, 295, 309, 700–1, 720, 736, 777, 918, 926, 989 see also exchange rates Devons, Ely economist, 356, 372, 652, 667, 703, 822, 907–10 Dharmaratna, Tantirige law student, 112 Diaghilev, Sergei ballet impresario, 49, 56–7, 947 Dickinson, H.D. economist, 346–7, 660 Dillon, Clarence banker, 699 Director, Aaron economist, 7, 316, 448, 476, 532, 618, 662, 664, 711, 737, 757 Dobb, Maurice economist, 136–7, 158, 550 Dominions talks 1942, 424–6, 433, 441; 1944, 511, 505–9, 602 Donaldson, Jack politician, 958 Donne, John poet, 100, 105, 109 Donnelly, Harry civil servant, 988 Donoughue, Bernard political scientist, 993, 1007, 1023 Dorrance, Graeme economist, 653, 751 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor novelist, 65, 75, 100 Douglas, Major C.H. monetary crank, 62–4, 75, 99, 154, 230, 268–9, 1079 Douglas-Home, Alec Prime Minister, 891, 917 Dover, Sir Kenneth classicist, 1067 Dow, J.C.R. economist, 737, 932 Draper, W.H. US Ambassador to OEEC, 746 Drever, Sir James physiologist, 860–1 Drogheda, Garrett (Lord Drogheda) newspaper publisher, 5, 7, 389, 986, 991, 1024, 1077

Financial Times, 832–3, 843, 872, 897–901, 933, 937–8, 1022, 1053 Royal Opera House, 789, 897, 941–5, 948–9, 951, 955, 957, 959–60, 1034, 1036–7, 1040–1 Drummond, Sybil, 109 Dunkley, 2nd Lt RFA, 34 Dunworth, John economist, 1065 Dupriez, Leon economist, 296 Durbin, Evan economist and politician, 19, 152, 164, 171, 207–8, 228, 232, 252, 255, 281, 309, 343, 346, 356, 389, 408, 439, 650, 724, 1082 Durbin, Marjorie (Mrs Evan Durbin), 7, 152, 228 Eady, Sir Wilfrid civil servant, 267, 324 loan negotiations 1945, 595, 602, 606–7, 609, 613–14, 621–2, 628 Treasury, 426–8, 435, 440, 451, 465, 484, 487–90, 492–3, 499, 502, 504, 507–8, 515–17, 520, 525, 530, 543–4, 546, 552–3, 556, 559, 560, 565, 569, 572, 579, 584, 587–8, 647, 674, 843 Earle, Edward Mead economist, 700 Eccles, David (Lord Eccles) politician, 128, 769–70, 893, 1036–7, 1042–7 Eccles, Marriner central banker, 615, 617 Economic Advisory Council, 169, 179, 189, 195, 217–19, 1082 Committee of Economists see Committee of Economists Economic Journal, 155, 157, 167, 171, 194, 231–2, 250, 288, 289n, 323, 498, 500, 648, 708, 985, 1052–3, 1065 ‘economic man’, 137, 214 Economic Section, 4, 372–4, 387–8, 436–7, 464, 480, 498, 500, 549–51, 563–5, 569–71, 593, 644–5, 651, 657, 668, 739, 744, 909, 1083–4 postwar planning, 391–2, 396–7, 398, 413–17, 437–9, 462–3, 484, 564–8 see also employment policy and wartime economic policy, 375–81, 382–5, 400–9 Economica, 136, 171–3, 198, 222–3, 250, 254, 267, 288, 320, 418, 497, 648, 662, 680, 708, 716, 743, 844, 925, 985 economics, definition of, 1, 72, 97, 160–1, 173–5, 213–14, 1070, 1081 see also Robbins, Lionel Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science

Index Economist newspaper, 112–13, 115, 117, 128, 131, 140, 164, 224, 227, 310, 749, 824, 901–4, 939, 1053, 1076 Edelberg, Victor economist, 200, 238, 251–4, 1082 Eden, Anthony politician, 384, 421, 462, 465, 503, 583, 789 Edey, Harold economist, 993, 996, 1015, 1018, 1023 Edgeworth, F.Y. economist, 127, 252, 692 Edminster, Lynn US Tariff Commission, 478–9, 481 Edwards, Ronald economist, 280, 343, 650, 832, 850, 910, 957, 976 Egli, Helen see Rowe, Helen Eichengreen, Barry economist, 393n Einaudi, Luigi economist, 236, 267, 347 Einzig, Paul economist, 430 Eisenhower, Dwight US president, 741, 759 El Alamein, 404, 424, 429, 452, 532 Elizabeth II, Queen, 829, 865, 899, 974, 988, 1060 Elizabeth, Queen Mother, 883, 1029, 1065 Elkin, Alexander social scientist, 243 Elles, Sir Hugh civil servant, 509 Ellis, Arthur solicitor, 28, 31, 39, 112 Elsas, Moritz Julius economist, 243 Elvin, Lionel professor of education, 7, 860–2, 868, 886, 1065 Emanuel, Aaron economist, 227, 238 Emminger, Otmar central banker, 979, 1024 employment policy, 391–2, 397, 413–17, 437–9, 462–3, 483–9, 499–501, 660, 663–4 see also Employment Policy Employment Policy, 391, 501, 508, 514–16, 548, 555, 565, 569, 703, 801, 1083 see also reconstruction committees and Steering Committee Enfield, Ralph civil servant, 445, 518, 591–2, 596, 601 English National Opera, 944 Esposito, Alfred banker, 1071–2 Eucken, Walter economist, 672, 682–3 Evans, Sir Ifor literary scholar, 855, 957 Evatt, Herbert politician, 506, 508 Everett, Charles historian, 916n Ewer, W.N. journalist, 55 exchange controls, 212, 225–6, 265–6, 300, 343, 394–5, 398–9, 504, 553, 558, 602, 613, 679 exchange rates, 467, 472–3, 504, 577, 579, 686, 700, 739–41, 980 see also

1139 devaluation, gold standard, International Monetary Fund

Falk, O.T. stockbroker, 227 Farmiloe, Tim editor, 985, 1052, 1075 Farrer-Brown, Lesley director Nuffield Foundation, 933n Federal Union, 345–8, 349–52, 354, 1084 federation, 300–1, 313, 322, 327, 431, 663, 721–3, 727, 1084 see also Federal Union Feis, Herbert US State Department, 420, 457 Fergusson, Sir Donald civil servant, 412, 426–8, 510, 546–8, 553–4, 592 Fetter, Frank W. economist, 785–6 Fforde, John economist/central banker, 502, 739, 800, 802 Field, John dancer, 960 Financial Times Ltd, 6, 826, 831–3, 850–2, 862, 870, 872, 877, 897–902, 904, 933–9, 1009, 1022, 1076, 1088 Financial Times newspaper, 6, 788, 796, 831, 843, 900, 923, 955, 960–1, 985, 1025, 1031, 1057 Finch, David economist, 653, 696 Finer, Herman political scientist, 91, 108, 111 Finer, Morris lawyer, 993n, 1011, 1018, 1021 Fink, Eugen philosopher, 242, 278 Firth, Raymond anthropologist, 549 Fisher, H.A.L. historian, 127, 147–8, 159, 305 Fisher, Irving economist, 123, 139, 176, 682 Fleming, Marcus economist, 346–7, 503, 645, 720–2 in Economic Section, 388–9, 412, 438n, 439, 465, 491, 499–501, 503, 514, 516, 550, 569, 579, 582, 601, 620, 645, 651 Flemming, John economist, 1053 Fletcher, Basil professor of education, 860 Florence, P. Sargant economist, 281 Flux, A.W. economist, 156 Fonteyn, Margot ballerina, 790, 946, 1065 Food and Agriculture Organization, 456, 661 see also United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture Food Policy Committee 1940–1, 359, 372, 380, 400 Ford, Brinsley art connoisseur, 774, 808–10 Ford, Ford Madox writer, 107 Forge, Andrew art critic, 756, 971 Forge, Frederick Waldo journalist, 113–14, 116

1140

Index

Forsey, Eugene economist, 153 Foster, F.G. computer scientist, 910 Foster, Thomas Gregory academic administrator, 27 Foster, William Trufant economist, 119, 178 Fowler, Henry US Foreign Economic Administration, 584 Fowler, Ronald economist, 207, 355, 372 Foxwell, Herbert economist, 307 Frankfurt Institut f¨ur Sozialforschung, 263 Franks, Oliver philosopher and civil servant, 510, 555–6, 560, 582, 835–6, 918–20, 948 Fraser, Lindley economist, 232 Freedman, Maurice anthropologist, 993 Freeman, John politician and editor, 8, 735 Freeman, Richard economist, 145n Freeman, Roland administrator, 899, 993 Fremantle, John (Lord Cottesloe) engineer and arts administrator, 763, 767, 770, 774, 791, 829, 953, 962 French, Sir Henry civil servant, 384 Friedman, Milton economist, 7, 662–5, 724, 743, 750, 850, 927, 932, 989, 1032, 1052, 1071, 1086 Fry, Roger artist and critic, 95, 793 Fuqua, John H. US State Department, 470 Gaitskell, Hugh economist and politician, 128–9, 152, 208, 235, 264, 409, 411, 421, 432, 903 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 724–5, 735, 745, 766, 798 Galbraith, John Kenneth economist, 316, 653 Galbraith, V.H. historian, 729, 732–6, 734 Gardiner, Ada (LCR’s mother-in-law), 58, 125, 691 Gardiner, Arthur journalist (LCR’s father-in-law), 37, 40, 58–9, 61, 104, 108–9, 125, 133, 149, 170, 644 Gardiner, Clive painter, 2, 37–8, 48, 56–7, 62, 65, 74, 77, 81, 101, 103–5, 109, 125, 134, 141–2, 148–9, 181, 644, 682, 738, 831, 844 Gardiner, Gilbert (LCR’s brother-in-law), 58, 105, 108, 111, 141, 264 Gardiner, Gwen (LCR’s sister-in-law), 58, 109, 111, 831, 1058, 1065 Gardiner, Iris see Robbins, Iris Gardiner, Lilian n´ee Lancaster, 57, 77, 103, 109–10, 134, 831

Gardiner, Patrick (LCR’s nephew) philosopher, 981 Gardiner, Phyllis (LCR’s sister-in-law), 58, 1058, 1065 Gardiner, Stella see Mallon, Stella Gardiner, Stephen (LCR’s nephew) architect, 981 Gardner, Helen literary scholar, 861, 875, 886, 957, 1067 Gardner, Walter central banker, 618 Garegnani, Pierangelo economist, 830–1 Gates, Sylvester barrister, 514 Gaulle, General Charles de, 365, 990 Gellhorn, Peter musician, 271 Gellner, Ernest philosopher, 1019, 1028 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 626, 749, 1084 see also international trade organization George, Miss, 77–8, 105, 109 Georgiadis, Nicholas painter, 843, 946, 956–7, 959 Gerrard, Brian civil servant, 885 Gibson, Pat (Lord Gibson) businessman, 832, 899, 938, 1053 Giersch, Herbert economist, 1024 Gilbert, Bernard civil servant, 413–14, 489 Gilbert, Jack economist, 168 Gilbert, Martin historian, 367n Gill, Eric artist, 74, 93–4, 104, 110, 135 Ginger, John novelist, 7, 9, 14n, 135 Ginsberg, Morris sociologist, 91, 282, 496 Glass, David sociologist, 999, 1011 gold standard, 79, 132, 139, 181, 183, 203, 205, 209–10, 211–12, 230, 246, 265–6, 276, 295, 309, 398, 504, 980 Goldenweiser, Emanuel economist/central banker, 526, 529 Goldman, Samuel economist, 200, 228 Gollins Melvin Ward architects, 961, 1040 Gollop, Leslie (LCR’s research assistant), 168, 198 Gombrich, Ernst art historian, 496, 671, 756 Goodfellow, David economic historian, 75, 78, 87 Goodman, Arnold (Lord Goodman) lawyer, 932, 953–4, 960, 1003, 1008–9, 1011–12, 1014, 1016–17, 1024, 1037, 1039 Goodman Derrick & Co solicitors, 1003, 1006, 1012 Gordon, Scott economist, 1035 Goschen, Kenneth civil servant, 587

Index Gould, Cecil art historian, 754 Gould, J.R. economist, 813, 815 Gowing, Lawrence artist, 767, 973, 1061, 1066 Goya, Francisco de The Duke of Wellington, 961, 964–5 Graduate Institute of International Studies, 200, 244, 277, 320, 326–7, 347, 725, 748–9 Graham, Frank economist, 663 Grant, Alec economist, 247, 623, 674 Grant, Douglas publisher, 933–4, 936, 939 Great Depression, 169, 177, 184–5, 197, 248–9, 270, 1082 see also Robbins, Lionel The Great Depression Green, Dame Mary headmistress, 993n Greenwood, Arthur politician, 59, 61, 82n, 92 Minister without Portfolio, 355, 359–60, 368–9, 371–2, 645 Minister of Reconstruction, 391, 397, 404 Greenwood, Hamar politician, 28 Gregg, Cornelius civil servant, 565, 567 Gregory, Theodore economist, 70, 88, 101, 104, 109, 115, 117, 135–6, 315, 424–5, 523, 654 professor at LSE, 143, 150, 162–3, 178, 193, 195, 200, 206, 209, 230, 240, 260, 284, 286, 304, 1079–80 as teacher, 70, 77, 79, 90 Griffith, John professor of law, 982, 998, 1011 Griffith-Boscawen, Sir Arthur politician, 80 Gross, Leo academic lawyer, 243 Gudin, Eugenio economist, 748–9, 750–1, 777, 1072 guild socialism, 41, 51–4, 74, 85, 94, 106, 131, 1079 Guillebaud, Claude economist, 823 Gulick, Luther economist, 483 Habbakuk, John economic historian, 507, 702 Haberler, Gottfried economist, 176–7, 186, 202, 213, 228, 240–1, 244, 251, 267, 271–2, 274–5, 278, 282, 288–9, 295–6, 723, 749, 803, 911, 979, 1020, 1081 Hahn, Dorothy n´ee Salter economist, 7, 642n, 653–4, 662 Hahn, Frank economist, 7, 653 Hahn, L. Albert economist and banker, 225 Haldane, J.S. physiologist, 159

1141

Hale, John historian, 1049, 1067 Halevy, Elie historian, 107 Haley, Bernard economist, 482 Halifax, Lord politician Foreign Secretary, 366–7 HM Ambassador in Washington, 588–91, 593, 601, 603, 605, 611, 616–17, 620, 623–5, 627–8 Hall, Noel economist, 245, 247, 285–7, 305–6 Hall, Peter theatre director, 944, 955–6, 959 Hall, Robert economist, 127, 437, 457, 482, 583, 660, 702, 776 director of Economic Section, 668–9, 737, 739–40, 744–6, 797, 799–801, 803 Halliday, Major W.J.F. RFA, 43–4 Hall-Patch, Sir Edmund civil servant, 584, 589, 603, 605, 609, 611, 616, 665n Hammarskjold, Dag economist, 289 Hammond, R.J. historian, 385 Hamnett, Nina painter, 77 Hancock, Keith historian, 405 Hankey, Robin diplomat, 128 Hankey, Sir Maurice civil servant, 128, 191 Hansen, Alvin economist, 296, 410, 482–3, 533 Hardy, G.H. mathematician, 20, 137, 159 Hardy, Thomas novelist and poet, 106 Hargreaves, E.L. economist, 127, 130, 155 Harmer, Frederic civil servant and businessman, 589, 605, 607, 609, 613, 615–16, 625, 627, 921–2, 1034 governor of LSE, 652n, 986, 990, 993, 1004, 1007, 1009, 1013–14, 1018 Harris, Annette (LCR’s grandmother), 12–14, 33, 137 Harris, Charles (LCR’s uncle), 13, 36 Harris, Charles Centurier (LCR’s grandfather), 12–14, 33, 107 Harris, Herbert (LCR’s uncle), 13, 36 Harris, Jose historian, 121, 189 Harris, Laurence economist, 1007, 1011–12, 1014 Harris, Ralph (Lord Harris of Highcross) economist and polemicist, 7, 1059, 1077 Harris, Wilson editor, 351 Harrod, Roy economist, 127, 130, 139n, 150, 152, 191, 227, 231, 234, 245–6, 259, 298, 302, 308–10, 323, 363, 400, 410, 412, 498, 522, 531, 550, 668, 675, 698, 700, 722–3, 835–6, 993

1142

Index

Hart, Herbert legal philosopher, 916n, 1056, 1067 Hasler, W.J. civil servant, 445, 521 Hatcher, Captain RFA, 34 Hawkins, Harry US State Department, 470, 475–6, 479, 483, 534–5, 549, 553–4, 557–62, 572–5, 584–5, 589, 594–5, 598–9, 601–2, 604, 646 Hawtrey, Ralph economist, 119, 142, 145–6, 155, 163–4, 175, 215, 222, 419, 660, 685–5, 697, 775, 817, 836, 980 Hayek, Christine (daughter of Friedrich Hayek), 199, 354, 390, 704, 958 Hayek, Friedrich von economist, 3, 174, 176–8, 180, 208, 213, 240, 296, 319, 321, 343, 345–7, 350–1, 390, 648, 660–4, 667, 873, 1052, 1081–3, 1087 friendship with LCR, 195–8, 202, 206, 271, 280, 322, 354, 418–20, 608, 661, 690, 704–6, 757, 845–8, 958, 1062, 1066 professor at LSE, 199–200, 205–6, 216, 219, 228, 230, 235, 239, 250–2, 255, 257n, 263, 281, 284, 286, 288–9, 295, 304, 316, 324, 343, 353–4, 382, 642, 656, 704, 713, 742n The Road to Serfdom, 420, 661, 846, 1087 trade cycle theory, 176–7, 196–7, 214, 418–20 Hayek, Helen (Hella) (wife of Friedrich Hayek), 199, 354, 390, 690, 704, 845 Hayek, Helene (second wife of Friedrich Hayek), 705 Hayek, Laurence (son of Friedrich Hayek) microbiologist, 354, 390, 704, 847 Healey, Denis politician, 1034 Heath, Edward politician, 889, 928, 1063 Prime Minister, 1026, 1031, 1044–6, 1051 Helmore, James civil servant, 580, 584, 593, 606–7, 616 Hemming, Francis civil servant, 180, 189, 192–3, 195, 217, 353–6, 360–2, 368–9, 371–2, 645 Henderson, Hubert economist, 98, 117, 129, 142, 144, 145, 194, 235, 245–6, 269, 276, 285, 355, 658, 667, 775, 823 secretary of Economic Advisory Council, 169, 179–80, 186–7, 190–3, 217–18 wartime Treasury, 398–9, 415, 432, 434–5, 463, 491, 493, 502, 507, 514, 548, 564, 1084

Hendy, Philip director of National Gallery, 732–3, 755, 758, 760, 766–7, 769, 805, 808, 810, 812–13, 957, 965, 967–71, 1049 Herben, Joe professor of English (LCR’s brother-in-law), 234, 327, 354, 447, 456, 459, 469, 521, 628, 681, 688, 698, 728, 747, 775, 843–4, 876, 911, 924, 984 Herbert, Sir Edward businessman, 861–2 Herford, C.H. literary scholar, 173 Hewins, W.A.S. economist and politician, 68 Heydel, Adam economist, 310–11 Hickerson, John D. US Foreign Service, 476 Hicks, John economist, 3, 143, 166–7, 171, 193, 207, 250, 252–3, 255, 274, 280–1, 284, 298, 309, 419, 544, 652, 683, 692, 706, 710, 818–19, 849, 932, 1026, 1061, 1066, 1082 Hicks, Ursula n´ee Webb economist, 227, 253–4, 280–2, 643, 1066 Higgins, Benjamin economist, 256, 287 Higgs, Henry economist, 216 Hilton, John economist, 153 Hinshaw, Randall economist, 978, 1054, 1071 Hitler, Adolf dictator, 225, 234, 237, 278–9, 294, 319, 321–2, 343, 353, 385, 403, 496, 569, 923 Hobson, J.A. economist, 119, 175, 215, 229, 269, 326 Hobson, Oscar financial journalist, 113–14, 116, 140–1, 209–10, 225–6, 245–6, 247, 678, 726, 931 Hobson, S.G. journalist, 53–4, 62 Hoch, Paul student, 998, 1001, 1005, 1011, 1012–13, 1017 Hodson, Henry economist, 153, 169 Hogben, Lancelot biologist, 243, 258, 305 Hollander, Sam economist, 718, 1057 Hollycroft, 12, 17–18, 39, 48–50, 56, 80–1, 106, 109–10, 327, 354, 608, 728, 738, 747 Holmes, Stephen civil servant, 466 Hopkins, Sir Richard civil servant, 368–9, 398, 410–13, 415–16, 424, 462–4, 483–4, 489–93, 499, 501, 504–5, 517, 530, 551, 563–5, 567–8, 740 Horsefield, Keith economist, 650, 698 Horton, Constance, 37, 48, 74, 106, 137 Horton, Robert Congregational minister, 37, 41

Index Hot Springs see United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture Howe, Geoffrey politician, 1064 Howell, Gwynne singer, 1077 Howson, Susan economist, 130n, 217 Hudson, R.S. politician, 380, 404–5, 407–8, 449, 501, 503, 546, 548 Hugh-Jones, E.M. economist, 128 Hull, Cordell US Secretary of State, 393, 421, 512, 530 H¨ulsmann, J¨org Guido economist, 9, 210 Hume, David philosopher, 707–8, 988, 1050 Hunold, Albert businessman, 661, 687, 705, 725, 848 see also Mont Pelerin Society Hurst, Sir Alfred civil servant, 414, 463 Hurt, Ambrosine secretary, 1055, 1076–7 Husserl, Edmund philosopher, 242 Hussey, Christopher architectural historian, 729, 734 Hutchison, Terence economist, 271, 320, 682n, 713, 752, 816 Ickes, Harold US Secretary of the Interior, 537 imperial preference, 21, 314, 394, 439, 476–7, 502, 512, 514, 557–9, 585, 592, 594–6, 599–602, 607, 609–10 import duties see tariffs import quotas see quantitative restrictions inflation, 99, 343, 402, 565–8, 575, 577, 657, 666, 676, 686–7, 702, 735, 740, 746, 765, 771, 777, 787, 795, 800, 926, 980, 1051, 1062–3, 1074 Inlander, Heinz artist, 843 Institute of Economic Affairs, 999, 1032, 1059–60, 1062 interest rate theory, 159, 176, 182–3, 565–8, 683 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 1, 391, 428, 468–9, 474, 507, 521–3, 529, 652, 661, 688–9, 1084 Advisory Council, 669, 688–9, 698–9 international cartels, 300, 469, 555–7, 561–2, 573, 575, 592, 595, 597–8, 609 international commercial union see Commercial Union International Economic Association, 697, 723 International Monetary Fund, 1, 391, 474–5, 505, 507, 511–12, 520, 522–3,

1143

526, 543, 558, 646–7, 661, 686, 689, 698, 706, 741, 745, 749, 798, 926, 979–80, 1052, 1084 see also Bretton Woods, Clearing Union and Stabilization Fund international monetary policy see Clearing Union, devaluation, exchange rates, gold standard and International Monetary Fund international trade conference see United Nations Conference on Trade and Employment international trade organization, 554, 557, 561, 593, 600, 609, 626, 677, 687 see also Commercial Union and United Nations Conference on Trade and Employment Isaacs, Nathan philosopher/psychologist, 35–6, 61–2, 74, 100, 118–19, 125, 176, 202, 214, 232, 867, 878, 1081 Isaacs, Susan psychologist, 61–2, 100, 118–19, 125, 867 Jacob, Ian army officer and broadcaster, 727 Jacobsson, Per manager Bank for International Settlements, 240, 324, 586, 618, 689, 835, 872 James, Eric (Lord James of Rusholme) headmaster, 824, 863–5, 869, 954, 992 Jay, Douglas politician, 673 Jebb, Gladwyn civil servant, 429 Jenkins, Roy politician, 902–4, 990, 1028 Jevons, William Stanley economist, 288, 993 Jewkes, John economist, 308, 387, 498–9, 501, 514, 549, 555–6, 569, 652, 661, 664, 667–8, 682n, 702, 743, 790 CEIS, 355–6, 360, 367 director of Economic Section, 372–3, 383, 391–2, 397 John, Arthur economic historian, 910, 993, 1018–19 Johnson, Anne see Robbins, Anne Johnson, Caroline (LCR’s granddaughter), 957 Johnson, Christopher (LCR’s son-in-law) financial journalist, 7, 823, 831, 843, 872, 874, 880, 1076–7 Johnson, Dominic (LCR’s grandson), 823, 831 Johnson, Harry economist, 821, 876, 907, 910, 939, 1027–8, 1033, 1034, 1053 Johnson, Lyndon US President, 990

1144

Index

Johnston, Alexander civil servant, 499, 756, 770, 774, 804, 811 Johnstone, Harcourt politician, 392–3, 422, 431 Jones, Aubrey politician, 174, 194, 976 Jones, David poet and painter, 93 Jones, Gwyneth singer, 1077 Jones, Kit n´ee Howell administrator, 607 Jones, L. Rodwell geographer, 220 Joseph, H.W.B. philosopher, 124, 126, 137, 159 Joseph, Peggy economist, 356, 370–1, 372 Jowitt, Sir William (Lord Jowitt) lawyer and politician, 414, 760–1, 763, 765 Judges, A.V. economic historian, 237, 284n Kahane, Jacques economist and grain shipper, 66, 69, 78, 87–9, 107, 118, 131, 147, 210, 389, 456, 746, 775, 830, 843–4, 846, 871 Kahn, Richard economist, 180–1, 183, 253, 255, 281, 371, 376, 696n Kaldor, Clarisse n´ee Goldschmidt, 7, 245, 280, 353, 519 Kaldor, Nicholas economist, 818–19, 896, 923, 932, 935–6, 992, 1053 at Cambridge, 343, 353, 518–19, 743, 816 at LSE, 3, 168, 174, 178, 239, 245, 250, 252, 280, 282–4, 290, 309, 323, 518–19, 650, 654, 671–2, 681–2, 1082 Kalecki, Michal economist, 252, 255, 689, 698–9 Kantorowicz, Herman legal scholar, 236–7 Kaplan, Abraham philosopher, 989 Kaufmann, Felix philosopher, 242, 245, 272, 278, 320 Kaysen, Carl economist, 994 Keegan, William journalist, 1032 Kendall, Maurice econometrician, 820 Kendall, William architect, 770 Keniston, Kenneth psychologist, 989 Ker, William Paton. professor of English, 27 Keynes, Geoffrey doctor, 866 Keynes, John Maynard economist, 1, 3–4, 20, 113, 117–20, 139, 155, 163, 169, 178, 198, 201, 212, 219, 235, 269, 276, 281, 284, 289n, 311, 323, 382, 498, 628, 645, 686, 737, 772, 775, 826, 871, 942 Committee of Economists 1930 see Committee of Economists

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money 1936, 250–2, 288–90, 298, 565, 567–8, 667, 682, 849 How to Pay for the War 1940, 344–5, 356, 358, 381, 1083 LCR’s relations with, 185–6, 188–90, 191–2, 198–9, 201, 217, 230–1, 257n, 278, 301, 345, 358, 368–70, 375, 398–9, 402, 408–11, 438, 464, 466, 489, 497, 515, 517, 522, 526n, 529–30, 536, 538, 544, 581, 603, 611, 615, 617–18, 621–3, 628, 642, 645, 648, 663, 666, 700, 980, 1072, 1083–6 A Treatise on Money 1930, 181–3, 187, 194, 198, 202, 212n, 255, 347, 682 in wartime Treasury, 363, 368–71, 375, 381, 393–6, 415–17, 429, 431, 434–5, 437, 442, 463, 500, 502–3, 513, 516, 541n, 563–8, 575, 580–2, 585, 588 see also Clearing Union and commodity plan Bretton Woods, 517, 520–4, 527, 529–31, 543–4, 56 Law Mission, 466, 468, 472–4, 478, 481–3, 493 loan negotiations, 588–94, 597–8, 601–3, 605–6, 609, 611–23, 625, 627, 674, 678n Keynes, John Neville economist and academic administrator, 175, 216, 1081 Keynes, Lydia n´ee Lopokova dancer, 56–7, 467, 483, 524, 589, 618, 645, 697–8 Kimber, Charles founder Federal Union, 346 Kinersley, Captain RFA, 34–5 King-Hall, Stephen writer, 245 Kingsley, David businessman, 1023 Kitchin, Donald, 232–3 Kittredge, Tracy associate director Rockefeller Foundation, 286–7, 304–6 Klappholz, Kurt economist, 7, 813–15, 822, 843, 999 Klein, Lawrence economist, 820 Knapp, Georg Friedrich economist, 100 Knight, Frank economist, 155, 172–3, 214, 233, 236, 249, 284, 302, 662, 665, 682, 710–11, 757, 783, 849 visits to London, 320, 665, 684, 687, 727–8 Knockles, 535–6

Index Knowles, Lilian economic historian, 70–1, 75–6, 79, 84, 129, 137 Knox, David economist, 653–4, 713 Knox, F.A. economist, 302 Knox, Major RFA, 34 Kokoschka, Oskar painter, 946, 956 Koopmans, J.G. economist, 290 Kropotkin, P. anarchist, 40–1 Kubelik, Rafael conductor, 941 Kuczynski, R.R. demographer, 242–3, 305–6 Kung Hsiang-Hsi central banker, 524 Kurz, Otto art historian, 756 Kydd, Harry administrator, 986 Kynaston, David historian, 6, 900 Labour Campaign for the Nationalization of the Drink Trade, 59–61, 65 Labour governments: 1924, 115–17, 121, 131; 1929–31, 165, 169, 203 see also Economic Advisory Council; 1945–51, 583, 588, 600, 605, 609–10, 624, 642, 658, 676, 690, 696, 724, 735, 801; 1964–70, 894–5, 917–18, 926–30, 967–8, 974, 989–90; 1974–9, 1031, 1041, 1047, 1051–2, 1062 Labour Party, 60, 63–4, 90, 111, 115, 131–2, 152, 199, 203, 207, 353, 439, 467, 564, 572, 789, 904, 1086 Lachmann, Ludwig economist, 316, 680, 712 Laidler, David economist, 7, 57, 718, 813, 1000n, 1058n Lakatos, Imre philosopher, 1050–1 Lal, J.S. civil servant, 922 Lamont, Mrs Thomas, 696 Lancaster, Kelvin economist, 813, 817, 905–6 Lancaster, Lilian see Gardiner, Lilian Lane Bequest, 38, 755, 805–12, 833, 966, 968, 972, 1087 Lane, Sir Hugh art collector, 5, 38 Lange, Oskar economist, 660, 666–7 Laski, Harold political scientist, 2, 4, 83, 100–1, 107, 111, 114, 219, 260–1, 458, 667, 691, 706 professor of political science LSE, 142, 163, 170, 189, 223, 232, 237, 258, 283n, 303, 349, 496, 693, 976 as teacher, 83, 87, 91–3, 106, 174 Latsis, John shipowner, 1050–1 Latsis, Spiro philosopher, 1050 Lavington, Frederick economist, 119, 1081

1145

Law, Andrew Bonar Prime Minister, 90 Law Mission see Anglo-American discussions Law, Richard (Lord Coleraine) politician, 444–5, 447, 450–1, 454–5, 466, 467–8, 470–1, 480–1, 483, 492–3, 501–2, 513, 518, 530, 533, 535–6, 539, 548, 584, 591 Lawrence, Evelyn educational psychologist, 867 Lawson, Harry businessman, 36, 57 Lawson, Jack stockbroker, 66–7, 112 Lawson, Lillie n´ee Harris (LCR’s aunt), 13, 36 Lawson, Marie n´ee Harris (LCR’s aunt), 13, 36 Lawson, Reginald (Brother David), 13, 36–8, 41, 48–9, 56–7, 74, 77, 81, 93, 103–4, 110–11, 135, 830 Layard, Richard economist, 6, 868, 875, 931 Layton, Walter journalist, 112, 193, 230, 902 League of Nations, 200, 244, 294, 295–7, 316, 356, 425 League of Nations Union, 117, 197, 313–14 Leddy, John US State Department, 598 Lederer, Emil economist, 225–6 Lee, Arthur (Lord Lee of Fareham) politician and art collector, 23, 307, 670, 1061 Lee, Frank civil servant, 388, 466, 470, 479, 493, 509–10, 700, 740, 790, 828, 866, 883, 924, 932, 957, 992 in Washington, 466, 471, 479–81, 532–6, 539, 560, 594, 605, 613, 616, 621–2, 625, 646–7, 688, 726 Lee, Jennie politician, 894, 952–3, 965, 971, 974, 1044 Lee, Kathleen (Mrs Frank Lee), 7, 594, 622, 957 Lee, Sir Kenneth civil servant, 445 Lees-Smith, H.B. politician, 70–1, 75–6, 79, 85, 90, 169 Leisching, Percivale civil servant, 421, 429, 432, 518, 530, 549, 553, 557, 572–4, 580, 584, 589–90 Law Mission, 466, 468–9, 471, 474–6, 479, 483, 493, 507 loan negotiations 1945, 590–1, 593–5, 597, 599–603, 609–10, 616, 618, 623, 627, 1085 Leith-Ross, Sir Frederick civil servant, 362, 395–6, 412–13, 464

1146

Index

lend-lease, 374, 393–4, 538, 540, 579, 586, 558, 625, 1085; consideration for see Article VII Leontiades, James student, 911 LePan, Douglas poet, 563, 570–1 Lerner, Abba economist, 195, 227, 238–9, 252–4, 280, 282–3, 290, 309, 660, 666–7, 683, 715, 717, 814, 1082 Lerner, Arthur economist, 817 LeRoux, LeRoux Smith arts administrator, 760–4 Leubucher, Charlotte economist, 242–3 Levey, Michael art historian, 754, 773, 965, 969, 1049–50 Lewis, Arthur economist, 650, 652–3, 685, 703, 820, 1017 Lewis, Wyndham artist, 29, 95 Liberal Party, 21, 51, 111, 115, 132, 220 Licence, John civil servant, 744 Liddell Hart, Basil military historian, 26, 42, 532 Lidka, Maria musician, 271 Lightfoot, R.H. chaplain, 159 Lindahl, Erik economist, 250, 324, 745 Lindemann, Frederick see Cherwell, Lord Lindsay of Birker, Lord academic administrator, 708 Linstead, Sir Patrick chemist, 860–1, 862n, 885, 892 Lippmann, Walter journalist, 320–1, 448, 459, 618 Lipset, Seymour Martin sociologist, 989 Lipsey, Richard economist, 7, 813, 817–19, 905–6, 910, 1000 Little, Ian economist, 819 Livingstone, E. & S. publishers, 933 Lloyd, E.M.H. civil servant, 352, 376, 383 Lloyd, Selwyn politician, 805, 866, 951 Lloyd George, David politician, 21, 23, 40, 51, 58, 61, 80, 90 Lloyds Bank Review, 230, 264–5, 275–6, 289, 312, 318, 643, 656–7, 675–9, 700–2, 721–3, 787, 803 Logan, Douglas academic administrator, 854, 869, 913, 917, 986, 994, 1010, 1013 London and Cambridge Economic Service, 147, 178, 180, 257, 286–7, 304, 306 London Economic Club, 155, 194, 250, 320

London Opera Centre, 958–9, 1013 London School of Economics, 65–8, 258, 261–2, 303–4, 329, 342–3, 353–4, 497, 642, 649, 655–6, 677, 715, 897, 1072, 1076, 1088 Academic Board, 73n, 650, 978, 991, 997, 1000, 1004–8, 1011, 1014, 1015 Academic Freedom Committee see Academic Freedom Committee Appointments Committee, 281–2, 497, 650, 671, 713, 815, 821–2, 851, 853, 856, 904–7, 909–10, 1018 Constitution Committee, 258, 283, 302–3 Court of Governors, 73n, 303, 305, 307, 651, 790, 837, 851, 854, 981–2, 986, 991, 993, 995, 997–9, 1002, 1006, 1009, 1014–15, 1020, 1029 Economics Department: 1930s, 1, 3, 166–8, 170–1, 261, 280–1, 304, 308, 1082; 1940s–60s, 1, 5, 642, 650–2, 672, 691, 713, 720–1, 748, 813, 826, 897, 904–10, 913, 931, 1087 Emergency Committee, 73n, 142, 162, 169, 171, 200–1, 219, 259–60, 262, 308, 317 see also Standing Committee General Purposes Committee, 303, 306, 651, 718, 997, 1000, 1004–7, 1014, 1016, 1018 Library Appeal, 6, 95, 1018, 1021–7, 1029–30, 1055–6, 1088 Professorial Council, 73, 201–2, 219–20, 228, 237–8, 258, 260, 281, 283, 287, 303–4, 306–7, 497, 656 see also Academic Board Socialist Society: 1920s, 75; 1960s (Soc Soc), 976, 996, 998, 1001, 1004–5, 1012 Standing Committee, 73n, 303, 356n, 651–2, 671, 790, 832, 837, 851–6, 905, 910, 982, 991, 993–8, 1000, 1002, 1004, 1006–14, 1018, 1023, 1027, 1029 Students’ Union, 86–7, 258–9, 518, 977–8, 982, 991, 993n, 995–6, 998, 1004–8 troubles, 6, 975–8, 981–4, 989, 995–1001, 1004–9, 1011–18, 1033, 1088 Lopokova, Lydia see Keynes, Lydia Lord President’s Committee, 355–9, 371–3, 377–8, 382, 385, 389, 401, 404, 407, 436

Index Loretz, Marjorie (friend of Iris Robbins), 271 Loretz, Philip (brother of Marjorie Loretz) doctor, 271 Lorimer, James economist, 936n Loveday, Alexander director Financial Section League of Nations, 239–40, 297–7 L¨owe, Adolf economist, 242, 244 Lucas, A.W. picture restorer, 755 Ludendorff, General Erich, 45, 47 Lund, Douglas accountant, 942–3, 948–50 Lyme Regis, 649, 826, 831, 843, 867, 871–2, 874, 878, 880–2, 886, 892, 914, 925, 940, 965, 1009, 1016, 1019, 1035, 1065, 1077 Lyttelton, Oliver (Lord Chandos) politician, 371, 389n, 404, 503, 557, 573–4, 811 McCarthy, Edwin civil servant, 508 McCloy, John J. president IBRD, 669 McCulloch, J.R. political economist, 707–8, 784 MacDougall, Donald economist, 720, 739, 746, 821, 873, 932 McDougall, F.L. economist, 441 Machlup, Fritz economist, 224, 228, 233–4, 240, 244, 247, 249–50, 267, 271–2, 282, 420, 457–9, 470, 532, 627, 647, 662, 664, 682, 690, 759, 846, 870, 979, 992, 1020, 1081 Macrae, Norman journalist, 902–3 Macfie, Alec Lawrence economist, 708, 710, 936n MacDonald, James Ramsay Prime Minister, 3, 115, 152, 169, 179–80, 203, 217–18, 294 Macgregor, D.H. economist, 127, 130, 140, 163, 222, 230 Mackinder, Sir Harold geographer, 85 Mackintosh, W.A. economist, 424–5, 506–8, 511, 531, 574 McLachlan, Donald journalist, 727 Maclennan, Barbara economist, 985 Macmillan, Charles publisher, 933, 936 Macmillan, Daniel publisher, 270, 709, 751, 828–9, 873 MacMillan, Deborah (Mrs Kenneth MacMillan), 960 Macmillan, Harold politician, 299 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 774, 798, 943

1147

Prime Minister, 791, 797, 809, 811–12, 828–9, 858, 860, 862, 866, 891, 917, 962, 1036 MacMillan, Kenneth choreographer, 946–7, 954–6, 960, 1039, 1068 Macmillan, Maurice publisher, 1035 Macmillan & Co publishers, 167, 216, 248, 270, 299, 496, 667n, 783, 911, 985, 1009, 1019, 1052 Macmillan Committee see Committee on Finance and Industry Magowan, J.H. civil servant, 445, 466, 477–9, 589, 595 Mahon, Denis art collector, 756, 762, 765, 804, 809–10, 969–70, 1043 Mair, Jessy (Lady Beveridge), 120–1, 123, 160, 163, 170, 263, 285, 305, 323 Majumdar, Tapas economist, 819 Makins, Roger civil servant, 774, 796, 799 Makower, Helen economist, 316, 713–14, 720, 814, 821–2 Malach, V.W. economist, 696 Malkin Committee see Committee on Reparation and Economic Security Malkin, Sir William civil servant, 429, 446 Mallalieu, E.L. politician, 806, 808 Mallon, J.J. social reformer, 55, 58–60, 108, 110–11, 113–14, 125, 131, 137, 363, 788n Mallon, Stella n´ee Gardiner (LCR’s sister-in-law), 58, 108, 110–11, 125, 131, 134, 363 Malone, R.S. publisher, 1057 Malraux, Andr´e author and politician, 758, 877, 966–7 Malthus, T.R. economist, 82, 154, 707–8, 710–11, 752, 784, 940, 993 Manas, Arturo politician, 453 Manchester Guardian newspaper, 102, 111, 117–18, 140–1, 209, 328n Mannheim, Karl sociologist, 236–7, 243–4 Manning, Charles professor of international relations, 313 Mantoux, Etienne economist, 302, 350–1 Margaret, Princess, 1041, 1065 Marget, Arthur economist, 239, 698, 744–5 Marjolin, Robert economist, 453 Marquis, Fred see Woolton, Lord Marschak, Jacob economist, 225, 238 Marsh, Leonard economist, 166–7

1148

Index

Marshall, Alfred economist, 72, 76, 139, 155, 157, 174, 237, 711, 831, 1068, 1080 Principles of Economics, 82, 164, 249, 682, 752, 849 Marshall Lectures, 646, 656, 662, 665–8, 679, 1085 Marshall, Nadine (Mrs Thomas Marshall), 83 Marshall Society, 158, 171, 196, 234, 344, 356, 725, 911, 1082 Marshall, Thomas sociologist, 258, 281, 283n, 988, 997, 1028 Marsterton, Valerie singer, 1077 Martin, Basil Kingsley editor, 101–2, 198–9 Martin, P.W. civil servant, 466, 479, 626 Marx, Karl political economist, 41, 56, 137, 199, 496–7, 1068 Marxian theory, 53n, 317, 327 Masoin, M. economist, 745 Massey, Vincent Canadian high commissioner, 570, 731 Massine, Leonid choreographer, 49, 56 Maud, John (Lord Redcliffe-Maud) civil servant, 377, 382, 384, 405, 442, 445–9, 454–6, 464, 498, 510, 518, 536, 579, 992 Mayer, Gustav historian, 243 Mayhew, Christopher politician, 727 Meade, James economist, 4, 7, 154–5, 208, 231, 298, 313–14, 347, 350, 363, 497, 583, 626, 643, 669, 727, 932, 1077, 1083–4, 1086 CEIS, 356–7, 360, 370, 500, 507–8 Economic Section, 372, 382–4, 387–8, 395, 397–8, 427, 439–40, 467, 530, 543, 545, 553–4, 562–3, 575, 577, 579–80, 587, 591–2, 601–2, 607, 620 commercial union see Commercial Union director of Section, 549, 563, 574, 645, 647, 668, 674 employment policy, 391, 397, 413–14, 437–9, 480, 515, 549, 569, 574 see also Employment Policy Law Mission, 464, 466, 468–9, 472–7, 482–3, 493 national income estimates, 356–7, 369, 372, 381, 387, 418, 551–2, 569 proposal for countercyclical variation of social insurance contributions, 416, 426, 439, 489–90, 841

professor at LSE, 651, 685, 713, 715–17, 813, 818, 821–2 professor of political economy Cambridge, 651, 816 Meade, Margaret n´ee Wilson (Mrs James Meade), 7, 356, 363n, 651 Meadway Close, 165, 210, 228, 240, 271, 282, 390, 541, 572, 596, 644, 646, 683, 690, 696, 728, 747, 764, 848, 882 Meek, Ronald economist, 708, 886, 925 Meenai, S.A. economist, 743, 783 Mehta, G.L. journalist and public servant, 87–8, 527n, 656, 991n, 1024 Melville, Leslie economist, 240, 323, 506–9, 511, 522, 526, 531–2 Mendes-France, Pierre politician, 531 Menger, Carl economist, 274, 1068 Menken, Jules, 220–2, 245–6, 247n Merton, Sir Thomas physicist, 811 Meyer, Frank student, 259–60 Mill, James political economist, 707 Mill, John Stuart political economist, 71, 82, 159, 160, 707, 710–11, 784, 925, 978, 985, 993, 1088 Millard, 2nd Lt RFA, 44–5 Miller, Morris economist, 7, 696 Milner-White, Eric Dean of York, 863 Ministry of Agriculture, 264, 359, 379–81, 395, 400, 405–8, 426–7, 435, 441, 442–3, 509–10, 542–3, 545–6, 554, 590, 592, 1083 Ministry of Aircraft Production, 387, 402 Ministry of Food, 343, 352, 359, 372, 374, 376–81, 382–5, 395, 404, 407, 442–3, 510, 546, 560, 713 Minkes, Leonard economist, 713–14 Mises, Ludwig von economist, 139, 144, 158, 160, 176–7, 201, 210, 216, 225–6, 228, 232, 236–7, 240, 244, 249, 264, 266–7, 272, 275, 277–80, 296, 320, 458–9, 532, 662–4, 679–80, 1081 Socialism, 135, 147, 196, 210, 264, 266, 300, 347, 1081 Mishan, Ed economist, 813–14 Mitchell, James gardener, 14, 48 Mitchell, Wesley economist, 118–19, 295 Modigliani, Franco economist, 849 Moggridge, Donald economist, 413 Molson, Hugh politician, 804–5 monetarism, 934, 1052, 1064, 1074, 1086

Index monetary policy, 5, 99, 182–4, 227, 230, 310–11, 439, 488–9, 499, 565–9, 676, 735–6, 737–8, 745, 796, 798–802, 833–6, 1031–2, 1074 Monk, Jessie, 37, 48, 74, 106, 137 Monnet, Jean economist, 356, 721–3 Mont, Mme du, 38, 48–9 Mont, M. du pianist, 36, 38, 48–9 Mont Pelerin Society, 661–4, 682, 705, 743, 848, 1061, 1071 Montague, F.C. historian, 27 Montgomerie, John lawyer, 1006, 1008–9 Montgomery, General Sir Bernard, 424, 429, 964 Moore, Henry sculptor, 760, 767, 791, 809–10, 824, 957, 962, 967, 969, 971–2, 974, 1049 Moore, Peter historian, 786 Morgan, David economist, 713, 822 Morgenthau, Henry Jr US Treasury Secretary, 469, 512–13, 516, 525, 529, 531, 539 Morgenstern, Oskar economist, 200, 228, 257, 296, 682, 912 Morrell, J.B. director Rowntree Trust, 363 Morrice, Norman dancer, 1039, 1041 Morris, Sir Philip academic administrator, 860–1, 885, 890 Morris, William designer and author, 18, 41, 53 Morrison, Herbert politician, 583, 588, 601, 620 Morton, George statistician, 819 Morton, W.W. civil servant, 967–8 Moser, Claus (Lord Moser) statistician, 6–7, 961 Higher Education, 862n, 868, 875–8, 878, 881, 931, 941n Royal Opera House, 941n, 947, 953, 1037, 1041, 1077 Moyne, Lord (Bryan Guinness) novelist and poet, 806–8, 810 Mozart, W.A. composer, 89, 944–5, 954, 959, 1066, 1077 Muir, Sir Edward civil servant, 769, 805 Mundell, Robert economist, 844, 979 Murray, Keith agricultural economist, 869, 930, 987 Mussolini, Benito dictator, 268, 294 Mutual Aid see lend-lease

1149

Myers, J.L. historian, 159 Mynors, Humphrey central banker, 702, 798–9 Myrdal, Gunnar economist, 290, 671 Nash, Eric agricultural economist, 384, 713 National Art Collections Fund, 729, 734, 757, 771, 773, 962, 1044 National Debt Enquiry, 564–8, 757 National Farmers’ Union, 22–4, 80–1, 90, 115–16, 208, 265, 407, 409, 441, 592 National Gallery London, 2, 5, 38, 307, 729, 731, 772–3, 890, 1042–6 board of trustees, 747, 753–6, 760, 826, 862, 865–6, 897, 941, 961–2, 971–2, 1022, 1042–50; LCR chairman of, 759, 766–75, 791–5, 803–13, 961–2, 964–70 National Gallery Washington, 471, 480, 532, 731 National Government 1931–9, 203, 208–9, 294 National Guilds League, 53–5, 62, 74 see also guild socialism national income and expenditure estimates, 175, 213, 243, 344, 356–7, 369–70, 372, 381, 413, 418, 436, 516, 551, 563–4, 569–70, 695, 1083, 1085 National Institute for Economic and Social Research, 285–7, 304–6, 671, 702 Nehru, B.K. student, 174, 194 Nethania, 13, 33 Neuman, Andrew economist, 238–9 New Age magazine, 41, 52, 54, 62, 64 New College Oxford, 2–3, 104–5, 124, 126–30, 137, 147–8, 159–60, 164, 228, 490, 524, 644, 651, 673n, 682, 696, 769, 807, 832, 1060, 1066 Newman, Peter economist, 684 Newton, Gordon editor, 6, 898–901, 938, 955 Niemeyer, Sir Otto civil servant and central banker, 644 Nietzsche, Friedrich philosopher, 40, 56, 1079 Nixon, Richard US President, 1030 Noble, Peter academic administrator, 854–5, 913 Noble, Sir Fraser academic administrator, 976 Noreiga-Morales, Manuel economist, 526

1150

Index

Norman, Montagu (Lord Norman) central banker, 993 North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 721–2, 727, 739, 743–4, 749 Notestein, Wallace historian, 348, 732 Nove, Alec economist, 822 Nureyev, Rudolf dancer, 947, 954, 957 Oakeshott, Michael political scientist, 832 O’Brien, Denis economist, 708, 785, 1031n, 1080 O’Brien, Leslie central banker, 745 Ogg, David historian, 159 Ogilvie, Frederick economist, 129–30 Ohlin, Bertil economist, 180, 202, 240, 251, 295–8 Oil Agreement 1944 see Anglo-American Oil Agreement Oliver & Boyd publishers, 902, 933–9 Opie, Redvers economist, 302, 447–8, 450, 454, 457–8, 459–60, 462, 466, 469, 480, 482, 517–18, 524, 534, 980, 1059 Opie, Roger economist, 817 Opp´e, Armide civil servant, 777 Orage, A.R. editor, 52, 62–4, 75, 269, 293 Organization for European Economic Cooperation, 743–6 Ormsby, Hilda geographer, 69–70 Orr, John Boyd nutritionist, 441, 661 Orr, Robert political scientist, 7, 898 Orwin, C.S. agricultural economist, 132–4 Ottawa Agreements 1932, 209, 230, 314 see also imperial preference Outlook magazine, 113, 115–17, 121–2, 125, 128, 130–3, 137, 140, 145–6, 1086 Overstone, Lord banker, 772, 784, 785, 1031n Overton, Sir Arnold civil servant, 432, 463, 484, 490, 507, 580–1 Overton Committee see Committee on Postwar Commercial Policy Padmore, Thomas civil servant, 373–4, 761n, 802, 858, 860, 869, 944 Page, Sir Denys classicist, 861, 862n Paish, Frank economist, 29, 35, 222–3, 252, 304, 343, 350, 650, 701, 705, 813, 910, 932, 1032 Pakenham, Frank (Lord Longford) politician and writer, 129, 207, 806, 807–11, 832

Papi, Giuseppe Ugo economist, 830, 836, 843 Pareto, Vilfredo economist, 252, 274 Parker, Alwyn editor, 643, 675 Parkinson, Hargreaves journalist, 112–13 Parnis, A.E. civil servant, 730, 734 Parry, David Hughes professor of law, 238, 258, 283n, 303, 497 Part, Antony civil servant, 860, 953 Pasmore, Victor painter, 946 Pasvolsky, Leo economist, 421, 448–9, 458, 460–1, 470–1, 522–3, 530, 541, 698 Patinkin, Don economist, 818–19, 849, 1025–6 Pavitt, Burnet businessman, 948, 956 Peacock, Alan economist, 713, 794, 816, 865, 1062 Pearson, Lester civil servant, 450, 453, 455, 599–600, 618 Pember & Boyle stockbrokers, 66, 754 Pemberton, Jim economist, 1052–3 Penning-Rowsell, Edmund C. geographer, 80n Penrose, E.F. economist, 420, 448, 553, 557, 572, 584, 626 Penrose, Edith economist, 908 Perlman, Mark economist, 1020 Perlman, Selig economist, 618 Perroux, Franc¸ois economist, 871 Peston, Maurice economist, 813, 815 P´etain, Marshal Philippe, 354, 365–7 Pethick-Lawrence, Lord politician, 833 Phelps Brown, Henry economist, 7, 19, 152–4, 164, 642n, 650–1, 654, 685, 715, 813, 906, 984 Philip, Prince, Duke of Edinburgh, 865, 899 Phillips, A.W.H. economist, 715–18, 721, 813, 819, 821–2, 932 Phillips, Sir Frederick civil servant, 424, 428, 448, 458–60, 462, 466, 513 Phillips, Sir Thomas civil servant, 463, 518 Pigou, A.C. economist, 99, 139–41, 144, 146, 155, 160, 163, 172, 179, 187–8, 190–2, 194, 216, 230, 288–9, 343, 419, 697, 1081 Economics of Welfare, 119, 164, 172, 249n, 643, 720, 849 Pike, John financial secretary LSE, 1003, 1019, 1027, 1056 Pinney, Jennifer secretary, 1056 Piper, John artist, 768, 946, 954, 971, 1057

Index Plant, Arnold economist, 68, 72, 78, 87, 105, 108, 110, 113, 137, 321 professor of commerce LSE, 170, 173, 179, 188, 193, 197, 201–2, 205–7, 219–22, 230, 250, 252, 257n, 258, 284, 286, 304, 308, 343, 350, 497, 549, 608, 650, 685, 713, 715, 717, 813, 852, 907, 910 Plant, Edith (Mrs Arnold Plant), 105, 162, 164, 188, 321 Playfair, Edward civil servant, 429, 731, 748, 754, 760, 828, 971, 983, 1043, 1046 Plesters, Joyce painting conserver, 756 Plowden, Edwin industrialist and civil servant, 739, 741, 824 Plumb, J.H. historian, 1067 points rationing, 4, 345, 370–1, 375–8, 382–5, 405, 518, 1083 Pole, Joseph, 61, 75 Pole, Phoebe n´ee Rickards, 61, 75 Polimeni, John, 40, 57, 74, 109–10, 275, 830 Pollard, A.F. historian, 27 Ponsonby, Gilbert economist, 650 Poole, Oliver (Lord Poole) businessman, 831–3, 850–1, 857, 898–9, 900, 933, 1016, 1053 Pope-Hennessy, John museum director, 1037–8 Popper, Karl philosopher, 7, 290, 496–7, 653, 664, 705, 820, 849, 958, 976, 1035–6, 1050, 1070, 1077 population problem, 96, 120, 154, 156–7 Porter, Andrew music critic, 900, 955 Postan, Michael economic historian, 174, 702 postwar planning see commercial policy, commodity plan, employment policy and international monetary policy postwar transition, planning for, 507, 533, 538–41, 551–2, 562, 565, 578, 580–2, 592, 602, 612, 614, 624 Pound, Ezra poet, 64–5, 107, 268–9, 290–3, 844 Powell, Enoch politician, 803, 990 Powell, Sir Richard civil servant, 993n Power, Eileen historian, 84–5, 201, 223, 237, 260 PPE, 127–8, 130, 143, 150, 152, 154, 164, 228, 271, 694, 842 Prausnitz, Otto academic lawyer, 243 Prest, Alan economist, 1027, 1043, 1053

1151

Prest, Wilfred economist, 302 Proctor, Dennis civil servant, 376, 569–70, 578, 827 chairman of trustees Tate Gallery, 760–2, 764, 766–7, 791–2, 973 public investment/public works, 3, 185, 203, 218, 230–1, 235, 310, 311–13, 318–19, 413, 418, 439, 485–8, 491, 499, 660, 664 quantitative restrictions, 225, 266, 300, 314, 392, 434–5, 440, 474–5, 544–7, 553, 558, 592, 702, 609, 613, 625 quantity theory of money, 76, 89, 214, 683, 836, 849 see also monetarism SS Queen Elizabeth, 627–8, 668, 690, 698, 700, 705 SS Queen Mary, 446, 467–8, 519–21, 591–2 Queen’s Hall Committee, 5, 775, 776–82, 1088 Radcliffe Committee see Committee on the Working of the Monetary System Radcliffe, Lord lawyer, 796–7, 836 Radomysler, Asik economist, 316, 416–17, 650, 719, 751–2 Raeburn, John agricultural economist, 713 Raisman, Sir Jeremy civil servant, 520, 522, 526 Raman, Sir Venkata physicist, 689, 698–9 Ransome, Patrick founder Federal Union, 346 Rappard, William director GIIS, 200, 244, 277, 296, 298, 320, 326, 420, 662, 725, 748 Rasminsky, Louis central banker, 424–5, 457, 459, 522, 529, 531, 653, 748, 1024 Ratcliffe, G.R.Y. bursar, 159 rationing, 344, 358, 368, 370–1, 375, 405 see also points rationing Rauner, Robert student, 9, 717, 843 Rawnsley, Derek founder Federal Union, 346 Rayne, Max (Lord Rayne) property developer, 967–8, 972, 1010, 1017, 1024, 1029, 1047, 1061 Raynor, Hayden US State Department, 535–6 Read, Conyers historian, 420, 458, 732 reconstruction committees 1941–4, 391, 411–12, 414, 436, 462–3, 499, 501, 516, 557 see also Employment Policy

1152

Index

Redcliffe-Maud, Lord see Maud, John Reddaway, Brian economist, 371, 1053 Rees, Goronwy novelist, 129 Reeves, Fr John-Baptist, 74, 93, 110 Reform Club, 170, 191, 193, 209, 222, 240, 285, 328n, 389, 425, 586, 646, 681, 846, 874, 895, 1028–9 Reid, Norman deputy director then director Tate Gallery, 762–3, 973 Reinhart, Oskar art collector, 687, 725, 868 reparations see Committee on Reparation and Economic Security Reviewing Committee on Export of Works of Art, 734, 748, 756–7, 770–1, 804, 962–4, 1044 Rhodesia, 929–30, 975–6, 1004 Ricardo, David political economist, 82, 151, 154, 159, 209, 707–11, 742, 752, 784–5, 831, 982 Ricardo effect, 418–20 Richards, Ceri painter, 946, 956, 1022n Rickett, Denis civil servant, 942 Riefler, Winfield economist, 699 Rist, Charles economist, 197, 256, 276 Robbins, Anne (Mrs Christopher Johnson) (LCR’s daughter), 7, 103n, 136, 164, 210, 325, 354, 423, 555, 596, 644, 658, 675, 682, 683, 726, 738, 747, 788, 823, 831, 843, 872, 874, 877, 880, 882, 1001, 1019, 1033, 1076, 1089 Robbins, Arthur (LCR’s uncle) farmer, 11–12, 17 Robbins, Brenda (LCR’s daughter-in-law), 886–7, 880, 882, 925–6, 1001, 1016, 1051 Robbins, Caroline (LCR’s grandmother), 11 Robbins, Caroline (LCR’s sister) historian, 7, 12, 15–20, 48, 79, 104, 107, 110, 125, 143, 234, 319, 327, 348, 354, 374, 521, 599, 628, 644, 687, 726, 728, 733, 746, 775, 824, 831, 843, 861, 874, 926, 992, 1047–8, 1061, 1071 LCR visits to, 447, 456, 459, 469, 480, 483, 532, 539, 601, 688, 698–9, 706, 844, 876, 911, 924, 984, 989, 1020, 1027, 1034, 1055, 1069 Robbins, Estelle May n´ee Harris (LCR’s stepmother), 16, 39, 48, 56, 81, 109, 125, 726, 728 Robbins, Frank (LCR’s uncle), 11

Robbins, Iris n´ee Gardiner (LCR’S wife), 2, 57–8, 103–9, 115–16, 120, 124–5, 131, 133, 141, 148, 160, 162, 178, 181, 195, 202, 211, 236, 240, 264, 275, 289, 298, 314, 321, 322–3, 325, 327, 343, 390, 446, 464, 490, 517, 541, 555, 596, 628, 648, 675, 682, 697, 700, 702, 706–7, 744, 746, 750–1, 758, 775, 797–8, 829, 831, 844, 874, 880, 882, 911, 913–15, 923, 957–8, 984, 992, 1001, 1009, 1016, 1025, 1027, 1033–4, 1050–1, 1055, 1057–9, 1065–6, 1069–73, 1077 Robbins, Kenneth (LCR’s cousin), 12, 26 Robbins, Lionel, CAREER childhood, 12–19 education: school, 19–20, 25–7; UCL, 27–8; LSE, 68–101, 106–7 Royal Artillery: cadet, 2, 27–31; officer, 2, 31–6, 41–50 lecturer New College Oxford, 2–3, 126–30, 134 lecturer LSE, 134–48 fellow New College Oxford, 130, 147–64 professor of economics LSE, 3, 6, 187–8, 191–3, 195–6, 205, 250, 254–7, 322–5, 330–1, 349–51, 353–4, 381–2, 393, 558–9, 619–20, 660, 662, 665, 710–11, 719–21, 743–5, 755, 766, 792, 801–2, 838, 909–12, 917–19, 923, 950–9 see also Academic Freedom Committee, Robbins, Lionel lectures and London School of Economics Economics Department CEIS, 353–62, 364, 367–8 Economic Section, 4, 372–4, 387–90, 401–30, 408–9, 418, 435–7, 517–18, 541–2, 549–50, 563–71, 574, 576–8 see also agricultural policy, Anglo-American discussions, Bretton Woods, Dominions talks, Hot Springs, Law Mission, loan negotiations, Malkin Committee, Overton Committee, points rationing, postwar planning, Steering Committee, war economy trustee of National Gallery see National Gallery London director of Covent Garden see Royal Opera House Covent Garden

Index honours: knighthood declined, 494; CB, 517–18; CH, 988; peerage, 7, 824–9, 857, 1072 see also speeches in House of Lords chairman of Financial Times, 831–2, 850–2, 862, 870, 872, 877, 897–904, 933–9, 1009, 1022, 1088 chairman of governors LSE, 6, 975, 991, 993, 995–1020, 1022–9, 1088–23 see also London School of Economics Library Appeal, troubles LECTURES at Oxford, 128, 130, 151–2, 153–7, 160–1, 174 LSE, 132, 135–6, 166–8, 174, 176, 188, 206–7, 223, 281, 315, 324, 343–4, 643, 649, 654, 681, 703, 719–20 comparative economic theory, 143, 148, 152, 154, 162, 168, 176 currency and banking, 138–9, 143 economic causes of war, 315 economic problems of war, 143–4, 148 elements of economics, 143–6, 154, 167, 173–4, 188, 206 history of economic thought, 167, 281, 719–20, 752–3, 857, 897, 910, 982, 1033, 1060, 1008–9, 1073 see also schools of economic theory Nature and Significance of Economic Science, 160, 168, 174–5, 202, 207, 213 Principles of Economic Analysis: 1930s, 167, 171–2, 174, 206, 281, 315, 343 ; postwar, 671–2, 681–3, 702, 719, 822–3, 837, 857, 913, 915 problems of applied economics, 188, 206 schools of economic theory, 167, 188, 752 theory of economic policy, 315, 643, 649, 658–61, 666, 681, 720, 794 Chichele Lectures, 939–40, 978, 984–5 Ely Lecture, 1063, 1069–71 Keynes Lecture, 1030 Mais Lecture, 1063–4 Marshall Lectures, 656, 666–8, 679 Simon Lectures, 703, 707–8 Stamp Memorial Lecture, 735–7, 1086 speeches in House of Lords, 831–4, 871, 892–3, 896, 925–8, 930–1, 936, 978, 983, 990, 992, 1031, 1046–7, 1052,

1153 1073–4, 1076n see also Against Inflation TRAVELS Austria, 3, 87–9, 235–6, 240, 275, 278–80, 797–8 Belgium, 42–3, 702–3 Canada, 912–13, 1024–5, 1057 Finland, 289 France, 33, 41–7, 65–6, 125, 141–2, 148–9, 181, 202, 264, 296, 298, 314–15, 321, 326, 351–2, 697, 700, 723, 743–44, 749, 871–2, 874–5, 877 Germany, 225–6, 874, 895, 914–5, 1071 Greece, 1050–1 Hong Kong, 1025, 1054–5 India, 922–3 Ireland, 685 Israel, 1025–6 Italy, 775, 829–30, 843–4, 871, 913–14, 979, 984, 992, 1016, 1024–5, 1027 Latin America, 748–51, 1058–9, 1071–2 Scandinavia, 289, 312, 1025 South Africa, 1033–4, 1059 Spain, 749, 1025, 1027, 1062 Switzerland, 275, 277, 296–8, 326–7, 661–4, 675, 685–7, 725, 747, 749, 812, 868, 925 Taiwan, 1072–3 USA, 4, 445–61, 467–83, 519–41, 591–628, 688–9, 698–700, 705–7, 757–9, 844, 876–7, 911–12, 924, 979–81, 984, 989, 1020, 1024–5, 1027, 1054–5, 1058–9, 1061, 1068–71 USSR, 868, 872, 877–8, 1075 VIEWS ETC cartels and restrictive practices, 300, 317, 484–5, 491, 492, 500 employment policy, 391, 413–14, 416–18, 663–4, 702–3 see also Steering Committee equality, 391, 788–9, 1058 European economic integration, 721–3, 1031 see also Federal Union and federation finance for the arts, 5, 771–2, 791–5, 951–2, 1043–5, 1054–5, 1088 see also National Gallery, Queen’s Hall Committee, Royal Opera House, Treasury and Waverley Committee

1154

Index

Robbins, Lionel (cont.) fixed versus flexible exchange rates, 215, 246, 350, 392–3, 579, 686, 736–7, 741, 834, 927, 980, 1030, 1086 see also devaluation, gold standard free trade versus protection, 3, 21, 90, 112, 139, 179, 185, 193–5, 198–9, 215, 217, 427, 434, 579, 1080 see also agricultural policy, quantitative restrictions, tariffs German language, 78, 89, 112, 135, 143n, 147, 153, 200–1, 210 history of economics, 83, 642, 703, 707–11, 725, 1034–5 see also lectures on history of economic thought, The Evolution of Economic Theory, Robert Torrens and the Evolution of Classical Economics, The Theory of Economic Development in the History of Economic Thought, The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy mathematics, 20, 26–7, 69, 78, 159, 692 methodology, 214, 271–5, 320–1, 694, 849, 1050–1, 1070, 1081 planning, 206–7, 277, 299–301, 659–60, 666–7 poetry, 16–17, 25–6, 41, 49–50, 61, 64, 74, 87, 105, 591, 689 political science, 83, 91, 97–8, 1079 religion, 15–16, 38–41, 78, 133 socialism, 2, 41, 52, 54–5, 62–3, 74–5, 92–6, 131–2, 135, 152, 318, 659–60, 666–7, 989, 1079 see also guild socialism WORKS (books and major articles) Against Inflation, 1052–3 Autobiography of an Economist, 3, 11–12, 18, 25, 31–2, 44–6, 55, 60–1, 65, 74, 79, 87, 91–2, 100–1, 126, 144, 150n, 231, 236–7, 252, 258, 263, 280, 307, 343, 352–3, 361–2, 461, 522, 542, 644, 670, 738, 949, 1009, 1019, 1075, 1077 ‘Consumption and the trade cycle’, 63, 229–30, 293, 318 The Economic Basis of Class Conflict, 312–13, 317–18 The Economic Causes of War, 320, 326–7, 329, 346–8, 1084

‘The economic effects of variations of hours of labour’, 157–8 Economic Planning and International Order, 277, 290, 299–301, 318, 327, 347, 1084 The Economic Problem in Peace and War, 656, 665–8 The Economist in the Twentieth Century, 691, 751, 911, 1019 An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, 1, 160–1, 202, 213–16, 224, 228, 235, 253, 302, 320, 347, 820, 848, 1050–1, 1063, 1069–70, 1081–2, 1087; reviews of, 231–3; second edition, 240, 271–5, 315; third edition, 1075 The Evolution of Economic Theory, 911, 993, 1009 The Great Depression, 3, 247–9, 265–71, 310–11, 1081–2 ‘Hayek on liberty’, 845–6 Higher Education Revisited, 1064–5 ‘How to mitigate the next slump’, 311–13, 318, 418, 1083 ‘Inquest on the crisis’, 675–9, 990 Liberty and Equality, 1058–9 The Mixed Economy, 1058–9 Money, Trade and International Relations, 1019 ‘On a certain ambiguity in the concept of stationary equilibrium’, 158–9, 171, 214 ‘On the elasticity of demand for income in terms of effort’, 172–3 Political Economy Past and Present, 1034–6, 1059, 1063 Politics and Economics, 873 proposed principles, 748, 790, 823–4, 848–9, 858, 911, 913 ‘Remarks upon certain aspects of the theory of costs’, 234–6 ‘The representative firm’, 155–6, 158 Robert Torrens and the Evolution of Classical Economics, 742–3, 748, 750, 751, 757, 760, 782–7, 816 The Theory of Economic Development in the History of Economic Thought, 939–40, 978, 984–5 The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy, 707–11, 725, 738, 786, 793–4, 1035, 1087

Index ‘Thoughts on the crisis’, 803 The University in the Modern World, 915, 931 Wages, 133–4, 137, 145 Robbins, Nancy (LCR’s stepsister) doctor, 7, 12n, 15–16, 18, 24, 48, 66, 327–9, 728, 747, 843, 923, 1065 Robbins, Philip (LCR’s grandson) artist, 7, 823, 831, 867, 1051, 1060, 1068–9 Robbins principle, 875, 886, 1064, 1074 Robbins, Ralph (LCR’s cousin), 12, 26 Robbins Report see Committee on Higher Education Robbins, Richard (LCR’s son) painter and sculptor, 83, 103n, 148, 325, 353, 423, 447, 555, 596, 644, 658, 662, 672, 674, 682, 687, 743, 747, 775, 789, 823–4, 831, 843, 848, 866–7, 880, 925, 981, 1009, 1016, 1048, 1051, 1068, 1076–7 Robbins, Rosa Marion n´ee Harris (LCR’s mother), 11–12, 15–16, 109 Robbins, Rowland (LCR’s grandfather), 11 Robbins, Rowland (LCR’s stepbrother), 7, 12, 16, 18, 328, 845 Robbins, Rowland Richard (LCR’s father) farmer, 11–12, 15–19, 21–5, 27–30, 37, 48–9, 65, 66–7, 89–90, 108, 112, 125, 133, 148, 216, 234, 264, 328, 344, 494, 596, 608, 619, 644, 681, 726, 728–9, 746–7, 824, 831, 843–5, 850, 1061 work for NFU, 22–4, 66, 80–1, 90, 115, 208, 670 Robbins Seminar: 1930s, 3, 168, 206, 235, 239, 243, 250–6, 290, 316, 343, 418, 451; 1940s–1960s, 652–3, 684–5, 712, 716–18, 816–20, 836, 851, 857, 897, 925, 932–3, 936 Robbins, Wendy n´ee Dobbs (LCR’s daughter-in-law), 728, 747, 775, 823, 831, 843, 866 Robbins, William (LCR’s grandson), 789, 831, 867, 946, 957, 1051, 1065 Robbins, Winifred (LCR’s sister), 12, 15–16, 109 Roberts, Ben professor of industrial relations, 7, 906, 975n, 991, 993, 996, 1002, 1007, 1023–4, 1026 Robertson, D.H. economist, 139, 142, 144, 155, 162–3, 167, 169, 178–9, 196, 204–5, 211, 233, 245–6, 257n, 296–7,

1155

304, 345, 419, 567, 682, 715n, 718, 849, 883, 993 Cassel professor at LSE, 322–3, 519 friendship with LCR, 201–2, 228, 267, 532, 644, 666, 671, 702, 708, 710, 781n, 790, 883, 1085–6 professor of political economy Cambridge, 560, 651, 656, 697, 720 on trade cycle, 99, 119, 182, 197, 248, 270, 284, 1081–2 in wartime Treasury, 342, 368, 412, 417, 424, 501–7, 509–11, 514, 516; Washington, 457, 460, 462, 466, 482–3, 532–3; Bretton Woods, 517, 521–3, 524, 529, 530, 543–4 Robertson, H.M. economist, 785, 1062 Robinson, Austin economist, 7, 308, 342, 408, 498, 648, 673, 697, 702, 775, 830, 1030 CEIS, 353, 355–6, 360 Economic Section, 372, 383n, 385, 389, 397, 668 Robinson, Joan economist, 233, 251, 253, 255, 272, 683, 722, 787, 818–19, 830, 932 Robinson, L.G. historian, 84, 283n, 649–50 Robot, 739–42, 745–6 Robson, William professor of public administration, 839, 841 Rockefeller, David banker, 316, 994–5, 1027 Rockefeller Foundation, 142, 197, 284–7, 296, 298, 304–6, 319, 550, 646, 665n, 689, 752, 757, 916, 1024 Rockefeller Travelling Fellowships, 122–4, 244, 252, 282, 290, 356 Ronald, Nigel civil servant, 429, 431, 443, 466, 468, 470–1, 517, 524, 550, 589 Roosevelt, Franklin US President, 239, 249–50, 374, 393–4, 403, 441–2, 470, 529, 539, 583 R¨opke, Wilhelm economist, 176–7, 180, 186, 232, 235, 237, 239, 244, 267, 296–8, 326, 347, 662–5, 848 Rose, Edwin musician, 20–1, 35–6, 40–1, 56–7, 61, 74, 78, 85n, 100, 105, 109–10, 124, 232, 824, 850 Rose, John student, 1012–13 Rosenstein-Rodan, Paul economist, 235–6, 239, 244–5, 250, 252, 271, 290, 652 Ross, Philip civil servant, 878, 881, 885 Rossetti, Harold civil servant, 973

1156

Index

Rossi, Ernesto economist, 347 Rothbarth, Erwin economist, 243 Rothenstein, Sir John gallery director, 760–4, 767, 973 Rothenstein, Lady, 767 Rothschild, Evelyn de chairman The Economist, 1025, 1053 Rothschild, Lord zoologist, 756, 1076n Rougier, Louis social philosopher, 321, 352, 365–7 Rousseau, Henri Surprised!, 1048–9 Rowan, Leslie civil servant, 739, 746 Rowe, Helen poet, 77 Rowe, J.W.F. economist, 123, 138, 171, 188, 627 Rowse, A.L. historian, 143, 687–8 Roxburgh, Jean economist, 650 Royal Artillery, 28–31, 32–5, 41–7, 53 Royal College of Art, 888, 891, 914, 988 Royal Economic Society, 119, 180, 216, 288, 498, 580, 697, 716, 775–6, 837, 1053 Royal Institute of International Affairs, 245–7, 313, 399, 727, 738–9 Royal Institution, 247–8, 265 Royal Opera House, 1, 6, 789–90, 831, 850, 874, 890, 899–900, 941–61, 1036–42, 1076–7, 1088 ballet subcommittee, 898, 945–6, 949, 956, 960 finance subcommittee, 898, 941, 948–53, 1036–7 redevelopment, 961, 1036, 1040–2, 1066 Rubenstein Nash & Co lawyers, 845n, 1040 Rueff, Jacques economist, 240, 267, 351, 663, 723, 725, 744–6, 979–80 Ruhemann, Helmut picture restorer, 755 Rupert, Anton businessman, 1033 Ryan, Louden economist, 713–14, 720, 751 Rybczynski, Tad economist, 1054 Ryder, Oscar US Tariff Commissioner, 594 Sadler’s Wells ballet, 942–3 Sadler’s Wells theatre, 943–4 Saenz, Josue economist, 456 Sainsbury, Sir John (Lord Sainsbury) businessman, 1036–7 St Clements Press, 118, 898, 902, 937 Salter, Sir Arthur (Lord Salter) civil servant and politician, 193, 219, 230, 245,

269, 399, 669, 689, 699, 738–9, 746, 827–8, 957 Salvesen, Harold economist, 105, 124–5, 127–8, 130, 137, 147, 150–1, 153, 157, 836 Samuelson, Paul economist, 253, 682, 690 Sargan, Denis econometrician, 910 Sargent, A.J. economic historian, 220 Saunders, Christopher economist, 154 Sayers, Richard monetary historian, 207, 290, 651, 796–7, 799, 803, 813, 835–6, 1000, 1043 Schindler, Walter journalist, 224 Schneider, Erich economist, 745 Schoenbach, Victor student, 978, 1001, 1005, 1007–8, 1012 Schoenberg, Arnold Moses und Aaron, 955 Schultz, Henry econometrician, 250, 257 Schuman plan, 721–4 Schumpeter, Joseph economist, 156, 158–9, 160, 163, 208, 214, 239, 278, 281, 667n, 752, 776, 993 Schwartz, George economist, 147, 166–7, 171, 178, 193, 199, 207, 210, 343 Schwartz, Pedro economist, 1027, 1035, 1062 Scitovsky, Tibor economist, 251, 316 Scott, C.P. newspaper editor, 140–1 Scott, E.T. journalist, 140–1, 194 Scott, Honor see Honor Croome Secord, Campbell economist, 290 Seebohm, Frederic banker, 993n, 1028 Seers, Dudley economist, 668 Seiler, Ellen n´ee Viner, 150n Seldon, Arthur publicist, 1059 Self, Sir Henry civil servant, 603, 605 Senior, Nassau political economist, 254, 288, 707–8, 784 Sereny, Gitta writer, 458 Seurat, Georges painter, 876 Bathers at Asnieres, 766–7, 972 Seymour, Lynn dancer, 955–6, 1039 Shackle, George economist, 251, 255, 911 Shackle, Robert civil servant, 392–5, 397, 432, 553–5, 572, 584 Law Mission, 466, 483, 493, 508 loan negotiations, 590–1, 593, 601–2, 604, 607, 623, 627 Shackleton, Lord politician, 936, 1013 Shakespeare, William playwright, 41, 43, 47, 619, 886, 923

Index Shann, Edward economist, 240 Sharpe, Montagu barrister, 28 Shaw, George Bernard playwright, 40, 64, 68, 94, 111 Shawcross, Hartley barrister, 824, 901 Shearman, Harold administrator, 860–1, 890, 892–4 Shinwell, Emanuel politician, 657 Shone, Sir Robert businessman, 861, 862n Shove, Gerald economist, 138, 281 Shroff, A.D. businessman, 520, 527 Shufeldt, Miss civil servant, 509–10, 560 Sickert, Walter painter, 57, 64 Simey, Tom social scientist, 153 Simon, Ernest politician, 217–18 Simon, Sir John politician, 318, 345, 353 Simons, H.J. student, 259 Simons, Hans political scientist, 243 Singh, Tarlok civil servant, 9, 254 Sipson, 11–12, 17–18, 110 see also Hollycroft Sitwell, Osbert writer, 49 Skidelsky, Robert historian, 394n, 514n, 531n, 591n Slaney, David student, 1012–13 Smirnov, Alexey economist, 527–8 Smith, Adam political economist, 82, 151, 159, 176, 659, 707, 752, 940, 985, 998, 1057–8 Smith, Alic philosopher, 126, 137, 147, 159, 305, 644 Smith, David businessman, 986, 994, 1009–10 Smith, Herbert professor of international law, 258 Smith, James Drummond lecturer in commerce LSE, 70–1 Smith, Lady Sybil, 117 Smith, W.H. & Sons Ltd, 986, 1009–10, 1017 see also Strand House Smithers, Waldron politician, 677 Snow, Sir Charles writer, 860–1, 862n, 869 Snowden, Philip politician, 132, 169, 195, 208 Society for the Protection of Science and Learning see Academic Assistance Council Solo, Robert economist, 653, 696 Solti, Georg conductor, 951, 955–6, 959, 999, 1077 Soutar, Mary economist, 388–9, 586, 588 Souter, Ralph economist, 233–4

1157

Southall, R.B. industrialist, 860–1 Southard, Frank economist, 701 Spalding, Frances art historian, 761n, 767 Spann, Othmar economist, 173 Sparrow, Sir John academic administrator, 940 Spearman, Alec politician, 513, 583, 652n, 674, 832, 984, 1056 Spectator magazine, 209, 226, 228–9, 235, 345–6, 350, 726 Spengler, Joseph economist, 787 Spinelli, Altiero politician, 347 Spooner, Rev W.A., 126, 159 Sraffa, Piero economist, 232, 702, 742n, 782, 787, 917n, 932 Stabilization Fund, 428–9, 457, 459–61, 468, 472–4 see also International Monetary Fund Staehle, Hans economist, 172–3 Stafford, Jack statistician, 569, 574 Staley, Eugene economic historian, 327 Stalin, Joseph dictator, 495, 583 Stamp, Sir Josiah statistician and administrator, 162, 169, 179–80, 187, 192, 213, 217–18, 230, 285–6, 305, 315, 355, 362 Stamp, Maxwell economist, 832 Stark, Werner social scientist, 497, 916 Steel-Maitland, Sir Arthur politician, 285–6 Steere, Lloyd US Embassy London, 553 Steering Committee on Postwar Employment, 463, 483–92, 499–500, 516, 555 Stepanov, M.S. politician, 527, 531–2, 537 sterling balances, 520, 526, 538, 559, 577, 580–2, 589, 609, 613–14, 615, 617, 620, 625, 674, 677–8, 701, 735, 739, 741–2 see also convertibility Stettinius, Edward US Assistant Secretary of State, 534, 538 Stewart, Walter economist, 698, 707 Steyne, Alan US Embassy London, 421 Stigler, George economist, 662–4, 682–3, 752, 876, 911, 1062 Stinebower, Leroy economist US State Department, 454, 525, 584, 597 Stone, Richard economist, 356–7, 369, 372, 381, 418, 551, 569, 1083 Stonier, Alfred economist, 271–2, 274 Stopes, Marie birth control pioneer, 120 Strachey, John politician, 661

1158

Index

Strand House, 986–7, 993–5, 1002–3, 1009–10, 1017–18, 1029, 1055–6 see also London School of Economics Library Appeal Strauss, Richard composer, 89, 226, 800, 958 Street, Sir Arthur civil servant, 587 Streit, Clarence writer, 345–6 Strict Baptists, 14–16 Suarez, Eduardo politician, 525 Summerscale, John civil servant, 594 Sutherland, Graham painter, 762–3 Sutherland, Joan singer, 790, 831, 952 Sutton, Denys art critic, 900, 961 Suzman, Helen politician, 1033, 1066 Svennilson, Ingvar economist, 290 Sweezy, Alan economist, 238 Sweezy, Paul economist, 238, 253 Swing, Raymond Gram journalist, 618 Tappan, Marjorie economist, 113 tariffs, 185–95, 198–9, 202, 225, 266, 300, 392, 434–5, 475–6, 553, 558–9, 584, 594, 1082 ‘Tate Affair’, 5, 758, 760–5 Tate Gallery, 5, 58, 753, 760, 766, 772, 792, 806–7, 890, 962, 970, 972–4, 1066 Taussig, Frank W. economist, 76, 144, 239, 428 Tawney, R.H. historian, 85, 260, 349, 497, 691 Taylor, A.J.P. historian, 1067 Taylor, Myron chairman US Committee on Postwar Foreign Economic Policy, 470–1 Tcherniakoff, David language teacher, 75, 78 Te Kanawa, Kiri singer, 959 Tegetmeier, Denis engraver, 93 Terrill, Robert economist, 598 Thapar, P.N. civil servant, 128 Thatcher, Margaret politician, 1031, 1043 Prime Minister, 1041, 1063–4, 1066, 1074 Thirlby, George economist, 713, 715 Thomas, Brinley economist, 168, 229, 252, 255, 282, 343 Thompson-McCausland, Lucius central banker, 467–8, 483, 932 Thomson, G. National Gallery staff, 756 Thorneycroft, Peter politician, 583, 740, 1086 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 791–2, 796–9, 802–5

Thorp, Clarice (Mrs Willard Thorp), 1054 Thorp, Willard economist, 844, 979, 1054, 1071 Times newspaper, 157, 170, 217, 222, 227, 230–1, 235, 239, 311, 345, 656–8, 679, 685, 700, 721–3, 726, 805, 823, 843, 893, 896, 977–8 Tinbergen, Jan economist, 296–7 Tirana, Rifat economist, 200, 457 Titian Death of Actaeon, 730, 770, 1043–4, 1048 Tobey, Charles W. US senator, 525, 530 Tooke Chair of Economic Science and Statistics, 169, 195, 200, 228, 770–1, 821–2 Tooley, Sir John opera administrator, 7, 941n, 942, 944–5, 956, 960, 1036, 1038 Tor Cottage, 325, 327–9, 343, 349, 353–4, 363–4, 390, 517, 541, 555, 572, 596 Torrens, Robert see Robbins, Lionel Robert Torrens Towers, Graham central banker, 562 Toynbee Hall, 59, 108, 110, 112, 114, 125, 134, 271, 311, 363, 788n trade cycle theory, 99, 117–19, 122–3, 176–7, 182–4, 196, 270, 295–7, 326, 418–9, 683, 1081–2; Austrian cycle theory, 176–7, 182, 184, 190, 196, 214, 230–2, 248, 265–6, 267, 297, 418 Treasury, 227 see also budgets in Second World War, 342–3, 355, 359, 368, 375–6, 381, 397–8, 400, 405–6, 410–11, 462–3, 473, 484–8, 491, 493, 502, 514–16, 549, 551, 569–70, 580, 582, 1083–4 postwar, 602, 606, 609, 614, 620, 673–5, 739, 743, 745, 796, 799–803, 1064 finance for the arts, 729, 731, 753, 760, 770–5, 791–2, 795, 803–5, 812, 824–5, 890, 942, 949–52, 973, 1088 Tress, Ronald economist, 388–9, 498, 574, 576, 652, 685, 701, 751, 1054 Trevor-Roper, Hugh historian, 1000–1, 1004, 1067 Tribe, Sir Frank civil servant, 414 Triffin, Robert economist, 979–80 Trottenberg, Arthur Ford Foundation, 1002–3 Troughton, C.H.W. businessman, 1017

Index Truman, Harry US President, 583, 586, 608, 618, 726 Truptil, Roger banker, 722, 1058 Tsiang Sho-Chieh economist, 1072 Tucker, Norman theatre manager, 777 Tucker, Stanley (LCR’s research assistant), 224, 250, 266 Tugendhat, Georg journalist, 87–9, 106–7, 113–14, 118, 125, 131, 178, 209, 242, 278, 652n, 981–2, 986, 1066 Turvey, Ralph economist, 7, 642, 653, 697, 713, 720–1, 743, 814, 816n, 817, 842, 909 Twentyman, Edward civil servant, 374, 445–7, 450, 456 Tyerman, Donald journalist, 902, 904 Uccello, Paolo, 756 St George and the Dragon, 5, 812–13, 825, 1087 unemployment, 51, 99–100, 114, 117, 122, 141, 157, 169, 181–5, 187–8, 295, 326, 578, 660, 1081 see also Great Depression, trade cycle theory Ungphakorn, Puey economist, 315, 684n, 696 United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, 4, 441–5, 448–56, 506, 543, 551, 1064 United Nations Conference on Trade and Employment, 572–4, 584–5, 589, 606, 626, 665 United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, 4, 391, 513, 517, 520–32, 537, 688, 748, 932, 980, 1003, 1084 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, 464–5, 521 University College London, 2, 27–8, 171, 208, 235, 238, 244, 250, 271, 285, 644, 652, 684, 837, 841, 855, 914, 916, 924, 1066, 1076n University Grants Committee, 655, 859, 863, 869, 879, 889, 895, 986, 994, 1074–5 University of London, 68, 853–7, 994 Board of Studies in Economics, 655, 692–5, 836–41, 905 Senate, 307, 652, 654–5, 854–5, 873, 892n University of Stirling, 6, 891, 895, 987–8, 1060–1 University of York, 6, 826, 859, 863–5, 909, 987n

1159

Urquidi, Victor economist, 9, 315, 526 utilitarianism, 85–6, 96–7, 706–9, 845–6, 1062, 1087 utility, interpersonal comparisons of, 175, 215–16, 271, 323, 1070 Vaidya, R.N. student, 107 Vaizey, John economist, 895–6 Van der Horst, Sheila economist, 1033, 1034, 1066 Van Sickle, John assistant then associate director Rockefeller Foundation, 286–7, 351–2 Vandepeer, Sir Donald civil servant, 592–3 Velazquez, Diego painter, 756, 771, 1043 Vickers, Jon singer, 790, 952, 954 Viner, Frances (Mrs Jacob Viner), 159, 180, 195, 200, 354, 689, 700, 758, 775, 924, 1020 Viner, Jacob economist, 5, 150–1, 180, 194–5, 214, 364, 428, 458–9, 1082, 1086 friendship with LCR, 150–1, 210, 223, 240, 256, 266, 302, 315, 354, 374, 458, 530, 604, 671, 627, 689, 697, 700–1, 709, 749–50, 757–8, 775, 876, 911, 924, 984, 987, 989, 993, 1020 at LSE, 180, 256, 550, 645–6, 652, 684 Vinson, Frederick politician, 528–9, 594, 597n, 601, 603, 611–13, 616–17, 620, 624–5, 627 V¨ogelin, Eric political scientist, 278 Wagner, Richard composer, 790 Der Ring des Nibelungen, 850, 914, 940, 955, 946, 948, 954–5, 999, 1038–9 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon promoter of colonization, 784, 786, 940 Waley, S.D. civil servant, 432, 434, 443, 466, 468, 474, 483, 502, 647 Walker, Gilbert economist, 152–3, 532 Wall, John civil servant, 445, 510, 599, 560, 582 Wall, Rolande civil servant, 405 Wallace, Henry US vice-president, 412, 441, 447–8, 594 Wallas, Graham political scientist, 68, 79, 85–6, 91, 100, 104–5, 138, 141, 158, 170, 691 war economy, 344–5, 357–60, 367–8, 370–1, 375–85, 404–5, 666, 1083 Warren, Major RFA, 34

1160

Index

Watkins, John philosopher, 7, 852–3, 925, 958, 975n, 976, 991n, 1006 Watts, Nita economist, 389, 397, 1084 Waverley Committee see Committee on Exports of Works of Art etc Waverley, Lord see Anderson, Sir John Weaver, Toby civil servant, 877, 993 Webb, Beatrice social reformer, 68, 261, 420 Webb, Sidney (Lord Passfield) social reformer, 68, 70, 91, 162–3, 169, 263 Webb, Ursula see Hicks, Ursula Weber, Max social scientist, 232–3 Webster, Charles historian, 237, 258, 260, 283n, 342, 374, 628, 691, 727 Webster, David opera administrator, 942–7, 949, 959–60 Wedderburn, K.W. professor of law, 999, 1011 Weidenfeld, George publisher, 938–9 Weizsacker, Christian von economist, 1024 Wellington, Duke of, 765, 768, 770, 806–10 Wells, H.G. novelist, 40, 64, 92n Whale, Philip Barrett economist, 168, 171, 207, 284 Wheare, Kenneth constitutional historian, 919 Wheat Act 1932, 208, 545 Wheat Agreement, 395–6, 445, 448, 560–1 Wheatley, John politician, 115–16 Wheeler, Leslie US Department of Agriculture, 452, 475, 477, 479, 594 Wheeler, Sir Mortimer archaeologist, 1016 Wheeler-Bennett, John historian, 373, 385, 843 White, Harry Dexter economist, 1, 428–9, 457, 459–60, 469, 472–3, 523, 525, 529, 594, 597, 612–13, 646–7 White Knight see Eady, Sir Wilfrid White Plan see Stabilization Fund see also International Bank for Reconstruction and Development Whiteleaf, 58, 103, 106, 109, 134, 148, 163, 325, 648 Wicksell, Knut economist, 176, 182–4, 201, 214, 228, 249–50, 682, 752, 849, 993 Wicksteed, Philip economist, 98, 144–5, 172–3, 224, 236, 249, 274, 993, 1080–1

Wicksteed, Rebecca, 173 Wilcox, Clair economist, 598, 602, 604–5, 610, 618, 623, 698 Wild & Robbins Ltd, 11, 17–18 Wild, Thomas farmer, 11–12, 15–17 Wild, Thomas junior, 11, 17 Williams, Shirley politician, 1013 Williams, William Emrys administrator, 777, 782 Willits, Joseph director Rockefeller Foundation, 646, 689, 757–8 Wilson, Harold economist and politician, 356–7, 373, 453, 661, 735, 803, 903, 1026 Prime Minister, 894–5, 917, 926, 928–9, 953, 988, 1031, 1049, 1051 Wilson, J.S.G. economist, 684n Wilson, John Baptist minister, 39 Wilson, Roger professor of education, 153 Wilson, Roland economist and civil servant, 151, 424, 506 Wilson, Thomas economist, 816, 905, 1057 Winant, J.G. US Ambassador, 420, 624 Winch, Donald economist, 217, 1003, 1032 Wincott, Harold journalist, 899, 923, 1032 Wise, E.F. politician, 199, 202, 427 Wise, Michael geographer, 840–1, 975 Wiseman, Jack economist, 684, 713–5, 813, 909 Witt, John solicitor, 152–3, 704–5, 766–7, 771, 773–4, 791, 806–7, 809–11, 895, 1045 chairman of trustees National Gallery, 865–6, 962, 964, 970–2, 1042–3, 1046–7 Witt, Sir Robert art collector, 153, 307, 670, 807 Wolf, Abraham philosopher, 70–1, 82n, 85, 496 Wolfson, Leonard businessman and philanthropist, 967 Wood, Ann singer, 958–9 Wood, Sir Kingsley politician, 355, 363, 368–9, 381, 402, 404, 411, 429, 440, 463, 465, 472, 480 Woodall, Mary museum director, 793 Woods, Sir John Henry civil servant, 836 Woolton, Lord (Frederick Marquis) businessman and politician, 113–14, 661, 827 Minister of Food, 375, 380, 384–5, 407

Index Minister of Reconstruction, 498–9, 501, 516, 548 Wootton, Barbara economist, 164, 239–40, 320, 347–8, 351 World Bank see International Bank for Reconstruction and Development World Monetary and Economic Conference 1933, 235, 245, 485 Wrong, Hume civil servant, 424–5 Wu Chi-Yuen economist, 316

1161

Yamey, Basil economist, 7, 713, 715, 906–7, 913–14, 971, 975n, 993, 1006, 1011, 1019, 1023, 1067 Young, Allyn Abbot economist, 142, 147, 153, 155, 158, 162, 168 Young, Edward Hilton (Lord Kennet) politician, 177 Youngson, A.J. economic historian, 985 Zassenhaus, Herbert economist, 278

Other Books in the Series (continued from page iii) Harro Maas, William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics Philip Mirowski, More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics Philip Mirowski (ed.), Nature Images in Economic Thought: “Markets Read in Tooth and Claw” D. E. Moggridge, Harry Johnson: A Life in Economics Mary S. Morgan, The History of Econometric Ideas Takashi Negishi, Economic Theories in a Non-Walrasian Tradition Heath Pearson, Origins of Law and Economics: The Economists’ New Science of Law, 1830–1930 Malcolm Rutherford, Institutions in Economics: The Old and the New Institutionalism Esther-Mirjam Sent, The Evolving Rationality of Rational Expectations: An Assessment of Thomas Sargent’s Achievements Yuichi Shionoya, Schumpeter and the Idea of Social Science Juan Gabriel Valdes, Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School of Economics in Chile Karen I. Vaughn, Austrian Economics in America: The Migration of a Tradition E. Roy Weintraub, Stabilizing Dynamics: Constructing Economic Knowledge