ABSTRACT

Brian Reddaway was one of the Cambridge undergraduates of the 1930s who switched their studies to economics because of a desire for an understanding of the causes of and cures for, the mass unemployment of the time. His father was a Fellow of King’s College, and so he found himself among several of the most prominent economists of the time: Keynes, Pigou, Kahn, and Shove. He first worked in the Bank of England, but finding this undemanding, and being acquainted with Keynes, he was recommended for a Research Fellowship at the University of Melbourne. After two years in Australia he returned to a Fellowship at Clare College, Cambridge in 1938. He has lived in Cambridge ever since. During the war he worked in the Board of Trade, where he contributed greatly to the development of the clothes rationing scheme. In 1947 he resumed teaching in Cambridge, and during 1951-52 spent a year at the OEEC in Paris. In 1955 Reddaway became Director of the Department of Applied Economics in Cambridge, succeeding Richard Stone; and in 1969 he succeeded James Meade as Professor of Political Economy.1 The following is an edited version of an interview conducted on 6 September 1994 in Cambridge.