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Born
Wimbledon, 26th July 1915
Died Leeds, 4th October 2002
Walter Newlyn was one of the group of outstanding
economists from a wide variety of backgrounds
educated at the LSE in the immediate post-war
years who made their mark on British universities
and the world. He never knew his father, killed
on the Western Front a few months after his
birth; he left school without qualifications
at 16 and got his first job as an office boy
in a city firm, and his first promotion when
the next-senior office boy stole the petty
cash. A visit to Welsh coal mines fired an
interest in economics which was interrupted
by war, during which he was evacuated on the
last day from Dunkirk and subsequently saw
service in India.
In
1945 he persuaded LSE to take him on despite
his lack of formal education, and read Economics
there until 1948, when he was appointed to
an Assistant Lectureship at Leeds University.
While at LSE he had become good friends with
a fellow student, the maverick New Zealand
genius Bill Phillips, and together they constructed
in a Wimbledon garage the prototype of what
became known as the Phillips hydraulic machine
– the first analogue computer model of
a Keynesian macroeconomic system - which gained
widespread fame, even notoriety. It was typical
of Walter’s modesty that he never resented
the general attribution to Phillips alone.
His
original interest in economics was in macroeconomics
and monetary policy, but early work on the
financial systems of colonial countries led
on to a career specifically in development
economics, much of it in or related to Africa.
Among other assignments he was successively
Economic Adviser to the Government of Uganda,
a member of the UN Expert Committee on Payment
Agreements in Africa, and Director of Economic
Research in the East African Institute of
Social Research in Kampala. In Leeds (where
he became a Professor in 1967) he set up the
African Studies Centre and brought many African
social scientists as Fellows there. He also
founded and was the first President of the
Development Studies Association. It was a
great sadness to him that much of the economic
work on East Africa was vitiated by political
events, most notably the Amin era, during
which he lost many close friends.
His
publications include Money and Banking in
British Colonial Africa (with David Rowan,
1954), Money in an African Context (1967),
and The Financing of Economic Development
(1977). For many years his Theory of Money
(1961) was one of the few accessible general
introductions to this specialised area, and
was read widely by undergraduates.
His
other great love was the theatre. With Doreen,
whom he married in 1952, he set up and ran
a pioneering multi-racial theatre company
in Uganda; in Leeds they were tireless campaigners
for the establishment of a Leeds (now the
successful West Yorkshire) Playhouse. For
the campaign he wrote an economic analysis
of the theatre industry, which became a standard
reference for the Arts Council.
Throughout
his life he was quietly but nonetheless passionately
a man of the Left. His underlying motivation
in both economics and theatre was in seeing
that the benefits of an advanced society should
not be available only to the elite: the Playhouse
campaign was essentially about artistic outreach,
and in his later economic work he focussed
exclusively on the distributional effects
of financial policies. In his retirement he
was particularly active in the movement for
debt relief for the poorest countries, and
even in his last illness he was wanting to
discuss the taxation of capital movements.
He
is survived by Doreen and three daughters,
Lucy, Gill and Kate; Sally, his eldest daughter,
predeceased him, causing much sadness in his
final years.
Written
by Walter Newlyn's son-in law, Martin Slater,
Senior tutor at St Edmund Hall, Oxford
See
the obituary on campusweb
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