The Manchester Faculty of Commerce

THE FACULTY OF COMMERCE AND MANCHESTERECONOMICS, 1903–44*

byKEITH TRIBE†

King’s School, Worcester

The Manchester Faculty of Commerce was founded in 1903 by SydneyChapman, who quickly developed it into the foremost British faculty ofits kind. It also played an important role in the development of the teach-ing of economics, with many of its young appointees moving to head neweconomics departments at provincial universities. Student numbers con-tinued to increase during the interwar years, but the most significantdevelopment during this period was the formation of a ‘Research Section’in the early 1930s, on the initiative of John Jewkes. This was the first suchresearch organization in a British university, and many of those whopassed through it went on to senior positions in wartime economicadministration. In 1944 the Faculty was reorganized into ‘Economics andSocial Science’, reflecting the broad base for the teaching of economics,social administration and government which the original foundation hadestablished.

The Faculty of Commerce of the Victoria University of Manchester, formedin late 1903 and transformed into the Faculty of Economic and Social Studiesin 1944, was the most significant and successful among a number of similarEnglish foundations of the early 1900s. Outside Oxford and Cambridge themovement for commercial higher education was the principal vehicle throughwhich the regular study of economics first developed in Britain, and theapproach adopted by Manchester laid a sound foundation for the teachingof commercial subjects, while at the same time providing for advanced teach-ing in economics.1 The introduction of courses in commercial subjects—law,

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd and The Victoria University of Manchester, 2003.Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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The Manchester School Vol 71 No. 6 December 20031463–6786 680–710

*Manuscript received 25.6.02; final version received 14.1.03.Editor’s Note: The contribution by Keith Tribe, which traces the Manchester Faculty of Com-

merce from its inception in 1903 to its reorganization as the Faculty of Economics andSocial Sciences, was originally commissioned to mark the 150th Anniversary of the University of Manchester. Its publication, now, runs at a time of great significance for Economics and Social Sciences at Manchester. In August 2004 the (new) University ofManchester will be established (following a merger with the University of Manchester Insti-tute of Science and Technology) in which a powerful School of Social Science (includingEconomics and Politics) will sit alongside a School of Business and Management withinthe same Faculty. This will undoubtedly mark a new chapter in the development of eco-nomic research at Manchester.

†The research for this paper was completed while I was a Hallsworth Research Fellow in Manchester during 1992–93. It is part of a larger project tracing the development of thestudy and teaching of economics in Britain during the period 1860–1970.

1In London the BSc (Econ.) was established as part of the general reorganization of the Uni-versity at the turn of the century, and the B.Com. degree at the London School of Eco-nomics (LSE) was not introduced until 1919 (W. H. Beveridge, Report on the Teaching of

banking, accounting, industrial organization and geography—and the asso-ciated creation of the ordinary degree of Bachelor of Commerce was a typicalproduct of the transformation of civic colleges into universities and univer-sity colleges at the turn of the century. There were parallel developments inNorth America and Europe; but everywhere problems emerged with the leveland content of study. Students, naturally enough, wished to acquire practi-cal skills and knowledge that might confer advantage in future employ-ment, and looked to new local colleges for their training and certification.Expansion of the civic colleges was in turn predicated upon meeting thisstrong local demand for training appropriate to careers in public and privateemployment. But the routines and aims of university-level teaching were notimmediately practical, and there was an inherent danger that the expectationsof students and of institutions would diverge: the former attracted by theprospect of practical vocational instruction, the latter seeking in the longerterm to enhance their academic respectability and to gain formal universitystatus. There was a real danger that both could wind up as losers—studentswould follow soft courses and be granted certificates recognized by noemployer, while the institutions would forfeit their aspiration to academicrespectability.

In the early twentieth century the idea that universities and colleges hadan important part to play in the education of a new generation of profes-sionals, administrators and managers, and that economics was central to anysuch education, was not a new one: the first chair of Political Economy inBritain, founded at East India College in 1805 with Malthus as its first incum-bent, was informed by exactly the same sentiment (Tribe, 1995a). This alsowent for those chairs founded during the 1820s in Cambridge, Oxford andLondon. Throughout the century, however, demand for instruction was toolimited and diverse to permit the development of regular cycles of courses.Restricted to one or at most two consecutive courses with the same students,teachers were unable to develop the subject beyond the reiteration of ele-mentary principles, and this episodic and uncertain demand in turn discour-aged teachers from the kind of specialization that was by the close of thenineteenth century increasingly necessary for higher level teaching. For alongwith the absorption of political economy into the university curriculum wentits reinvention as a more technically demanding ‘economics’.

It was up to the institutions to resolve this particular impasse; without

The Manchester Faculty of Commerce 681

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd and The Victoria University of Manchester, 2003.

Commerce in the University of London, July 1924, BLPES, LSE Archive 20/11). Neverthe-less, the early constituency for the LSE’s degree in economics was the same as that for theB.Com. elsewhere—young people seeking careers in business, commerce and administra-tion (see Kadish, 1993). The most comprehensive survey of higher commercial educationin Britain currently available unfortunately lacks insight into the symbiotic relationshipbetween labour markets, student demand, institutional development and the formation ofnew disciplines, and quite erroneously presents commercial education in Britain during thefirst half of the twentieth century as a failed precursor to the business schools eventuallyfounded in the 1960s (Keeble, 1984).

students no institution could survive, let alone prosper, but the regular flowof suitable students that they sought was predicated upon a reputation thatthey did not yet possess. The relevance of economic studies to future man-agers, administrators and teachers was widely accepted; indeed the diversemembership of the British Economic Association on its establishment in 1891testified to this quite independently of the naturally partisan claims made byAlfred Marshall, E. C. K. Gonner and W. A. S. Hewins.2 Successful teachingof the new economics, however, required teachers whose interest in thesubject was more purely intellectual than practical, and it was upon the rep-utations of these academics that the future of the civic colleges depended.Marshall’s Cambridge Economics Tripos, inaugurated in 1903, did provide amodel curriculum, but the reputation of the University of Cambridge waswell established, and Marshall’s position did not directly depend upon thenumber of students that he taught. Although Marshall made much of thestrictly vocational benefits of the new Tripos in his advocacy, the purposeinscribed into the structure of the Tripos was plain: to rescue politicaleconomy from its subordination to the study of history;3 and to banish fromthe academic economic curriculum practical subjects such as accounting,commercial law or railway practice. This purist strategy faced a protracteduphill struggle in Cambridge; in the commercial and industrial provincialcentres of the nation, in Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester, such astrategy would have been unthinkable, let alone unworkable.

The stalemate resulting from these circumstances was resolved by a seriesof institutional changes during the latter half of the 1890s. Since 1858 theUniversity of London had been purely an examining body,4 conferring BAand BSc degrees on students taught and examined in London and theprovinces. This in turn facilitated the formation of provincial colleges whosestudents could be taught the London curriculum and sit for London degrees.Political economy was taught in the London BA as part of Logic, and Mental

682 The Manchester School


2On the membership of the British Economic Association (from 1902 the Royal EconomicSociety) see Tribe (2001). Of 501 members at the end of 1891, 86 recorded their employ-ment as ‘university teacher’, 113 as ‘business’, 51 the law and 48 banking. Marshall mademuch of support from businessmen for his proposal to create an Economics Tripos in Cambridge; Gonner (1894) drafted a survey of the provision of economics teaching, andHewins as first Director of the LSE made a number of statements advocating the practi-cal advantages of training in economics (Kadish, 1993, pp. 237–239).

3In Cambridge, as in Manchester, political economy was an option for Honours History stu-dents; and in Oxford it was part of Greats—from which the philosophy, politics and eco-nomics (PPE) degree developed as ‘Modern Greats’.

4The 1858 charter of the University of London abolished the requirement that candidates forits examination should present a certificate of study at an affiliated institution, making itin effect a national examination board. A new two-part BA was also introduced, includingin Part II a paper on logic and mental and moral philosophy. Demand from candidates led to an accommodation crisis in the metropolis, examination centres being established in1859 at Owens College in Manchester and Queen’s College in Liverpool (Harte, 1986,pp. 104–106).

and Moral Philosophy, forming the subject matter of one course. VictoriaUniversity, founded in 1880 as a federal institution with Owens College asfirst constituent member, created a new provincial institution with authorityto set its own examinations and confer its own degrees; and it moved beyondthe general London degrees to new Honours degrees in Arts, Science, Lawand Music.5 In principle, it could on the basis of modern subjects create spe-cialist degrees, or prescribe particular subjects as constituent parts of suchdegrees. Hence the regulations for the Honours History examination in theVictoria University required all students to have attended a college course inpolitical economy, such that by the early 1880s the situation in Manchesterwas analogous to that existing in Cambridge: students could read politicaleconomy either as part of a degree in Moral Philosophy (as in the LondonBA degree or the Cambridge Moral Sciences Tripos) or as part of anHonours History degree (Tribe, 2000a).6

In 1884 University College, Liverpool, was affiliated to the Victoria University, followed by Yorkshire College, Leeds, in 1887, but in all threeinstitutions the constituency for economic studies remained quite diverse. InManchester, the most consistent demand for tuition in economics came from non-degree-level students either already in commercial or administra-tive employment or seeking such employment. Alfred Flux, Cobden lecturersince 1893, dealt with this by introducing special courses for banking employ-ees and school teachers, and in the better-attended evening classes imposinga two-year cycle in 1895 which gave more time to the study of general eco-nomics. Attendance at evening classes increased dramatically, and in 1898 daystudent numbers broke away from an annual figure of between 10 and 20 andbegan an expansion, with some fluctuations, to 125 in 1908–9.7 Presumablyas a response to this developing range of courses and a clear increase in (fee-paying) students the Stanley Jevons Chair of Political Economy was foundedin 1899, with Flux as its first incumbent. But as yet there was no degree asso-



5Kelly (1981, p. 61). Students at Owens College and at University College, Liverpool, continuedto sit for London degrees after 1880, emphasizing the nature of the early civic colleges anduniversities as examination centres offering qualifications at different levels originatingeither with themselves or with external centres. The eventual disappearance from estab-lished institutions of the Ordinary Degree in the 1960s—and the creation of postwar uni-versities offering exclusively Honours qualifications—can be seen as part of a process bywhich universities first established specialized Honours courses and then set about riddingthemselves of all other levels of teaching and examination. This also applies to Oxford andCambridge, where before 1914 a significant number of students left without sitting for anydegree.

6The development of the Victoria University as a federal university including university collegesin Leeds and Liverpool, as well as the teaching of political economy in Victoria Univer-sity, Firth College Sheffield, Mason College Birmingham and Birmingham University’sFaculty of Commerce, is outlined in Tribe (1993), especially pages 194–197 for a summaryof the implications of the new University.

7For a summary of attendances at day and evening classes in political economy see Tribe (1993,p. 202, Fig. 1).

ciated with this post, simply a diversity of teaching in political economy andcommercial subjects.

The formation of Victoria University had prompted debate over thefuture of the University of London, the staff of University College andKing’s College quickly realizing that Owens had achieved the academicautonomy that they lacked. From the mid-1890s reform of the University ofLondon made its slow way through committees and parliament, its eventualreorganization as a federal university being in large part modelled on the Victoria University, with the LSE as the affiliated institution with principalresponsibility for teaching economic and commercial subjects. During thesame period negotiations took place to charter Mason College, Birmingham,the new University of Birmingham being formed in 1900. These two devel-opments in turn undermined the existing federal Victoria University, whichnow, from the perspective of Liverpool and Leeds, looked rather like the oldUniversity of London. University College, Liverpool, was chartered as anindependent institution in 1903, and Yorkshire College in 1904, ending thefederal university structure and relaunching Owens College as the VictoriaUniversity of Manchester. Coupled with this reorganization came the foundation of a new Faculty of Commerce, under the leadership of SydneyChapman, Stanley Jevons Professor since the departure of Flux to McGill in1901. It is no exaggeration to say that Chapman’s qualities were critical tothe success of the new Faculty, and laid the foundations for the eventual rapidexpansion of the teaching of economics in Manchester after the SecondWorld War. But to appreciate exactly the novelty of his approach, we needfirst to consider briefly the solution to the problem of student demand andcurricular design adopted in Birmingham. Here the new University, spurredon by the municipal leadership of Joseph Chamberlain and the money ofAndrew Carnegie, had moved quickly to establish a Faculty of Commerce,and despite the fact that the Faculty was broadly unsuccessful in comparisonwith Manchester and the LSE, it remains perhaps the best known instanceof commercial studies in a British university context (Kadish, 1991).

The reasons that the Birmingham Faculty was relatively unsuccessful layin the design of its curriculum, and the appointments made to support it.William Ashley, its founder, was an Oxford History graduate, like so manyof the political economists of his generation.8 Although he remained oncordial terms with Marshall, who provided a reference for the Birminghamappointment, it is evident from his inaugural lecture as Harvard’s first Pro-fessor of Economic History that even by the early 1890s he was sceptical ofcontemporary developments in economic theory, a scepticism that hardened



8For example Cannan (founding Professor of Political Economy, LSE, who took an OrdinaryDegree for health reasons), Gonner (founding Brunner Professor of Political Economy,Liverpool) and Hewins (first Director of the LSE).

over the following years.9 In the prospectus which he wrote for the newFaculty, he clearly stated that it should provide

a course of training suitable for men who look forward to business careers. Itsobject is the education, not of the rank and file, but of the officers of the indus-trial and commercial army: of those who, as principals, directors, managers,secretaries, heads of departments, etc., will ultimately guide the business activ-ity of the country. (Ashley, 1902, p. 1)

Central importance was ascribed to ‘accounting’, not so much as a technicalskill but ‘to teach the ordinary business man the proper use and inter-pretation of accounts’ (Ashley, 1902, p. 9). Not only was there a course onaccounting in each year within the three-year programme, but a Professorialappointment to support it; and alongside this chair and Ashley as Professorof Commerce there was a third, for a Professor of Finance. Teaching in com-mercial law was provided for by a lectureship, while what teaching there wasin economics was provided initially by Ashley himself.

Quite evidently the teaching of commerce at Birmingham was light oneconomic analysis, as the minute books of the Commerce seminar so lam-entably testify (Tribe, 1993, pp. 224–225). This was in part related to, andmight possibly be explained by, the nature of Ashley’s target constituency offuture business leaders, aiming at an altogether higher niche in the labourmarket than was customary elsewhere, a class of student perhaps not requir-ing detailed and technical understanding of economic principles. From theuniversity’s point of view, any suspicion that courses were ‘soft’ might beoffset by the higher status of the students. But despite Ashley’s best effortswith the local business community, recruitment remained a problem: duringthe interwar years an average of 12 students graduated from Birminghamwith a B.Com., while in Manchester the equivalent figure from year to yearwas usually more than twice that.10 And this is not simply a comparison madein retrospect; the Birmingham Principal’s Reports for the 1920s reveal thatthis discrepancy in student numbers and graduates was keenly felt at the time.Casting around for explanation of Birmingham’s relatively lacklustre recordof student recruitment, the Principal came to a familiar self-serving conclu-sion—it was just that Birmingham’s standards were so much higher thaneverywhere else, especially those of Manchester:

We do not propose (as at Manchester, or Liverpool or Sheffield) to cater forthose who cannot by either time or educational qualifications be full-time uni-versity students working for a degree. If we did, and offered an elaborate cur-riculum of evening classes to part-time students in pure technology, we could,as at Manchester, swell our Faculty in twelve months into 300 or 400 students,



9See for an account of Ashley’s perspective on economics and history Tribe (2000b).10See Table 1 below for a comparison of Birmingham and Manchester commerce graduates up

to the mid-1920s.

and give certificates and diplomas and academic passports or even allow theB.Com. degree to be won, like the kingdom of heaven, by violence accumul-ated between 5.30 and 9.30pm. But we leave this work very properly to theMunicipal College of Commerce under its energetic Principal; we give atEdmund Street all the facilities that we can to its expanding activities, and wewish it every success in its determination to meet the legitimate needs of somehundreds of young men and women by the appropriate classes.11

As we shall see, Manchester did seek to make its degree courses available to those in full-time employment, but the charge that Manchester simply bolstered its numbers through evening classes and occasional students is misconceived and groundless. Comparison of the year of graduation forManchester students in the mid-1920s with their year of matriculation showsthat the majority of students graduated three or four years after they hadmatriculated.12 And given the existing system of external examination,13 therewould have been no grounds for belief that a Manchester commerce degreewas in any way easier to gain than a Birmingham degree. By the 1920s, there-fore, Birmingham tacitly recognized the pre-eminence of Manchester as acentre for higher commercial education, however obliquely such recognitionmight be expressed. But why should Manchester have been more successfulthan Birmingham in attracting and graduating students of commerce, giventhe broad similarity of employment in the two cities?14 The answer lies notin the volume or nature of student demand, but in the strategy followed byChapman in creating a Commerce Faculty.

1 T F M F C

Sydney Chapman was 30 when appointed to the Jevons chair, coming from two years at University College Cardiff where he had established theteaching of political economy. He had only graduated from Cambridge threeyears previously, gaining a double first in Moral Sciences in 1898;15 during



11‘Report of the Vice-Chancellor and Principal to the Council for the Twenty-Ninth Session,1926–27’, pp. 18–19, Reports of the Proceedings of the Council, 1901–40, University ofBirmingham Archives.

12Of 25 students awarded a B.Com. in 1924, 12 had studied for three years, seven for four, andfive for five; of 26 students in 1926 18 had studied for three years and five for four—University Calendar, various years.

13Between the foundation of the Faculty and the First World War Foxwell, Bastable, Cannan,Edgeworth, Gonner and Macgregor served as external examiners and there is no reason tobelieve that economists of their stature would have countenanced a lower standard ofstudent performance than that prevailing elsewhere—University Calendar, various years.

14In fact the local Manchester economy was marked by a declining cotton industry, Birminghambeing altogether more buoyant.

15Before attending Cambridge he had graduated from Owens with a London BA in 1891. Havingfirst intended to study psychology, he was persuaded to specialize in political economy,attending Marshall’s lectures for three years and having weekly supervisions—S. Chapman,Some Memories and Reflections, unpublished manuscript, c.1944, p. 19, John RylandsLibrary, Manchester, MSS. EH C91.

the following year as Jevons Research Student in Manchester he conducteda study of the cotton industry, for which he was awarded the CambridgeAdam Smith Prize in 1900. Marshall had approved the research topic, andthe monograph is quite clearly a case study in Marshallian analysis, ratherthan a historical-descriptive account of the industry’s development thatmight have been more usual for the time.16 The style of the work setsChapman apart from Ashley, only some 10 years his senior but in effectalready part of an older generation; and later Chapman commented directlyon this difference between the older Oxford style of political economy andthe new Cambridge economics:

I remember W. A. S. Hewins (the first director of the London School of Eco-nomics) asking me which theory of wages I was adopting when I told him Iwas getting to work on an inquiry into the Lancashire Cotton Industry andwanted to search through the Webb papers for material on the wages side. Thequestion seemed to me then like raising spirits from the sepulchre of dead con-troversies. But Hewins was an Oxford man and had not therefore been caughtup in the Marshall mesh as I had been.17

Quite evidently one dimension of the difference between Birmingham andManchester relates to that between Oxford and Cambridge economics of the1890s. But Chapman was also a vigorous exponent of higher commercial education, and differed with Marshall on this, whose support for commer-cial subjects was purely tactical. The problems of higher commercial educa-tion formed the subject of an address that Chapman gave to the Cardiff andDistrict Educational Society in November 1905, the report concluding:

Whether the older Universities will make any attempt to provide special train-ing for students intending to enter business careers may be doubted. . . .18

The report drew a response from Marshall, making a clear distinctionbetween the kind of work suited to Honours Economics students and thatof Passmen whose degrees were comparable in status to the ordinary B.Com.:

If the University should ever decide to adapt its pass examinations in economicsto the wants of those business men who do not aim at education of the samehigh order as is given in our honours courses, it will probably be necessary tohave lectures on the common routine of accounting. And, if they are given by



16Chapman (1904). Note in this context that George Daniels, a later incumbent of the chair, didpublish a study of the cotton industry of this kind (1920).

17Chapman, Some Memories and Reflections, p. 22. ‘Generational’ differences of this kind playan important part in accounting for the rate of change in the development of economics,related on the one hand to changes in training and on the other to the creation of newteaching posts. The latter tends to occur in waves, young appointees then ageing in postand, on retirement from senior positions, creating in turn a surge of new professorialappointments. As we shall see, most of the ‘young men’ appointed in Manchester before1914 became founding professors of economics elsewhere, all of them then retiring in themid-1940s, just in time to provide openings for economists educated in the 1930s.

18‘Commercial Education’, The Times, 18 November 1905, p. 17.

a professional accountant, he may be asked to give a short course adapted tothe needs of abler students. It is, however, not probable that the University willallow much time to be given even by passmen to absorbing prematurely tech-nical information about those ‘forms and accounts adapted to different classesof undertakings,’ on which your Educational Notes lay stress. For Honoursmen, at all events, such work is inappropriate. The three sacred years of theirUniversity life are already fully occupied with studies which claim to help theable business man to be a leader in the world.19

This claim that the new Economics Tripos was training business leaders ofthe future is fanciful; and if this were the principal aim of the Tripos it wouldhave to be judged a dismal failure. But the idea that the Economics Triposwas the appropriate vehicle for such training does contrast strongly withAshley’s new Birmingham Faculty, where practical and descriptive subjectspredominated. Not only were Chapman’s plans distinct from those of Ashley,they also differed sharply from those of his teacher Marshall.

Evidence for Chapman’s own views on higher commercial education canbe found in a paper that he read to the Manchester Statistical Society on 12February 1902. He began by noting the manner in which training throughpupillage and apprenticeship was everywhere being superseded by formaleducation and examination, and that the time had come to extend this to theworld of business:

At the present time there is a special need among those who are to elicit thegreatest possible value from industry and commerce and shape their future, ofa higher education including (a) instruction in economic principles, since inthese the business man has instruments by which he can solve his own partic-ular problems in detail, and (b) instruction in special branches of economicinvestigation, since in these the business man will find large parts of the solu-tions which he is seeking. It is certain that the complications of modern indus-try and commerce cannot be faced successfully by those who are innocent ofall economic knowledge. (Chapman, 1902, p. 126)

Chapman made clear, however, that he was not simply concerned with busi-ness education in a commercial context but with all forms of public admin-istration, including local and national elected representatives:

The people with whom we have to deal may afterwards work in the world asbankers, accountants, actuaries, brokers, jobbers, commission agents, manu-facturers in many industries, shopkeepers or shippers, persons employed in gasworks or on railways, tramways, or canals, members of Parliament, diplomats,town councillors, town clerks or clerks in the Civil Service, justices of the peace,or social workers of various kinds. (p. 128)

He then proceeded to sketch out a university curriculum appropriate to the training for such employments, combining modern languages, politicaleconomy, political science, political philosophy, history and geography, law



19A. Marshall, Letter of 14 December 1905, printed as ‘Education for Business Men’, The Times,18 December 1905, p. 13.

and statistics as a general foundation, with a variety of special subjects takenin the second and third years which might include public administration and finance, accountancy, demography, banking and currency, internationaltrade, transport insurance, and poor relief (pp. 132–133). The Faculty, hesuggested, should be modelled on that of law or of medicine, by which hemeant that much of the specialized teaching would be covered by local pro-fessionals, three full-time teachers sufficing to cover the core academic subjects of the first group. He acknowledged in conclusion that Oxford andCambridge lacked business communities capable of supplying such occa-sional teaching, lending Manchester an advantage in this respect. This was a valid enough point, but it was not one applicable to Birmingham or Liverpool where, as in Manchester, there was a substantial pool of account-ants, bankers, lawyers and railway managers upon which a new institutionmight draw for its practical teaching.

In designing this programme Chapman had taken note of developmentselsewhere, publishing in April 1903 a survey of existing international provi-sion for commercial education. It is significant that the first of these two arti-cles opens with a discussion of the Handelshochschulen recently founded in Germany,20 for these were already well on their way to becoming theleading international model; and he wrote here from personal experience,observing of Cologne that facilities were cramped compared with those of Manchester.21 Referring to a recent article by Ashley on the Han-delshochschulen22 he also emphasized that all the German colleges were ade-quately staffed, a comment that was perhaps directed at the staffing choicesmade by Ashley in Birmingham, before passing to brief comments on the Antwerp college and French institutions. The second article reviewedAmerican developments, and advocated the establishment of commercialeducation in universities rather than separate institutions (the German col-leges were all independent of the state university system) before concludingwith the success that the LSE had had in attracting students to courses onrailway economics. The programme of commercial education that Chapmandesigned for Manchester rested therefore upon a sound working knowledgeof best contemporary practice, developing the established teaching in com-mercial and economic subjects that he found there.

Flux had drawn the greatest number of students in his final year for anevening course held in the Bankers’ Institute;23 that another course of evening



20S. J. Chapman, ‘ ‘‘Business” Education Abroad and At Home’, two parts, Manchester Guardian,21 April 1903, 24 April 1903. The Cologne college moved into spacious purpose-built prem-ises in 1907.

21See Tribe (1995b) for an account of the development of business and economic education inGermany.

22W. J. Ashley, ‘German Educational Experiments’, The Times, 2 April 1903, p. 10.2363 students registered for the ‘Outlines of Economic Theory’ course held on Monday

evenings—The Calendar of Owens College, Manchester, Session 1900–1901, p. 279.

lectures was held in the Board Room of the Chamber of Commerce is indica-tive of the kind of audience he sought to attract, and also of the easy rela-tions enjoyed with local institutions. When Chapman succeeded Flux for theacademic year 1901–2 he simply repeated the existing courses; the first, andquite minor, alteration was made in the following year, Chapman droppingMill’s Political Economy from the reading list for economic theory, andreplacing it for 1903–4 with Nicholson’s Political Economy.24 This apparentlack of interest on the part of Chapman in developing the existing teachingstructure can be explained by his preoccupation with the larger problem ofestablishing the new Faculty, the University Court having already determinedin March 1900 to explore the possibility of higher commercial education inpartnership with a number of other bodies.25

Additional funds were raised, and on 8 December 1903 the ‘Faculty ofCommerce and Administration’ was formally inaugurated, this being the finalacademic year for the old Owens College. Four related appointments weremade: a lecturer in economic and political geography;26 a lecturer in com-merce and economics;27 a lecturer in accounting;28 and a lecturer in banking.29

This pattern of appointment clearly distinguished Manchester from Birm-ingham; Chapman drew upon his contacts with the Manchester businesscommunity30 to cover the directly vocational teaching, while he assumedresponsibility for the teaching of economics assisted by a new generation ofyoung economists, most of whom later went on to head departments of theirown.31 This also permitted him to establish an Honours degree in Econom-



24The Calendar of Owens College, Manchester, Session 1902–1903, p. 109; Session 1903–1904,p. 116.

25Fiddes (1937, p. 152). A brief, if in places unreliable, overview of the development of the teach-ing of commerce and economics in Owens College can be found in Daniels (1930).

26J. Macfarlane (MA Edinburgh, BA Cantab.).27William George Stewart Adams (1874–1966), a graduate of Glasgow and Oxford, had spent

the year 1902–3 as a teacher of economics in the Graduate School of the University ofChicago; in 1905 he left to become Superintendent of Statistics in the Irish Department ofAgricultural and Technical Instruction, leaving this post to become Reader in PoliticalTheory at Oxford in 1910, being promoted in 1912 to the position of Gladstone Professorof Political Theory and Institutions, a post he held until 1933 when he became Warden ofAll Souls. DNB 1961–70, pp. 4–6.

28Roger N. Carter (FCA) was a Manchester accountant who taught in the University part-timeuntil 1918.

29D. Drummond Fraser (Fellow of the Institute of Banking).30Links between the University and the Manchester business community already existed, but it

might also be supposed that Chapman’s background here played a role. Born in Norfolk,he had in fact grown up in Manchester and attended Manchester Grammar School. Fur-thermore, he was already in his later 20s when completing his study of the Lancashirecotton industry, and so, combined with his local knowledge, it might be supposed that hegained access to employers and associations that would otherwise be denied to a youngerman without local connections.

31The first generation of academic economists is chronologically ‘Marshallian’, including Marshall, Edgeworth and Ashley, all of whom died in the mid-1920s, and all of whomcame only later in their careers into the regular teaching of political economy. The secondgeneration is intellectually ‘Marshallian’, pupils of Marshall and young economists trained

ics to run alongside the existing commercial courses, making the most of thelimited resources available to him but at the same time laying the foundationsfor a broadly based Manchester school of studies in commerce, economicsand public administration.

2 T O M F C

Chapman’s draft programme of 1902 provided the template for the newB.Com. syllabus outlined in the 1904–5 university calendar. Eight courseswere required to complete the degree, listed in the following order:32

(1) Political Economy (the economics of consumption, production,exchange and distribution), 2 hours per week

(2) Geography (definition and description of geographical conditions andtheir influence on economic and political development), 2 hours perweek

(3) Modern History (outlines of general history from the fall of Napoleon,with special reference to social and economic conditions), 2 hours perweek

(4) A Modern Language (interpretation of prescribed books with literaryand grammatical questions; unseen translation from and into English;composition and commercial correspondence; dictation and conversa-tion), 3 hours per week

(5) The Organization of Industry and Commerce (a description and analy-sis of modern industrial and commercial conditions), 2 hours per week

(6) Accounting (the principles and practice of accounting), 1 hour a weekfor two winter terms33

(7) Commercial Law (the principles of law applicable to, and the more important cases bearing upon, principal and agent, partnership,limited companies, mercantile securities; guarantees; carriage by land; carriage by sea; policies of insurance; sale of goods; bills ofexchange; cheques and notes; bankruptcy), 1 hour per week for two sessions

(8) Special Subject—either one subject from A, or two subjects from B(including one modern language), or one subject from B (including onemodern language) and two from C



in his principles who generally see themselves in this light. The academic careers of thisgeneration reach from the early 1900s to the mid-1940s, when a significant proportion of the English economics professoriate retired and gave way to a more diffuse third generation.

32The Victoria University of Manchester, Calendar 1904–1905, pp. 254–256.33‘Candidates who are not practising accountants will find it necessary to attend one hour a week

for three terms or its equivalent, and attendances for four terms are desirable’, Calendar1904–1905, p. 256.

Group A: a scienceGroup B: a science; second modern language, or advanced modern lan-

guage; currency and bankingGroup C: accountancy, foreign trade and foreign exchanges; railway

economics and transport; the cotton industry; special periodin economic history; public finance; statistics; insurance; thelaw of patents, designs and trademarks; international law;special subject in geography; political science

The principal change here with respect to the 1902 draft programme is tomove accountancy from the list of special subjects to become a mandatorypaper on ‘accounting’,34 the downgrading of statistics to an optional specialsubject, the omission of political science and political philosophy from themain list, and the associated omission from the list of special subjects ofpublic administration and demography. The immediate consequence is tosharpen the focus of the degree upon more strictly commercial subjects, whilethe range of special subjects includes economic topics which, if taken in com-bination, would represent something like an Ordinary Economics degreecourse. It was not only Chapman’s staffing strategy that permitted the devel-opment of economics teaching within a commercial context, nor the fact thatan Honours Economics degree was also offered in the Arts School;35 thedesign of the commercial curriculum kept open what would today be calledan ‘economics pathway’. Moreover, the subjects which were initially excludedbetween draft programme and its eventual form found their way back later,for during the 1920s the B.Com. degree was divided in two, the original degree continuing as a BA Com. and a new BA in Public Administrationbeing formed alongside it. Here therefore is the origin of more specializedteaching in government and social policy, pointing up the manner in which Chapman’s original design for commercial education in Manchesteramounted to the foundations for the general development of teaching in thesocial sciences.

The principal source that we have for the development of teaching in thesocial sciences in Manchester is the University Calendar, which recordsmembers of staff, teaching regulations, syllabi, recommended reading andexamination papers, but which does so in a manner which makes recon-struction of the actual distribution of teaching somewhat laborious. Indi-vidual members of staff can be attached to specific classes and lectures, but



34The Birmingham programme included ‘accounting’ rather than ‘accountancy’, the distinctionbeing that the purpose of the course was not to train professional accountants but to teachfuture managers and administrators how to read sets of company accounts—presumablyChapman followed this precedent.

35Only two of the four core subjects in the Honours Economics programme were strictly eco-nomic, and they were shared with commerce students, while an additional paper might betaken as a special subject in political economy, or instead two papers in history, another injurisprudence, and one in ethics and social philosophy—Calendar 1905–1906, pp. 131–132.

these classes were open to students from a number of different faculties: theintroductory course on political economy, for example, might be attended by Ordinary BA students, Honours Economics students, Honours Historystudents, as well as students of commerce. Seventeen students are recorded36

as having attended the ‘Advanced Economics’ course run by Chapman andAdams through the session 1904–5, a course for ‘Honours Students’;37 butsince there were only 13 Honours Economics graduates in total before 1914it is anyone’s guess how the class was composed. Nominally, the Faculty of Commerce possessed upon foundation only one full-time member ofstaff: Chapman. MacFarlane and Adams, who were among the four relatedappointments made at the time, were listed both under the Faculty of Artsand under Commerce, although Adams, like the increasing number of Assis-tant Lecturers in Economics who succeeded him, was entirely occupied indaytime and evening teaching for the commerce degree. Other tutors listedunder the entry for the various specialized courses of the Faculty of Com-merce were either local professionals or other members of the University.38

Teaching was by lecture,39 duplicated for day and evening students, withmany of the more specialized courses being assigned exclusively to eveninghours, when students in full-time employment could attend.40 Some courses—Chapman’s on railway economics,41 Drummond Fraser’s on banking, andProfessor Seaton’s on commercial law—extended over two years, while themodern language courses (French, German, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese)included practice of translation and conversation. In October 1904 14 stu-



36Calendar 1905–1906, p. 689.37Calendar 1904–1905, p. 260.38So for instance the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce lectured on the cotton industry,

and A. D. Lindsay on political philosophy.39Even if the number of students were small the class followed a lecture format, with an occa-

sional seminar in the Honours Economics course in the 1920s—see Sir Henry Hardman’saccount, in Tribe (1997, p. 16). By the later 1930s Ordinary and Honours students weredifferentiated by the fact that the latter had classes additional to lectures, while the formerdid not. Marjorie Tivey began the Ordinary BA (Admin.) degree in 1940 and it was onlywhen she switched to Honours Economics in 1941 that she received class-based tuition—Interview with Marjorie Tivey, Hall Green, Birmingham, 11 October 2000. By the timethat Dennis Coppock began an Ordinary BA (Com.) course in 1946 classes had been intro-duced for Ordinary degree students, but this must have been a new development. He thenconverted to Honours Economics, and recalls initially being in a group of around eightwith Jack Gilbert as tutor, while some Honours classes were around 30—Interview withDennis Coppock, Stockport, 29 April 1994.

40The Senate had resolved on 5 November 1903 that ‘qualifying courses for degrees in the Facultyof Commerce should be arranged on such lines as to make it possible for students engagedin business during the day to graduate in the Faculty’ (Minute Books of the Proceedingsof the Senate, 1903–51, University Archives, Manchester University Library RA/3/5, Vol.1, Item 7). Sir Henry Hardman recalled that in the mid-1920s there might be up to 100 fora core evening lecture, with perhaps 30 for German. In his daytime Honours Economicscourse there were by contrast only five students—see Tribe (1997, p. 16).

41Chapman was assisted in this course by A. E. Clear, Assistant Goods Manager for the GreatCentral Railway, on railway transport; and H. Pilkington-Turner, Barrister at Law, withrespect to railway law—Calendar 1904–1905, p. 62.

dents had registered for the degree, with another 14 attending lectures; andsome of the individual specialized courses were very well attended, therailway companies for example paying the lecture fees for employees attend-ing the course on railway economics.42 The Institute of Bankers likewiseestablished 10 scholarships covering the cost of two years’ courses in currencyand banking, and these lectures were also typically well attended;43 and sincethese lectures later attracted an exemption they would have been attractivefor those intending to work in banking.44 Generally speaking, in these earlyyears the substantial fee-income from these occasional commercial studentsprovided a firm basis for the recruitment of staff suitable for teaching com-mercial and economics subjects at an advanced level, so that the B.Com. stu-dents had from the very beginning a full range of courses, and there weregenerally at least two economists capable of teaching the subject to anadvanced level for the few Honours students.

When the Faculty opened its doors it was possible for students toproceed immediately to examination as and when they felt able,45 whichaccounts for the appearance in Table 1 of students graduating within threeyears of the inauguration of teaching. This was a provisional arrangement,however, presumably adopted to accelerate the development of teaching andexamination during the transition into an autonomous institution. Regula-tions were to come into force during October 1906 which laid down aminimum period of study of three years after matriculation.46 There is somedifficulty in interpreting the statistics that the University published on age at matriculation, which was possible from 16, although the available figuresindicate that before the First World War there were twice as many studentsaged 18–20 as 16–18, and twice as many again over 20 as those aged 18–20.Since these figures do not discriminate between day and evening enrolments,nor between medical and non-medical students, it is difficult to determine theage and employment status of students registering for degrees in commerceand economics.

Some general remarks can be made, however, concerning studentnumbers to the mid-1920s. First, very few students graduated with anHonours Economics degree, and there was no change in this pattern right upto 1944. If we were to employ a rule of thumb to the effect that significant



42Which clearly had an impact upon numbers, over 900 students having attended in 1903–4 the course on the history of railway transport, and 856 the course on railway transportpractice—Calendar 1904–1905, p. 643.

43‘Manchester University. The Faculty of Commerce’, Manchester Guardian, 9 March 1905.44‘The Council of the Institute of Bankers, London, has agreed to exempt from their prelimi-

nary examination in practical banking those students who attend the course on “The prin-ciples and practice of banking” and who pass the usual examination held at the end of thecourse.’ Report of courses run by Drummond Fraser and Meredith, Manchester Guardian,9 October 1908.

45Calendar 1904–1905, p. 254, para. 4.46Calendar 1904–1905, p. 100, para. 2.

numbers of Honours Economics students are necessary to justify the leveland quality of appointments capable in turn of founding a major school, thenon these numbers Manchester was nowhere near a critical mass of studentseven after 40 years. But as we shall see, by the 1930s Manchester was indeeda significant centre for economic research; over the years the trickle ofHonours Economics students were taught by some of the leading economistsof the day, and after 1945 the new Faculty of Economics and Social Studiesquickly expanded into a major national centre of teaching and research ineconomics. This could happen because of the manner in which Chapman setup the teaching for the commerce degree and associated vocational courses.The popular evening sessions on currency and banking noted above weretaught, for example, by Drummond Fraser, a local banker, in combinationfirstly with Adams, appointed in 1912 as Gladstone Professor of PoliticalTheory in Oxford, and then with Meredith, Pigou’s successor in 1908 as



T 1M B G C E

(UNIVERSITY CALENDAR, )a

Manchester BA Manchester(Hons.) Econ. Manchester B.Com. commerce students Birmingham B.Com.

1904–5 1 16 31905–6 1 31 51906–7 0 5 36 11907–8 0 7 38 51908–9 3 6 35 41909–10 2 6 33 41910–11 1 7 45 71911–12 3 7 47 31912–13 2 8 42 71913–14 0 11 57 81914–15 2 8 46 71915–16 1 7 26 51916–17 3 3 24 21917–18 5 4 17 51918–19 0 6 35 11919–20 2 14 63 141920–21 3 10 131 291921–22 4 39 142 231922–23 6 33 129 71923–24 3 25 118 91924–25 2 22 129 61925–26 1 26 144 6

a After 1926 the B.Com. became the BA Com. and a new BA (Admin.) was introduced; this is discussed below,and the annual graduation figures from 1927 to 1944 can be found in Table 2.

The column ‘Manchester commerce students’ includes the number of students registered for a degree ineach year, both full-time and part-time; after some initial variation, presumably related to students graduat-ing early, the pre-war figure settles to represent an average annual intake of around a dozen students, and wemight presume that the outbreak of war led several students to break off their studies. The ManchesterGuardian reported for example that 11 new students registered for the session 1907–8 (‘Board of the Facultyof Commerce’, 27 April 1909). By the mid-1920s there is an increasing drift between numbers enrolled andnumbers graduating; as noted above, we can establish retrospectively that those who graduated had generallystudied for three years, but since we have no record of enrolments by name it is not possible to detect dropoutrates.

Girdler’s Lecturer in Cambridge and then in 1910 appointed to the Chair ofEconomics at Queen’s University, Belfast, with the task of establishing aFaculty of Commerce.

Second, while the number of Birmingham graduates in commerce fluc-tuates around a small number throughout the period 1905–26 (with a briefpostwar surge), in Manchester after this initial surge numbers remain above20 per year, for the period a respectable number.47 The commerce syllabusdesigned by Chapman also had a solid core of analytical and applied eco-nomics, so that students graduating in Manchester with a commerce degreewould not necessarily be any less skilled in economic principles than studentselsewhere who had completed an economics degree. By the later 1930s thiswas no longer true, since the teaching of economics was becoming more spe-cialized; and so Manchester’s response was to turn the Faculty of Commerceinto a Faculty of Economic and Social Studies.

3 M E M E

Ashley’s perspective upon economics and commerce was quite different fromthat of Chapman; instead of building commercial studies upon an economicbase, as Chapman had done in Manchester, he sought to include commercialsubjects within an extended economics curriculum, a strategy that was anath-ema to Marshall’s perspective upon the future of economics. In 1908 Ashleydelivered a lecture in Manchester entitled ‘The Enlargement of Economics’,in which he expressed the hope that the formation of new Faculties of Com-merce would stimulate the study of economics, and suggested that

Political Economy should be widened to take account of facts of commercialand industrial activity, and complemented with the creation of a ‘. . .“Businesseconomics”, which frankly took for its point of view the interest of the indi-vidual man or business concern’.48

‘Business economics’, argued Ashley,

would ‘drive at practice’, but would not profess to be a series of recipes forsuccess. ‘It will be simply a serious and systematic grouping and weighing ofthe known results of actual experience. In this work the academic teacher willenjoy no advantage that may not be possessed by any man of common sense;he will pursue no subtle train of reasoning; he will make use of no peculiar“organism”.49 His sole advantage will result from his wider acquaintance with



47And the degree had a good reputation with Manchester employers, as shown by a survey ofemployment opportunities for graduates in January 1908—114 replies were received, 72 ofwhich were favourable, 24 being favourable but with few openings, and only 18 replying tothe effect that they were unfavourable or that no openings of this kind occurred in theirfirms. ‘The Faculty of Commerce’, Manchester Guardian, 27 March 1908.

48‘Business Economics’, Manchester Guardian, 12 February 1908.49Presumably here the reporter misheard an allusion by Ashley to Marshall’s economic ‘organon’,

the set of analytical principles with which the properly trained economist was equipped.

the field of inquiry than most men actually engaged in trade have time toacquire. His function will simply be to interpret to the business world thatworld’s own experience.’

Chapman clearly thought otherwise, as is apparent from the character of hisjunior appointments. In 1905 H. O. Meredith50 was made Lecturer in Eco-nomic History and Commerce, sharing with Chapman the teaching of basicprinciples of political economy and of ‘advanced economics’, while takingresponsibility for courses on economic history, currency and exchange, andpublic finance.51 In addition he took an introductory evening class ‘Outlinesof Economic Theory—on Production, Distribution and Exchange’ in theBankers’ Institute, so he was clearly kept very busy. When Meredith returnedto Cambridge he was replaced by Douglas Knoop, who had been the first tograduate at Manchester in Economics, being awarded a First in 1905. The1909–10 edition of the Calendar shows that Knoop simply slotted intoMeredith’s place in the teaching programme before moving to Sheffield thefollowing year, where he was subsequently Professor of Economics from 1920to 1948. Three Assistant Lecturers replaced him: C. F. Bickerdike, H. M.Hallsworth and R. B. Forrester. Bickerdike had read Mathematics andModern History at Oxford, and after two years at Manchester he joined theBoard of Trade, spending the rest of his working life in the Civil Service.Before moving to Manchester he had already published innovative papers onthe theory of rents, and devised a formula for the determination of anoptimal tariff, in 1906 becoming an LSE research student with Cannan as hissupervisor (Larson, 1987). Hallsworth, a Manchester graduate, had alreadycompleted research on local unemployment under the direction of Chapman,and the following year he was appointed to the new Chair of Economics atArmstrong College, Newcastle, where a Faculty of Commerce was planned.52

Forrester came from Edinburgh, where he would have been taught politicaleconomy by Shield Nicholson; in 1913 he became Lecturer in Economics atAberdeen, moving in 1922 to the LSE where he was appointed Reader inForeign Trade in 1926, finally holding the Chair of Political and EconomicScience at Aberystwyth from 1931 to 1951.

Apart from the evening teaching associated with the degree courses,members of the Faculty also took tutorial classes at regional centres.53



50Meredith had graduated from Cambridge in 1901 with a First in History, having read Classicsfor Part I, in which he also got a First; he was a Fellow of King’s College, 1903–5; Girdler’sLecturer in Cambridge, 1908–11; and Professor of Economics, Queen’s University, Belfast,1911–45. He died in 1964.

51Calendar 1905–1906, pp. 287–288.52Economic Journal, Vol. 22 (1912), p. 512. See also Chapman and Hallsworth (1909).53Under a scheme inaugurated in April 1909 and administered by a joint committee on which

Manchester University, the Co-Operative Union, the National Conference of FriendlySocieties, the Northern Counties Amalgamated Associations of Weavers, the Workers’Educational Association, the Miners’ Federation of Lancashire and Cheshire, and the Lancashire and Cheshire Federation of Trade and Labour Councils were represented.

Hallsworth, Knoop and Forrester together taught a three-year course on‘Industrial History’ to seven different classes, Hallsworth for instance teach-ing in Blackburn, Bolton, Manchester and Nelson. At Bolton 31 studentsattended and 26 completed essays, and so this teaching represented a con-siderable addition to an already substantial teaching commitment—but, onthe other hand, increased the number of Assistant Lecturers in Economicsthat the Faculty could support. In the following year a change of directionwas introduced, the courses becoming an introduction to economics;Forrester taught ‘Economic Theory’ on Thursdays at 8pm in Blackburn Technical School to 32 students, while Bickerdike took a course based on the Manchester second year ‘Principles of Economics’ lectures to 33 studentsat Manchester Grammar School.54 This pattern continued, in 1917 Danielsbeing recorded as teaching the second year economics course at a secondaryschool in Macclesfield.55 Each tutorial class appears to have attracted at least30 students, and while the tutors quickly took their material from standardManchester courses, these classes represented a substantial continuing commitment for both individuals and Faculty.

It was perhaps then not entirely coincidental that there was such a rapidturnover of Assistant Lecturers before the Great War. When Hallsworth left,two further Assistant Lecturers were appointed, Conrad Gill, later Professorof History at University College, Hull, and Francis Hubback, who hadstudied in Cambridge56 but who was killed on the Western Front in 1917.Bickerdike and Hubback left in 1912, to be replaced by A. F. Jack57 and G. W. Daniels,58 both Manchester graduates, the latter being the only one ofChapman’s appointees to remain in Manchester. During the last year beforethe War there were three Assistant Lecturers: Jack, Daniels and A. N.Shimmin, who in 1915 left for an Economics Lectureship at Leeds, later in1945 becoming Professor of Social Science. None of these junior appointeesstayed very long at Manchester, apart from Daniels. They do almost all,



The students were mainly classed as ‘skilled artisans and cotton operatives’—‘First AnnualReport, Session 1909–10’, pp. 1, 4, Manchester University Tutorial Classes, Annual Reports1909–22, University of Manchester Archives UA/3/24.

54Annual Reports 1909–22, ‘Second Annual Report. Session 1910–11’, pp. 4, 7.55Annual Reports 1909–22, ‘Ninth Annual Report, 1917–18’, mimeo.56But not economics, although his wife, Eva Spielman, had taken Parts I and II of the Economics

Tripos and gained a First in 1908.57Jack had been awarded an M. Comm. for a thesis on the history of life assurance, which he

presented in Cambridge as part of an application for a degree. Clapham’s comments wereemollient, Pigou’s not—in fact one of the very few recorded statements that survives fromPigou apart from his published writings. See Minutes of Degree Committee, 8 May 1912,Minutes of the Special Board for Economics and Politics 1911–23, Cambridge UniversityArchives: UA Min.V.115, f. 17.

58George Daniels, a former electrician, was a graduate of Ruskin College, Oxford, and hadgained degrees in both Economics and Commerce in Manchester. He was made Reader inAdministration in 1920, Professor of Commerce and Administration in 1921, and StanleyJevons Professor of Political Economy in 1927. He died suddenly in 1937 of a heart attack,and was succeeded by Hicks.

however, share a background in, or an aptitude for, modern economics,forming a distinctly Marshallian generation whose conception of economicswas primarily analytical, rather than historico-descriptive. Appointment inManchester led on to a career in which they contributed to the developmentof commerce and economics teaching in provincial universities. This entirephase came to an end with the war; Chapman was recruited in 1915 by theBoard of Trade because of his knowledge of industrial structure, and heremained in the Civil Service for the rest of his career, becoming ChiefEconomic Advisor to the Government in 1927.59 He was briefly succeeded as Stanley Jevons Professor by D. H. Macgregor, who quickly moved on tothe Drummond Chair in Oxford and was in 1922 replaced by Henry Clay.60

The previous year T. S. Ashton61 had been appointed to a lectureship in eco-nomics, and Daniels was promoted to the new Chair of Commerce andAdministration. During the 1920s the student numbers grew strongly andthere was less reliance on junior staff for the teaching, Daniels being a solid,if limited and uninspiring, interim leader of the Faculty.

In the later 1920s the focus of the Honours Economics course was sharp-ened, the ‘Political Economy and Economics of Industry’ paper in Part Ibeing divided and two papers set on each course, in effect doubling the eco-nomics content of Part I and taking it to four out of eight, instead of twoout of five, papers (Statistics also having been added). More significantchange came in 1932 when the ‘Honours School of Economics and PoliticalScience’ was renamed the ‘Honours School of Economics, Politics andModern History’.62 The common Part I was abandoned and students selectedone of the three streams. Economics was little changed, while Politics wasbased upon one of the existing Part II variants, preceded by an appropriatenew Part I. As already noted, in Adams and Lindsay Manchester had fromthe early 1900s attracted eminent teachers of political theory and politicalphilosophy, although given the small number of students following the politics component of the Honours course their teaching effort had alwaysbeen dispersed. This separation into a distinct stream in 1933 cleared the wayfor the foundation of the Department of Government, and the associatedstrong development of political studies in Manchester.

Social Administration was spun out of the commerce degree in a similarfashion, splitting the existing B.Com. degree in 1927 into a BA (Com.) and



59See my outline of Chapman’s career in the forthcoming New Dictionary of National Biography.

60Clay came from New College, Oxford. He had graduated in 1906 lit. hum., was afterwardswarden of a settlement in Sheffield, an Assistant Lecturer in Social Organization at Leedsfrom 1911 to 1913, and was also an extension lecturer for many years.

61A Manchester graduate in History and Political Economy, he had been a Lecturer in Economics at Sheffield from 1912 to 1919, then a tutor in Economics and Political Scienceat Birmingham from 1919 to 1921; from 1927 to 1944 he was Reader in Currency andFinance at Manchester before moving to a Chair in Economic History at the LSE.

62Calendar 1932–1933, pp. 430–433.

a new BA (Admin.)—both, however, still Ordinary degrees within the Facultyof Commerce.63 At first, the adjustment in teaching was relatively minor, asthe comparison of subjects in Table 3 shows. The course structure for the BA(Com.) that this listing represents is virtually identical with the original designfrom 1904, and so far as one can judge from the Calendar no significantchanges in structure were made until the mid-1940s. On this basis one mightbe tempted to conclude that the interwar period was one of necessary butunexciting consolidation, lacking the dynamism of the early years underChapman. Clay’s departure in 193064 certainly removed a respected econo-mist from the Faculty, and it was not until the arrival of Hicks in 1938 thatrebuilding in this respect began.65 But it was the creation of a small economic



T 2M G C, E A 1926–44

BA (Hons.) Econ. BA (Com.) MA (Com.) BA (Admin.)

1926–27 3 28 11927–28 2 36 41928–29 1 39 3 61929–30 3 15 1 101930–31 1 27 3 151931–32 3 28 3 131932–33 6 29 2 121933–34 4 37 2 141934–35 0 31 2 171935–36 3 26 1 211936–37 1 19 3 201937–38 4 20 1 281938–39 2 16 1 241939–40 5 15 2 341940–41 1 18 1 241941–42 2 3 1 231942–43 1 3 0 271943–44 3 10 1 25

63Minute Book of the Proceedings of the Senate, Vol. 13, 6 May 1926, f. 55; University ofManchester Archives RA/3/5.

64In 1925 he had been appointed to the South African Economic and Wage Commission, swap-ping the Jevons Chair in 1927 for a new Chair in Social Economics; in 1930 he left to jointhe Bank of England. See J. R. Hicks in Oxford Magazine, Vol. LXXIII, No. 1 (14 October1954), pp. 8–10; J. and S. Jewkes, Dictionary of National Biography 1951–60, pp. 227–229.

65The Calendar 1931–1932, p. 73, records T. E. Gregory as Clay’s successor, but there is no recordthat he ever took the post up. The post remained unfilled until 1936, when Jewkes wasappointed, but although Jewkes is important to the development of the ManchesterFaculty, his contribution was not as an academic economist. The appointment of Hicks as a successor to Daniels was of course a considerable coup for Manchester, and very likelyengineered by Jewkes, who was an external examiner on the Cambridge Economics Triposin the mid-1930s where he would have come into contact with Hicks. Anecdotal evidence,

research section in the early 1930s that lent a new dynamism to Manchestereconomics, its small staff and two annual research studentships bringing anumber of young economists to Manchester, launching several ‘economiccareers’ in a fashion similar to that of the early years of the Faculty.

4 T R S F

Hicks remained in Manchester throughout the war, moving to a Fellowshipat Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1946. His appointment had coincided with the completion of Value and Capital, whose Preface is signed off as‘Manchester, October 1938’,66 and it was of course this book which madeHicks’s reputation as a significant economic theorist and which later contributed to his being awarded a Nobel Prize for Economics. But at thetime, the key figure in Manchester economics was John Jewkes, who hadjoined the Faculty as a Lecturer in Commerce in 1927, refounding a link withthe Manchester business community that appears to have wilted after thedeparture of Chapman.67 During the 1930s the energies of the Faculty were redirected by Jewkes towards regional issues, resuming the kind ofresearch that had first been started by Chapman and then continued by



from Marjorie Tivey and Sir Hans Singer, suggests that Hicks largely restricted his activi-ties in the Manchester Faculty to teaching, although he did use the Manchester StatisticalSociety as a means of inviting eminent speakers to Manchester, based on contacts from histime at LSE and Cambridge. Jewkes briefly succeeded Hicks as Stanley Jevons Professorbefore, in 1948, likewise moving to Oxford, as Professor of Economic Organization.

66Hicks (1939). The publication date is given as February 1939; it was reprinted in September1939 and then again in 1941.

67Jewkes had completed a B.Com. in 1923 and then worked as Assistant Secretary to the Manchester Chamber of Commerce before in 1925 being appointed staff tutor at Armstrong College, Newcastle. In 1929–30 he visited the USA on a Rockefeller Fellowship,which began a link with the Foundation important to the funding of the Research Section.

T 3C S BA (C.) BA (A.)

BA (Com.) BA (Admin.)

1. Political Economy 1. Political Economy2. Geography 2. Political Philosophy3. Modern History 3. Modern History4. One Modern Foreign Language 4. One Modern Foreign Language5. Organization and Administration of 5. Central Government

Industry 6. Local Government6. Accounting 7. Accounting or Geography7. Commercial Law 8. History of Industrial Organization8. History of Industrial Organization 9. Modern Foreign Language (advanced)9. Special Subject(s) 10. Special Subject(s)

Hallsworth. Some time in the early 1930s the ‘Research Section of theDepartment of Economics and Commerce’ was formed, on Jewkes’s initiative we can presume.68

The Section directed its attention to local (Lancashire) economic problems; and this orientation gained it the approval of the Rockefeller Foundation, a major source of funds for the development of the social sciences in Britain between the wars.69 The Foundation was committed toempirical social science research rather than the more theoretical work thatcharacterized Cambridge, Oxford and the LSE. Although the last two institutions gained significant support in the 1930s, the Research Section was exactly the kind of academic organization that it sought to foster.70 Somuch so that when Ronald Tress proposed in 1937 to spend his year as aresearch student considering the cotton industry in the light of the theory ofmonopolistic competition he was quietly taken to one side by Jewkes andCampion who told him to ‘forget all that about monopolistic competition.There is a survey we want to do about unemployment and depressed areas,and if you are willing to take that on it is yours.’71 Later, the work of theSection became less localized, but as a subsequent Foundation survey shows,applications of modern theory were still not in favour. The intended pro-gramme of work that the Section passed on to the Foundation in mid-1939was as follows.

1. A study, on the Berle–Means line, of the tendency toward economic con-centration in Great Britain.

2. A study of the purely administrative aspects of public control of economicoperations in Great Britain.

3. A study of the price movements of a series of commodities in the case ofwhich control is now being exercised.

4. Detailed studies of the consequences of control in the coal mining, ironand steel and flour milling industries with others to follow as soon as theseare completed.



68Since the Research Section was kept separate from teaching activities no detail of its activitiesand staff were published in the Calendar, and no other records appear to have survived.

69Besides funding individual appointments, the Foundation contributed most of the funds forthe construction of the extension to the Bodleian Library, Oxford; provided half the capitalfor the construction of the new Cambridge University Library; and financed a significantpart of the LSE’s interwar building programme.

70‘The group at Manchester inaugurated a program of empirical research related to special problems of the Lancashire area which has attracted wide attention of the newer tenden-cies in economic and social research in many other institutions’, T. B. Kitteridge to Walker,21 May 1938, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, File 401S, University of Manchester,1938–39. In a separate report reference was made to the way in which Jewkes and Campion were ‘content to work modestly chiefly in the Manchester area and their studiesreflect a close laboratory relation with their environment’, ‘General S. S. Policy in Europe (written in June, 1939)’, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RG3, Series 910, Box 3,Folder 16. I would like to thank Salma Ahmad for making copies of these files availableto me.

71Interview with Ronald Tress, 6 June 1995, in Tribe (1997, p. 113).

Manchester will ask for a grant of about seventy-five hundred dollars a yearfor whatever term of years is practicable. I like the team and the subject. Theamount may be a little much.72

Altogether, the Section received a total of £7200 from the Foundationbetween 1933 and 1940, which amounted to a quarter of all its income.73

By the later 1930s the Section was located in a house on the OxfordRoad, disposing of two annual research studentships; and at least oneresearcher was employed full-time by the Section before 1933, since in thatyear Jewkes collaborated with him in two linked works on unemployment.74

George Daniels in his Preface to the Industrial Survey of Cumberland andFurness noted that the Board of Trade had requested that an industrial surveyof Lancashire be conducted; it could be of relevance that at this time bothFlux and Chapman were civil servants associated with the Board of Trade.75

In 1935 Jewkes published a further study with another researcher, E. M.Gray,76 and in his ‘Introduction’ George Daniels acknowledged the financialsupport provided for the work of the Economic Section, thanking the Uni-versity, a private benefactor and the Rockefeller Foundation. In the follow-ing year Jewkes was promoted to the vacant Chair of Social Economics, hischief duty, according to an announcement in the Economic Journal, to besupervision of the work of the Economic Research Section.77

The financial support that the Foundation gave was not on a large scale,but it was for instance greater than the amount given to Liverpool for theSocial Survey of Merseyside.78 The Research Section does have the dis-



72‘General S. S. Policy in Europe (written in June, 1939)’.73Reported in Salma Ahmad’s important PhD thesis ‘Institutions and the Growth of Knowl-

edge: The Rockefeller Foundation’s Influence on the Social Sciences between the Wars’,University of Manchester, 1987, fn. 50, p. 135. See also Ahmad (1991).

74Jewkes and Winterbottom (1933a, 1933b). The first study was based on research completed inLancashire and Cumberland.

75An Industrial Survey of the Lancashire Area (excluding Merseyside), London, HMSO, 1932.76Jewkes and Gray (1935). Gray is stated to have worked as a cotton operative before studying

textile technology, after which he developed an interest in economics (p. xiii). Barrie Davies,who was a research student in the Section during 1936–37 working under Gray’s supervi-sion, had the impression that Gray’s background was in journalism and that he lacked aca-demic training—interview with Barrie Davies, Ealing, 14 March 2001. Wages and Labourincluded a reference to another publication of the Section, George Daniels and HarryCampion, The Relative Importance of British Export Trade, London and Cambridge Economic Service.

77Economic Journal, Vol. 46 (September 1936), p. 565. The same note mentioned that the Chairhad been in abeyance since 1932, its previous holder being Gregory, but as observed abovethere is no record of Gregory ever having taken up the appointment. Neither Hopkin norDavies, both research students in the Section in 1936–37, recollect seeing much of Jewkesduring their period in Manchester. Davies recalls that ‘When I arrived, I reported to him,he talked to me for five or ten minutes, and then said, “Please excuse me now, I have anappointment”. I didn’t speak to him again for the rest of the year. He handed me over toCampion, who found something for me to do about Lancashire, and was a great help after-wards.’ Interview, 14 March 2001. Interview with Sir Bryan Hopkin, 13 December 2000,Bedford.

78See Caradog Jones (1934); Colin Clark was employed on this project in its early months.

tinction of having been the first such permanent economic research organi-zation associated with a university in Britain. In 1935 the Rockefeller Foun-dation provided finance for the creation of the Oxford Institute of Statistics,while the Department of Applied Economics in Cambridge was not formeduntil 1946, plans having been interrupted by the war.79 The work of the Man-chester Research Section predated this, was always directed towards theeconomy of the region, but brought together a distinguished collection ofyoung economists who were later to play a major part in wartime economicadministration. In 1936 Bryan Hopkin, having just graduated from Cam-bridge with a First for which Jewkes was External Examiner, was awarded aDrummond Fraser Research Studentship and spent a year in Manchesterreading through the Manchester Guardian in the Central Library for reportsof trade agreements in the cotton industry.80 He recalls having little supervi-sion apart from some conversation with Harry Campion, and that the Sectionwas kept quite separate from the teaching activities of the Faculty.81 Hisschoolfriend, Barrie Davies, held the other studentship in 1936–37, workingunder the supervision of Gray on wages in the weaving industry, extendingthe work that Gray had published with Jewkes on the spinning industry. In1937 Ronald Tress was awarded one studentship, and Stanley Dennison theother, the first working under Jewkes on unemployment in Barrow, the secondon the location of industry.82 Tress recollects that during the period he wasin Manchester Jewkes, Campion,83 Chester, Dennison, Hans Singer,84 PhilipChantler and H. C. Hillman85 all worked at the Research Section, and that



79See Chester (1986, Ch. 10); Congregation agreed the establishment of the Institute ofStatistics in October 1935, with Jacob Marschak as its first Director. For the Departmentof Applied Economics see ‘Report of the General Board on the Constitution of a Department of Applied Economics’, Cambridge University Reporter, Vol. LXX, No. 9, 14November 1939, pp. 241–242; and the announcement of the appointment of Richard Stone to head the new Department in the Reporter, Vol. LXXV, No. 36, 22 May 1945,pp. 752–753.

80See his subsequent articles (1937a, 1937b).81Interview with Sir Bryan Hopkin, Bedford, 13 December 2000.82See the comments by Tress in Tribe (1997, pp. 113–114). Tress later published his research

(1938); Stanley Dennison also wrote up his own work (1939).83Harry Campion had been appointed Lecturer in Statistics in 1936; he went on to be Director

of the Central Statistical Office from its foundation in 1941 to 1967.84Singer was working at the time on his Pilgrim Trust study of unemployment, for part of the

time being based in Manchester. This was published (1938), Ronald Tress compiling theindex. See Hans Singer’s comments on the Section (misremembering the dates) in Tribe(1997, p. 64).

85Hillman (1910–90) studied economics at Kiel, and worked there as a student assistant forGerhard Colm. Interned by the Nazis in a labour camp for four months on account of hisactivities as a leader of the Social Democrat student organization, he emigrated in January1934 to Britain and completed an MA at St Andrews, and then in October 1935 moved tothe Dundee School of Economics as a researcher for a Pilgrim Trust project. In 1936 hemoved to the Research Section, in December 1939 marrying Elisabeth Bacon, daughter ofthe President of the Manchester Statistical Society, and as a consequence becoming aBritish subject, which in turn enabled him in 1940 to take up a Chatham House post inOxford. See Hagemann (1999a, p. 265).

he was followed in the studentship for 1938–39 by Christopher Dow. ElyDevons, who graduated with a First in Economics from Manchester in 1934,also spent a year on a studentship in the Section, completing an MA on pro-duction statistics before in 1935 becoming Economic Assistant to the JointCommittee of the Cotton Trades Organisation.86

The turnover of young economists through the Research Section repli-cated the experience of the pre-1914 period in the Faculty, when a successionof young men passed through Manchester on their way to senior appoint-ments elsewhere as the teaching of economics and commerce spread throughBritish universities. This process was accelerated by the role that economistscame to play in the wartime administration of the early 1940s. Chapman hadbeen recruited into the wartime Civil Service in 1915, and had stayed on; butlittle specific use was made of trained economists during the First World War,and since most of the junior Manchester Assistant Lecturers recruited in theearly years of the Faculty were well into their 30s by the time that conscrip-tion began in 1916, they mostly remained throughout the war in their academic posts. It might also be added here that both Pigou and Macgregor,respectively Professors in Cambridge and Oxford during the interwar period,were shattered by their wartime service87 and consequently played little activepart after 1920 in the development of teaching and research. The experienceof the Second World War was different: there was an appreciation of the needfor specialist administrators. Jewkes himself of course became DirectorGeneral of Programmes and Statistics in the Ministry of Aircraft Produc-tion, a key post in the wartime economy.88 The practical understanding of economic organization that Devons had gained while employed in Manchester is reflected in his own account of the Ministry of Aircraft



86He left this post in 1940 to join Cotton Control in the Ministry of Supply, and worked during1940–41 in the Central Economic Information Service. Together with Harry Campion hefounded the Central Statistical Office before joining the Ministry of Aircraft Production.Alec Cairncross considered Devons to be the most important of the many economists fromManchester who joined wartime administration; see his remarks in Tribe (1997, pp. 48–49)and his Dictionary of National Biography 1961–70 entry for Devons.

87The upper age limit for conscription of single men was 40, but John Neville Keynes success-fully argued for the exemption of a 39-year-old Pigou (Deane, 2001, pp. 256f.)—nonethe-less, Pigou’s work in an ambulance unit during university vacations made a deep impacton him.

88See Cairncross (1991). By the later 1930s Jewkes had established a significant reputation forhimself; in a Rockefeller survey of British social science conducted in September 1939 NoelHall is reported as thinking that Jewkes ‘is a key man, an important person to do practi-cal and theoretical work in economics and to hold things together in England’. The reportcontinued to suggest that he might well play a pivotal part in any future Rockefeller activ-ities in Britain. Regarding the University of Manchester, the report stated that ‘Very goodwork is being done there, and probably could be continued without much reduction. Jewkesis chief man in the social sciences. R[ockefeller] F[oundation] can rely absolutely on any-thing he says.’ Untitled Report, 5 October 1939, by D. P. O’Brien on interviews conductedin England, 18–20 September 1939, pp. 4, 5; Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RG3 910,Box 1, Folder 4.

Production (1950). All of the individuals that Tress recollected as his Man-chester Research Section contemporaries worked in various parts of wartimeadministration as economists. Manchester was in fact the single most impor-tant source for wartime economists, primarily because of the existence of theResearch Section. The war, however, terminated the activities of the Section,and it was not revived, most probably because the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, formed shortly before the war, became in thelater 1940s the focus for applied research on a national basis.

In 1937 both Dennison and Singer transferred to the Faculty and weremade Assistant Lecturers. Adolf Löwe was also appointed Honorary SpecialLecturer in Modern Political Philosophy, having taught at Manchester since1933, originally as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow.89 During the war yearsthe Faculty seems to have been represented by Hicks, Ashton and Singer.During this time there were of course even fewer Honours Economics students than usual, so that when Marjorie Alderson90 graduated with a Firstin 1943 her final-year courses in Advanced Economics and International Eco-nomics with Hicks and Singer respectively were one-to-one tutorials. On theother hand, it is evident from Table 2 that the number of students in theAdministration degree held up throughout the war, the students being mainlywomen and the course being related to problems and issues relevant to thehome front. Introductory teaching in economics was therefore, during histenure of the Jevons Chair, Hicks’s major task. The most notable memorialof this activity was The Social Framework (1942), a lucid introductory textbook widely used after the war and based on his first-year lectures inManchester. Since most of those attending were neither commerce nor eco-nomics students, its unfamiliar approach made these lectures somewhat heavygoing for the students, for until Hicks published the book no other compa-rable textbook that might have provided some assistance was available.91

Examination of the notebooks kept by Marjorie Alderson during her



89Löwe, or Adolph Lowe as he soon became, had been instrumental in establishing the Statistical Research section of the Kiel Institute for World Economy in 1926, and he wasits Director up to 1930, recruiting among others Gerhard Colm, Hans Neisser, WassilyLeontieff and Jakob Marschak to work there. He left Kiel in 1930 for a Chair at the University of Frankfurt, but together with his colleagues Max Horkheimer, KarlMannheim and Paul Tillich he was dismissed under National Socialist legislation in thespring of 1933—on political grounds, although he was also Jewish. See Hagemann (1999b).It speaks volumes for Jewkes’s very real limitations that he opposed Lowe’s appointmentto an economics post—see Krohn (1996, p. 67).

90She later married Len Tivey, whom she met at LSE while working as a Research Assistant forHenry Phelps Brown.

91Marjorie Tivey attended the 1940–41 cycle of lectures with around a hundred other students,including one friend studying law and one geography; once the book was available it waseasier to follow the lectures. Hicks himself later commented that ‘It should have been calledThe Social Accounts, for its novelty consisted in the systematic use of social accountingmaterial for elementary teaching; but the idea of social accounting was then unfamiliar, soI was persuaded to fall back on that unsatisfactory title’ (1988, p. 5).

final year shows a broad similarity with the level and quality of the recordof teaching in Cambridge kept by Michael Kaser in 1943–45.92 Since she wastaught by Hicks and Singer this is in some respects only to be expected, butit does underline the way in which, by the 1940s, a standard approach to theteaching of Honours Economics was developing in British universities. Onthe other hand, there were very few students in Manchester studying thesubject at this level, and so the immediate impact of this teaching uponcohorts of students was very limited.

The platform upon which the postwar growth of economics in Man-chester was based lies elsewhere. First of all, as we have seen the ResearchSection gave employment to a small but critical number of young economistsin the later 1930s, establishing a research culture which could be renewed afterthe war. Second, The Manchester School of Economics, Commerce andAdministration had been founded in 1930,93 and this provided some focus forpublications associated with the social sciences in Manchester. Economicahad of course been founded by the LSE in the early 1920s, and by the 1930sthis was publishing significant work in contemporary economics, which is notsomething that can be said of the first few years of The Manchester School.94

After Daniels died, but before Hicks arrived, the content of the journalbecame less descriptive and local, publishing papers previously presented tothe Manchester Statistical Society, which itself was drawing on a wider set ofspeakers.95 By Volume 10 (1939) of The Manchester School this trend is fullyestablished, containing contributions from Harrod,96 Hicks,97 Whale98 andDevons.99 A symbiotic relationship developed, meetings of the StatisticalSociety providing a respected forum to which major speakers could beinvited, their papers then being published in The Manchester School.

The work of the Research Section and the presence of academics of thestatus of Hicks, Singer and Löwe brought Manchester firmly into the main-



92Michael Kaser completed the Economics Tripos in two years and made shorthand notes at allthe lectures he attended, writing up a fair copy later. Interview with Michael Kaser, Oxford,22 September 1999.

93Daniels was Chairman of the Editorial Board, with S. G. Roberts and Jack Stafford (bothAssistant Lecturers at the time) as Joint Editors.

94From 1939 the journal was called The Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies.95During the winter and spring of 1935–36 nine papers were presented to the Statistical Society,

including Jewkes, Ashton and Stafford from the Faculty, plus Christopher Saunders (Economic Research Section, Manchester 1933–35, Joint Committee of Cotton TradeOrganisations, Manchester 1935–40) and Jacob Marschak, newly appointed Director ofthe Oxford Institute of Statistics.

96‘Modern Population Trends’, pp. 1–20 (read to the Manchester Statistical Society, 1 March1939).

97‘Mr. Hawtrey on the Bank Rate and the Long-term Rate of Interest’, pp. 21–37 (review ofHawtrey, A Century of Bank Rate).

98‘Central Banks and the State’, pp. 38–49 (read to the Manchester Statistical Society, 8 February 1938).

99‘Production Trends in the United Kingdom’, pp. 55–61 (a response to a note in the EconomicJournal, September 1935).

stream of British economics once more, a development underwritten by theorganizational changes introduced towards the end of the war. In earlyJanuary 1944 the Senate appointed a committee to examine the implicationsof an alteration to the title of the Faculty—in essence to dissolve the Facultyinto a new Faculty of Economics and Social Science.100 By June 1944 newregulations had been drawn up, bringing the Honours Economics BA intothe new Faculty, together with the ordinary commerce and administrationdegrees. The Faculty of Commerce gave way to a new structure within whichthe social sciences in postwar Manchester would flourish. Through the later1940s and early 1950s access to higher education expanded, student numbersincreasing first as returning service personnel resumed their studies, and thencontinuing through a rising demand for school and college teachers with auniversity education. Economics became a popular choice in this new envi-ronment, a modern subject with a clear relationship to the problems of thepostwar world. By contrast, demand for commercial subjects waned, themore practical bias of its curriculum no longer appearing so attractive to students envisaging careers in teaching, public administration or the growingnumber of nationalized industries. And so the structure that Chapman hadestablished in Manchester at the beginning of the century—developing anHonours curriculum alongside the B.Com., and consequently building aFaculty around staff capable of teaching Honours Economics—proved wellsuited to the transition that now occurred.

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