The Times Great Lives. Anna Temkin

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      John Maynard Keynes

      A great economist

      21 April 1946

      Lord Keynes, the great economist, died at Tilton, Firle, Sussex, yesterday from a heart attack.

      By his death the country has lost a very great Englishman. He was a man of genius, who as a political economist had a worldwide influence on the thinking both of specialists and of the general public, and he was also master of a variety of other subjects which he pursued through life. He was a man of action, as well as of thought, who intervened on occasion with critical effect in the great affairs of state, and carried on efficiently a number of practical business activities which would have filled the life of an ordinary man. And he was not merely a prodigy of intellect; he had civic virtues – courage, steadfastness, and a humane outlook; he had private virtues –he was a good son, a devoted member of his college, a loyal and affectionate friend, and a lavish and unwearying helper of young men of promise.

      The Right Hon. John Maynard Keynes, cb, Baron Keynes, of Tilton, Sussex, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, was born on June 5, 1883, son of Dr John Neville Keynes, for many years Registrary of Cambridge University. His mother was Mayor of Cambridge as lately as 1932. He was brought up in the most intellectual society of Cambridge. He was in college at Eton, which he dearly loved, and he was proud of being nominated by the masters to be their representative governor later in life. He won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, in mathematics and classics, writing his essay on Héloïse and Abelard. He was President of the Cambridge Union, won the Members’ English Essay Prize for an essay on the political opinions of Burke, and was twelfth wrangler in the mathematical tripos. Although he did not take another tripos, he studied deeply in philosophy and economics and was influenced by such men as Sidgwick, Whitehead, W. E. Johnson, G. E. Moore, and, of course, Alfred Marshall.

      In 1906 he passed second into the Civil Service, getting his worst mark in economics – ‘the examiners presumably knew less than I did’ – and chose the India Office, partly out of regard for John Morley and partly because in those days of a smooth working gold standard, the Indian currency was the livest monetary issue and had been the subject of Royal Commissions and classic controversies. During his two years there he was working on his fellowship dissertation on ‘Probability’ which gained him a prize fellowship at King’s. This did not oblige him to resign from the Civil Service, but Marshall was anxious to get him to Cambridge, and, as token, paid him £100 a year out of his private pocket to supplement the exiguous fellowship dividend – those were before the days of his bursarship of the college. Anyhow, his real heart lay in Cambridge. He lectured on money. He was a member of the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance (1913–14). He served in the Treasury (1915–19), went with the first Lord Reading’s mission to the United States, and was principal representative of the Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference and deputy for the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Supreme Economic Council. After his resignation he returned to teaching and to his bursar’s duties at King’s, but he always spent part of his time in London. He was a member of the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry, and parts of its classic report bear the stamp of his mind.

      In 1940 he was made a member of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Consultative Council and played an important part in Treasury business. He was appointed a director of the Bank of England. In 1942 he was created Lord Keynes, of Tilton, and made some valuable contributions to debate in the Upper House. He became High Steward of Cambridge (Borough) in 1943. His continued interest in the arts was marked by his trusteeship of the National Gallery and chairmanship of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (cema). In 1925 he married Lydia Lopokova, renowned star of the Russian Imperial Ballet – ‘the best thing Maynard ever did’, according to the aged Mrs Alfred Marshall. She made a delightful home for him, and in the years after his serious heart attack in 1937 was a tireless nurse and vigilant guardian against the pressures of the outside world.

      Lord Keynes’s genius was expressed in his important contributions to the fundamentals of economic science; in his power of winning public interest in the practical application of economics on critical occasions; in his English prose style – his description of the protagonists at the Versailles Conference, first fully published in his Essays in Biography (1933), is likely long to remain a classic – and, perhaps it should be added, in the brilliant wit, the wisdom, and the range of his private conversation, which would have made him a valued member of any intellectual salon or coterie in the great ages of polished discussion.

      In practical affairs his activities in addition to his important public services were legion. As bursar of King’s he administered the college finances with unflagging attention to detail. By segregating a fund which could be invested outside trustee securities he greatly enlarged the resources of the college, and, unlike most college bursars, he was continually urging the college to spend more money on current needs. From 1912 he was editor of the Economic Journal, which grew and flourished under his guidance, and from 1921 to 1938 he was chairman of the National Mutual Life Assurance Society. He ran an investment company. He organised the Camargo Ballet. He built and opened the Arts Theatre at Cambridge and, having himself supervised and financed it during its period of teething troubles, he handed it over, when it was established as a paying concern, as a gift to ex-officio trustees drawn from the university and city. He became chairman of cema in 1942 and of the Arts Council in 1945. He was chairman of the Nation, and later, when the merger took place, of the New Statesman; but he had too scrupulous a regard for editorial freedom for that paper to be in any sense a reflection of his own opinions. He also did duty as a teacher of undergraduates at King’s College and played an important and inspiring part in the development of the Economics faculty at Cambridge. The better students saw him at his most brilliant in his Political Economy Club. He was interested in university business and his evidence before the Royal Commission (1919–22) was an important influence in causing it to recommend that the financial powers of the university should give it greater influence over the colleges.

      To find an economist of comparable influence one would have to go back to Adam Smith. His early interest was primarily in money and foreign exchange, and there is an austere school of thought which regards his Indian Currency and Finance (1912) as his best book. After the 1914–18 war his interest in the relation between monetary deflation and trade depression led him on to reconsider the traditional theory about the broad economic forces which govern the total level of employment and activity СКАЧАТЬ