OBITUARY
| Date | 01 June 1975 |
| Author | ARCHIBALD DUNCAN CAMPBELL |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9485.1975.tb00060.x |
| Published date | 01 June 1975 |
OBITUARY
ARCHIHALD
DUNCAN
CAMPBELL
The community of Scottish economists
is
a small one; and this intimacy will
make
it
particularly painful for
us
to come to terms with the untimely death
of Archie Campbell at the age of
55.
Yet the enormity of the
loss
is
sure to
be felt as much furth of the land where he began and ended.
As
teacher and
administrator in three Universities, as public servant in
so
many different
guises, then latterly
as
industrialist, he made a reputation at once pervasive
and uniquely his own. Along the way he acquired, from that wide circle of
colleagues which forined round
so
illustrious a career,
a
host of friends who
enjoyed his loyalty and companionship as much as the country at large
benefited from his exceptional qualities of mind.
He was a student in Glasgow, falling
in
time there between Alec
Cairncross and Donidd Robertson, and there he returned after the war to
lecture for ten years. During this period his pioneering work
on
the Scottish
Economy displayed statistical insight and creative analysis which have since
set the standard
for
the best of subsequent work in
this
field of research.
In
1955
the University of St Andrews recognised his qualities when they
appointed him to be the first incumbent of the Bonar Chair of Applied Econo-
mics
in
Queen’s College, in Dundee.
As
the first Dean
of
the Grst Faculty
of Social Sciences in a Scottish University he scored a characteristic success,
to be followed by a sustained flow of contributions to the newly-formed
University
of
Dundee. Meanwhile, he found time to become economic con-
sultant to the Secretary of State for Scotland,
to
chair several Wages Councils.
to serve on
a
number of committees of enquiry, to conduct highly sensitive
arbitrations for the Department of Employment, to form
a
close association
with the gas industry as a member first of the Scottish Gas Board and then
of the British Gas Corporation, and to chair the Building and Civil Engineer-
ing NEJDC.
No
man is indispensable; but in the depth and range of his
involvement in the administrative machinery of our country Archie Campbell
came near to being the exception to prove that rule.
Nearer home, he was joint director of the Tayside Study, and he forged
a number of informid links with the jute industry
in
Dundee which, by
a
natural progression, led eventually
in
his last year to the post of full-time
Chief Executive of the Sidlaw Group. He was elected to the Council of the
Royal Economic Society in
1971;
and in our own Society he was
a
founder
member,
a
Vice-president and long-serving member of the Council, and
to
successive Secretaries a generous and unfailing source of advice.
His
appointment as C.B.E. in
1972
gave ofEicial recognition to what had
already been done. The tragedy is that
so
much remained
to
do, and cannot
now
be
done by him.
This
will touch every one
of
his fellow countrymen
219
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