PROFESSOR ANDREW DUNSIRE 1924–2015
| Published date | 01 March 2016 |
| Date | 01 March 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12249 |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12249
OBITUARY
PROFESSOR ANDREW DUNSIRE 1924–2015
From the 1970s to the 1990s Andrew Dunsire was one of the leading and most original
British teachers and scholars of public administration. He was born in Buckhaven, Scot-
land, the eldest child of a blacksmith who shoed the pit ponies in the Fife coal mines. He
did well in most subjects (other than Greek) at Kirkcaldy High School and then went to
Edinburgh University to study English, only for his studies to be interrupted by war ser-
vice. He joined the RAF in 1943, spent over a year training to be a pilot in South Africa
(ying Tiger Moths) and attained the rank of Flight Lieutenant. But he contracted pneu-
monia and spent three months in hospital in Egypt and Palestine before being sent home
shortly before the end of the war, so he never saw weapons used in anger and avoided the
fate of some of his colleagues from South Africa who ended up ghting in Burma.
The route from his early intellectual fascination with Norse roots, Chaucer and Beowulf
to politics and public administration seems to have begun with that wartime experience.
Resuming his studies in Edinburgh in 1946, he switched to history and political science,
and indeed received the ‘medal’ for the one political science course available in 1949, his
nal year. That achievement secured him a two-year Carnegie Trust scholarship for post-
graduate study at LSE, and in 1951 he received a Harkness Fellowship for a year’s travel
to the United States and graduate study at the University of Minnesota. Newly-married to
Kay Sankey (whom he rst courted at Kirkcaldy High School and to whom he was mar-
ried for over 60 years), he took graduate courses in Minneapolis, which exposed him to
the then new generation of organization-theory-based approaches to public administra-
tion, then virtually unknown in the UK or Europe. As part of his studies he also surveyed
college training courses for city managers (also unknown in the UK), which involved an
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 1, 2016 (3–5)
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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