Robert Hall in Versailles while a Rhodes scholar

Robert Lowe Hall, Baron Roberthall, KCMG, CB (6 March 1901 – 17 September 1988) was an Australian born economist who served as chief economic advisor to the British government from 1947 to 1961.

[edit] Life

Robert Hall was born in Tenterfield, New South Wales, Australia in 1901. His father was an English mining engineer. while his mother was a first-generation Australian, whose father was Scottish. He was brought up in Queensland, where he attended Ipswich State High School. He obtained a degree in engineering at the University of Queensland, before becoming a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford in 1923. Having obtained a first class degree in Modern Greats in 1926, he was appointed as a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, where he taught until the onset of World War II.

During the war he worked in the Ministry of Supply in Washington DC and on the Board of Trade. In 1947, he succeeded James Meade as the Director of the Economic Section of the Cabinet Office of the British government; from 1953 until 1961 he was chief economic advisor to successive Chancellors of the Exchequer.

He was knighted in 1954 and made a life peer in 1969 as Baron Roberthall, of Silverspur in the State of Queensland and Commonwealth of Australia, and of Trenance, in the County of Cornwall.^[1] In the 1970s and 1980s he served actively in the House of Lords, latterly as a member of the Social Democratic Party. He was president of the Royal Economic Society from 1958 to 1960. He was invited to give the Rede lecture (on "Planning") in 1962.

[edit] External links

List of life peerages

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Hall, Robert Lowe; Cairncross, Alec (1989), The Robert Hall Diaries, 1947-1953, Unwin Hyman, ISBN 004445273X 
• Hall, Robert Lowe; Cairncross, Alec (1991), The Robert Hall Diaries, 1954-1961, Unwin Hyman, ISBN 004445274X 
• Arndt, H.M.; Bensusan Butt, D.M.; Swan, T.W., "An Appreciation of Robert Hall, 1901-1908", The Economic Record 64: 360-361 
• Jones, Kit (1994), An Economist Among Mandarins: A Biography of Robert Hall, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521471559 

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