Richard Smethurst

Webb Medley Junior Scholar in 1962, he graduated with a first in 1963, and began postgraduate research at Nuffield College, Oxford on the use of food as aid to developing countries under the newly-established UN/FAO World Food Program. His doctoral supervisor was George Allen, then the Economics Fellow of St. Edmund Hall.  As a research officer at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies/Queen Elizabeth House, he was elected to a Research Fellowship at the Hall in 1964, and succeeded George Allen as Tutorial Fellow in Economics in 1965. He was lured back to his old College, Worcester, in 1967, where he spent the next 24 years as, successively, Tutorial Fellow, Professorial Fellow, Supernumerary Fellow, and then the last 20 as Provost, fourteen of them as a Pro-Vice Chancellor.

During these years, like most economists of his generation, he slipped in and out of Whitehall, first as an Economic  Adviser in HM Treasury (1969-71), then in the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit (1975-76), where he worked closely with Andrew Graham (q.v.), and from 1978-89 as a member of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, the last three years as a Deputy Chairman. (In the biggest investigation he chaired, the case for the companies was led by his own old pupil from the Hall, Derek (now Sir Derek) Morris (q.v.)

Dick has always relished teaching, and says that in his brief period as the Economics Fellow at the Hall was fortunate to have outstanding pupils. In 1976 he shifted focus to teaching adults, becoming for the next ten years the Director of the University’s Continuing Education Department, where he rebuilt the department’s Rewley House premises and initiated the process of the foundation of Kellogg College. He was President of the National Institute for Adult Continuing Education 1994-2001.  Since his retirement in 2011 he has enthusiastically returned to teaching economics to adult classes in Oxford and Reading.