W. B. Reddaway (1913—)

Abstract

Brian Reddaway was bom in 1913 into a Cambridge ‘gown’ family — his father was an historian, a Fellow of King’s and the first Censor of Fitzwilliam House. Reddaway read Economics at King’s College, Cambridge (1932–4) coming from a First in Mathematics, Part I and forsaking Chemistry which he had intended to read because he was ‘inevitably much stirred by attempts to explain the world slump and see a way out’. He obtained a Ii. Keynes was his supervisor at the time when Keynes was writing The General Theory. Reddaway absorbed its message so well that he wrote, in the Australian Economic Record, one of the most perceptive reviews (1936) of the book. The review is a lucid account of the main proposition of The General Theory, the sort of review that could have been written only by someone who had absorbed and understood the contents of the work concerned. It includes a footnote which is in essence IS/LM, an interpretation which Reddaway himself twigged onto some fifty years later when his attention was drawn to it by the historian of the IS/LM saga, Warren Young (1987).