Professor George William DanielsAuthor(s): H. C.Source: Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Vol. 101, No. 1 (1938), pp. 251-252Published by: Wiley for the Royal Statistical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2980681 .

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1938] Obituary 251

explained that he had bought it to go to a Board meeting iti town- under family pressure, I suspect. He wrote soon after, and confessed that he had left it in the train, and that his son would have to retrieve it from the Lost Property Office.

" Did you ever hear Gosset say an unkind thing about anyone? He had an excuse for all the failings of other people, and how he enjoyed life-wet or fine-in bad days and good! It is indeed a tragedy that he should be deprived of life at 61, and his friends of one who made for peace and happiness.

"When I begin to think of Gosset, I don't think I saw anything much of him till after the war, when he used to come to the Lab. on his yearly holidays for a passing visit and later as an examiner; then he generally came straight to my room, dumped his rucksack in my arm-chair, and asked whether 'himself' was free; he would have tea in the common room, but seldom talked work. At one time he was great on crossing loganberries and blackberries (I think this was the combination), and he got something he called a jam- berry, and told us how to make jam of his berry (you must not boil it), and brought up a pot which we added to our bread and butter at tea-time. Generally he and I had a short chat, and others used to claim his company at tea.

" I doubt whether I knew him very well,. but our attitude was similar, and we saw things from the same point of view, but we did not correspond except once or twice about work. He came here with one of his daughters a year ago last month, and we talked of old times and present difficulties, and I was struck as I always was by his enjoyment of what I should call the simple pleasures of life."

PROFESSOR GEORGE WILLIAM DANIELS

IT is hard to believe that Professor Daniels is dead. He died from heart trouble on December 17th, 1937-a -few weeks before his sixtieth birthday. He had been for so long an essential part of the academic and business life of Manchester-belonging to Manchester and to nowhere else-that it is difficult to think of Manchester without him. It is sad to reflect that he will never again be seen wearing what always seemed to us the same light grey suit, the same heavy brown shoes and, in winter, the same macintosh, walking across the quadrangle regularly at nine o'clock each morning. Collecting his letters from his box in the porter's office, he used to climb the steps and make his way along the corridor to his room in the farthest corner of the main building of Owens College overlooking Burlington Street. There was his sanctum-a square room with a rolled-top desk with a portrait of Marshall hanging above, untidy piles of Punch sharing the window-ledge with a telephone (" I'll have that

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252 Obituary [Part I,

telephone out! "), a small blackboard on which on a famous occasion Jewkes and I tried to explain the necessity of weighting index numbers, and a gas fire round which he used to advise, persuade, and occasionally reminisce to us about his early life and struggles.

He was a man of the widest interests. Essentially practical in outlook and with a natural flair for administration, he had been trained in the method of economics by Chapman, and had shared enthusiasm for economic history with Unwin. He was the ideal head of a department. We could all go to him for advice on problems, whether personal or related to our research work. He stimulated in his staff much of his own intense loyalty for Manchester and its traditions. His was a dominating personality. Those who knew him best admired him the most.

His interest in statistical enquiries developed in his later life. Most of his published statistical work appeared in the Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society, and he contributed only one paper to the Journal (" The Post-War Depression in the Lancashire Cotton Industry ") with Jewkes in 1928. He did not become a Fellow of the Society until 1930. In that year he was chosen President of the Manchester Society, and by virtue of that position became an honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, dbut he preferred to be elected an ordinary Fellow. Already when he read his paper in 1928 he was stricken with the disease which was in the end to prove fatal, and durinig succeeding years most of his time was devoted to University Administration and to the direction of economic research work in the Department. (No one owes more to him than I for his eicouragement aid collaboration in those years.) So far as I know, he did not attenid any meeting of the Society after his election. I tried to persuade him to attend the Centenary meeting of Jevons. He once told miie that it was Jevoiis' Pr-imer of Political Economy which attracted him to economics and persuaded him to leave in- dustry to seek an academic career. Nothing gave him more satis- factioni in the last years of his life than to reflect he was the Stanley Jevons Professor of Political Economy in the University. He did not attenid the meeting, for he was already a very sick man. The end, when it came, was as uiiexpected as it was expected. H. C.

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