Saunders, Sir Alexander Morris Carr-, 1886-1966, Knight economist and educationist

Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders, 1886-1966, was born in Reigate and educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained a first in zoology in 1908. He was awarded the Naples Table, a scholarship in Biology, and returned to Oxford for a year as a demonstrator. He left Oxford for London in 1910 and, after studying biometrics under Karl Pearson, decided that he did not want a career as a natural scientist and therefore read for the Bar. He became the secretary of the Eugenics Education Society and lived at Toynbee Hall, in the East End of London, where he was a sub-warden from 1910 to 1914. He also took an interest in local politics, becoming a member of Stepney Borough Council. When war broke out in 1914, he attempted to join the London-Scottish Regiment, but the standard of his spoken French was such that he got a commission in the Royal Army Service Corps and was posted to a ration depot at Suez, where he stayed for the duration of the war. After World War One, he returned to Oxford to work in the Zoology department, taking a particular interest in the issue of population. He served on the Royal Commission on Population, 1944-1949. The success of his publication The Population Problem led to his appointment to the Charles Booth Chair of Social Science at the University of Liverpool in 1923. Here he established a reputation for the teaching of social sciences, and furthered the role of social science as a University discipline. In 1937, he was invited to succeed Sir William Beveridge as Director of the London School of Economics, a post that he held until his retirement in 1955. Carr-Saunders was also involved in the Colonial Office's plans to found universities in British colonial territories and the Sudan, chairing a number of committees and commissions between 1947 and 1962. He was knighted in 1946, and created FBA in 1946 and KBE in 1957. He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Glasgow, Columbia, Natal, Dublin, Liverpool, Cambridge, Malaya, Grenoble and London, and was made honorary fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, the University College of East Africa, and LSE.