Obituary: John Harold West MBE

摘要

John West was a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society for over 50 years. When he died in 1998 he left money to the Society to endow an appropriate prize. The Council decided to use the money both to award a West Medal every 3 years and a bursary every 2 years. The medal is for outstanding contributions to, or influences on, the development and use of official or social statistics; the bursaries will be given to young statisticians for planned activities that are intended to develop and exchange good practice between the UK and the developing world. Very few present Fellows would have heard of John West and still fewer would have met him for he emigrated to Southern Rhodesia in 1952 and remained there during the 'Smith' regime and after independence in 1979. I did know John West. I met him on the very first day of my arrival in Salisbury in 1955 to take up a post in the Central Statistical Office of the newly formed Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. He invited me immediately to join the Rhodesian Economic Society of which he was the Secretary. I did join, and later I acted as Treasurer for about 4 years. This Society was active, producing a quarterly journal, copies of which were sent to libraries around the world. (It is now known as the Zimbabwe Journal of Economics.)