Professor Harold Rose
Economist who pioneered the study of corporate finance
PROFESSOR HAROLD ROSE, who has died aged 94, was the first faculty member of the London Business School and an economic adviser to Barclays and Prudential.
Having previously taught at the London School of Economics, Rose was appointed professor of finance at the newly founded London Graduate School of Business Studies (later London Business School) in 1965. At a time when academic study of corporate finance was in its infancy, Rose deployed his City connections to help fund the creation of the School’s Institute of Finance, of which he was director from 1973.
From 1975 to 1988, while teaching part-time, Rose was group economic adviser to Barclays Bank, where his grasp of financial mechanisms and clarity of exposition on wider economic issues were highly valued – and where he observed with wry amusement the social division between “the gentlemen”, descended from the bank’s founders, and the professional managers of humbler origins.
Rose’s powerful intellect was deployed with a light touch; he was a good listener as well as a lively lecturer. After Barclays he returned to LBS as emeritus professor, finally retiring in 2001 – having observed that the right time to stop was “when students stop finding your jokes funny”.
Harold Bertram Rose was born on August 9 1923 to Jewish immigrant parents; his father Isaac, an embroiderer, shortened the family name from Rosenberg. After Isaac’s early death, Harold and his sister were brought up in Stepney by their Polishborn mother Rose (née Barnett, who on her marriage had become Rose Rose). Harold was educated at Davenant Foundation School, Whitechapel, and in 1941 won a place at the LSE – then evacuated to Peterhouse, Cambridge.
He served in the Royal Artillery from 1942, initially with 133 Field Regiment. Posted to India and Burma, he saw action with Orde Wingate’s Chindit special force in March 1944, when some 20,000 men were dispatched largely by glider to penetrate deep into the Japanese-infested Burmese jungle. At 21, Rose was one of the youngest captains in the British Army.
Demobilised in 1946, he completed his Bachelor of Commerce degree with a First, and was recommended by his supervisor to a job as the first in-house economist at the Prudential life assurance company. As well as providing commentary on markets and economic trends, he was called to advise on the implications of world events – including the death of Stalin in 1953.
In 1958 he returned to the LSE as a senior lecturer (later reader), running courses in industrial finance for overseas government and bank officials, many from newly independent former colonies, as well as teaching undergraduates.
One colleague observed of Rose that “he had about him an air of great sincerity and people loved him for it”. Appointed to the 1963 Plowden committee on primary education, he resigned rather than associate himself with the progressive teaching methods to which it was leaning.
He was a long-serving trustee of the Institute of Economic Affairs, the free-market think-tank, and its chairman from 1995 to 1998; thereafter he was treasurer of the Institute for the Study of Civil Society (Civitas), an independent think-tank that grew out of the IEA to pursue ideas for the nurturing of free societies that were less fundamentalist in their attachment to markets.
He was also at various times a director of The Economist newspaper and the Abbey National building society. In later years he was a keen Arsenal fan.
Harold Rose married first, in 1949, Valerie Chubb; the marriage was dissolved in 1974 and he married secondly in that year Diana Scarlett, who died last year. He is survived by three sons and a daughter of the first marriage and a son and daughter of the second.
Prof Harold Rose, born August 9 1923, died March 10 2018