Stamp, Josiah Charles (1880–1941)

Abstract

Stamp was born on 21 June 1880 in London, and was killed in an air raid on 16 April 1941. He was knighted in 1920, and given the title Baron Stamp of Shortlands, in 1938. In 1926 he was made a Fellow of the British Academy. He entered the Civil Service as a clerk in 1896, and spent most of the next 23 years in the Department of Inland Revenue, rising to Assistant Secretary in 1916. While he was there, he taught himself economics, obtaining in 1911 a first-class external BSc from London University, and in 1916, under the supervision of A.L. Bowley, a DSc from the London School of Economics with his thesis on British Incomes and Property (Stamp 1916). He left the Civil Service in 1919, becoming Secretary and Director of Nobel Industries (later ICI). He was Chairman of the London Midland and Scottish Railway from 1926 to 1941, and from 1928 he was Director of the Bank of England.