George Christopher Archibald

Who was George Christopher Archibald?

George Christopher Archibald, also known as Chris Archibald, was a British economist, a researcher and professor. He played a significant role in building the new University of Essex into a premier UK research centre for the social sciences in the 1960s.

Archibald was born in Scotland the first son of George Archibald, 1st Baron Archibald. He completed high school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and received his bachelor's degree in history from Cambridge University in 1943. After military service in WWII and Palestine, he completed a bachelors of science in economics at the London School of Economics in 1951.

After graduation Archibald taught in Otago, New Zealand, but returned to the London School of Economics in 1955 and was appointed to the staff. He was one of the founding members of the LSE Staff Seminar on Methodology, Measurement and Testing. He left LSE in 1964 to join the staff at the newly created University of Essex, where he received a professor's chair in 1967. In 1971, he moved to the University of British Columbia. Also in 1971 he married Daphne May Vincent Henman, his second wife. Upon the death of his father, instead of becoming Baron Archibald, he renounced the peerage, expressing the opinion that hereditary honors were empty honors. He retired from the University of British Columbia in 1991 and returned to Scotland.