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Formidable and punctilious academic who revolutionised economic forecasting and later
became chairman of Legal & General
When Edward Heath, the prime minister at the time, attended a black-tie dinner at the
London Business School (LBS) in a disagreeable mood while dressed in a lounge suit and
knitted tie, he probably realised that the disapproval of his host James Ball was not
something to be taken lightly. Ball was a stickler for punctuality and everything being in good
order.
By the early 1970s the principal of LBS had turned the institution
into an influential hub, with captains of industry rubbing shoulders with policymakers during
weekly dinners at Ball’s opulent residence overlooking Regent’s Park.
A
tall, lanky man obsessed with detail, Ball built on the work of his mentor, the Nobel
prizewinner Lawrence Klein, and transformed the methods by which governments decide
how much tax and interest their citizens should pay. He developed one of the first
computerised econometric models to predict how the British economy would respond to a
given set of measures.The model was based on established economic relationships. For
example, consumer spending rising or falling in line with income, and exports being driven
by growth or shrinkage in the global economy.
Instead of forecasting on
the basis of a few equations manually entered on to a spreadsheet, Ball used many more
equations and ran them through a computer.
With this model he had
effectively put LBS on the map in the mid-1960s. As professor of economics he ensured that
the forecasts were digested by a much wider audience than just economists by feeding the
information to business journalists at TheSunday Times.
Code and data
were fed into a Flexowriter, which punched holes in paper tape. It was then carried in large
cylinders to Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, where the University of London and BP had a
computer that occupied two huge rooms and would produce the forecasts.
Terence Burns, now Lord Burns, who was Ball’s research assistant, said: “The model
amounted to a set of simultaneous equations, estimated from historical data, that were
checked against one another so the results were consistent. You could change the level of
government expenditure and see what the impact would be on output, inflation, balance of
payments, exports, imports and so on, in a way that wasn’t possible before.”
The data formed the basis of the forecasts that began to feature in The Sunday Times
business news section three times a year from September 1966.
Having
forced the business world to take notice of LBS, Ball pressed home his advantage after
taking over as principal of the school in 1972. The weekly dinner at his home became a
popular networking event for chairmen and chief executives across the capital and leading
politicians such as Margaret Thatcher, when she was education secretary, and Denis
Healey, when chancellor of the exchequer.
Ball did plenty of assiduous
schmoozing of his own at these events. Lord Wolfson, the chairman of Great Universal
Stores, was persuaded to pay for a new lecture theatre, which was named after
him.
When Ball left LBS in 1984, with a knighthood for services to
management education, he took directorships at Ogilvy & Mather, Barclays Bank Trust and
Tube Investments, as well as positions on government committees. Most notably he was
appointed chairman of Legal & General Group. It was an impressive and well-remunerated
conclusion to the career of a foster child educated at a grammar school.
Robert James Ball was born in 1933. Although his immediate family background was
modest, his grandfather was chief engineer for the London, Brighton and South Coast
Railway and was knighted in 1918 for his service as controller of timber supplies during the
First World War. Ball’s parents were not married. His mother died when he was 14 months
old. As his father, Arnold, preferred to grow lavender in the south of France, Ball was
fostered by Bert and Hilda Thornett in Wealdstone, northwest London. The Thornetts
wanted to adopt Ball, but his grandmother, the formidable Lady Julia Ball, objected and
pressed Arnold to take his parental responsibilities seriously. Her plea was to no avail. Ball
continued to live with his foster parents and attended St Marylebone grammar
school.
After the death of Lady Ball, her late husband’s cousin, Major
Charles Ball, paid James an allowance to see him through university. He represented the
University of Oxford at chess and obtained a first-class degree in philosophy, politics and
economics. He had completed his National Service with the RAF before going to university.
During his training in Chester he met Patricia Davies and they married in 1954. The couple
had five children, three of whom predeceased him. Sarah died of meningitis aged three;
Charles, a businessman who moved to Canada, died of cancer aged 42; while Deborah,
who was an alcoholic, died at the age of 47. Their surviving daughters are Stephanie, a
consultant midwife, and Joanne, who worked for John Lewis. In 1964 Ball met Lindsay
Jackson (née Wonnacott) in the nightclub of the Bredbury Hall hotel in Stockport. They
married six years later, after his first marriage was dissolved.
His first
job was as a research officer at the Oxford University Institute of Statistics, where he met
Klein, who had written An Econometric Model of the United States. Ball followed Klein to the
Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania , where he wrote An
Econometric Model of the United Kingdom in 1961. By then he had become a lecturer at the
University of Manchester, where he remained until he moved to LBS. In his last work, The
British Economy at the Crossroads, published in 1998, he argued against Britain joining the
euro.
He made an immediate mark as chairman of Legal & General,
where executives were taken aback to find him drilling into details of the company from day
one. “Jim was very precise,” said Sir David Prosser, his chief investment officer and then
chief executive, who recalled emerging from a first-class rail compartment at Waterloo and
encountering his chairman standing in a cramped corridor in second class. “When we had
our first meeting, we got stuck into one topic and because he had so much to say about it