William Newmarch

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William Newmarch (January 28, 1820 - March 23, 1882) was an English banker, economist and statistician.

He was born at Thirsk, Yorkshire. He settled in London in 1846 as an official of the Agra Bank, but resigned in 1851 on his appointment as secretary of the Globe Insurance Company. This post he held till 1862, when he became chief officer in the banking-house of Glyn, Mills & Co., in whose employ he remained until 1881. Notwithstanding the continuous pressure of an active business life he found time to contribute largely many valuable articles to the magazines and newspapers, and took an active part in the proceedings of the Royal Statistical Society (of which he was one of the honorary secretaries, editor of its journal, and in 1869-1871 president) and the Political Economy Club. He was also elected a fellow of the Royal Society. His extensive knowledge of banking was displayed in the evidence which he gave before the select committee on the Bank Acts in 1857. He collaborated with Thomas Tooke in the two final volumes of his History of Prices and was responsible for the greater part of the work in those volumes. For nineteen years he wrote an admirable survey, of the commercial history of the year in The Economist. He died at Torquay on 23 March 1882. After his death his friends founded, in perpetuation of his memory, a Newmarch Lectureship in economic science and statistics at University College, London. Arthur Bowley, Josiah Stamp, and Udny Yule were amongst the distinguished Newmarch lecturers.

[edit] Obituaries

"The Death of Mr. William Newmarch" Journal of the Statistical Society of London, Vol. 45, No. 1. (Mar., 1882), pp. 115-121.
Obituary Notices of Fellows Deceased, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 34. (1882 - 1883), pp. xvii-xix.

[edit] Discussion

There is a section on Newmarch in

Paul J. FitzPatrick "Leading British Statisticians of the Nineteenth Century," Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 55, No. 289. (Mar., 1960), pp. 38-70. Reprinted in Studies in the History of Statistics and Probability II Edited by M G Kendall and R L Plackett, London 1977.