First name/s: Arthur
Last name: Ashby
Known names / nicknames:
Date of birth: 19/08/1886
Year of birth: 1886
Life before Ruskin
Date and place of birth19 August 1886 Tysoe, Warwickshire
Family eldest of 8 children of Hannah and Joseph Tysoe
Work Apparently helped his father in range of duties of a small farmer
Politics/Trade union activity Liberal
Trade Union membership (at time of entry to Ruskin)
Life at Ruskin
Dates at Ruskin 1909
Source of funding
Charles Buxton scholarship
Campaigns/political activity
Subjects studied at Ruskin
Dissertation
Qualification Diploma with distinction in economics and political science
Life after Ruskin
Education
In 1912 following the award of a scholarship by the Board of Agriculture he went to the Institute for Research in Agricultural Economics at Oxford and then to the University of Wisconsin . There he studied the history of allotments and smallholdings and wrote Allotments and smallholdings in Oxfordshire ( 1917 ).Research scholarship to Agricultural Economics Research Institute, Oxford
Work
Food production department of Ministry of Agriculture during First World War establishing the first Agricultural Wages Board; Professor Agricultural economics UCW, Aberystwyth ; director Agricultural Economics Research Institute Oxford (1946)
Politics/trade union activity
‘In politics he was a supporter of the Labour Party, yet successive Labour governments failed to utilize effectively his unrivalled knowledge of the problems facing British agriculture’. (Oxford DNB) JP; CBE 1946.
Family married Rhoda Dean Bland 1922. One son.
Place & date of death 9 September 1953 (Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford)
Date of death: 09/09/1953
Year of death: 1953
Achievements / Publications
Professor Agricultural Economics at Oxford university.
Developed an advisory service for Welsh farmers in connection with the co-operative movement
First chair in agricultural economics in Britain (1929)
Established the Milk Marketing Board ‘which more than any other initiative was responsible for bringing the agriculture of the lowlands of Wales (and the whole of the United Kingdom for that matter) out of poverty from 1933 onwards.’ (Oxford DNB)
List of publications in Journal of Agricultural Economics (vol. 12, 1956).
Material in archives or already published articles
Welsh biography online : author Llywelyn Phillips (1914-81), Aberystwyth
Oxford DNB ( Edgar Thomas)
M. K. Ashby, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe, 1859–1919: a study of English village life (1961)
Image
Notes on Image/s
From Picture Post 19 January 1946
Comment of contributor/s and sources
Sources:
Welsh biography online : author Llywelyn Phillips (1914-81), Aberystwyth
Oxford DNB ( Edgar Thomas)
I only came across Ashby’s name in the Picture Post article forwarded to the website. I was astonished that the son of the famous Joseph Ashby could be apparently accepted into institutions like the civil service and Oxford University during a period in which social mobility was supposedly so difficult. His sister, Mabel Ashby became a principal of Hillcroft College.
Author/s
Hilda Kean