Edwin Plowden, Baron Plowden

[1] The young Edwin was educated abroad, at the progressive Le Rosey school in Switzerland and at Hamburg University, before returning to Britain in 1926 to read economics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he received an "indifferent degree".

[1] Having the great misfortune to graduate from university at the beginning of the Great Depression, Plowden spent many years unsuccessfully trying to find gainful employment, taking up odd jobs as "a farm labourer, for some months as a ‘general handyman’ in a hospital in Labrador, and as a shop-floor worker and then a travelling salesman for Standard Telephones and Cables.

"[1] At last, before the Second World War, Plowden secured a better job in the City when he joined C. Tennant Sons & Co, commodity dealers.

[4] "I was at this stage put in charge of a working party set up to formulate an official reply to the Americans and, over the next year or so, was to be responsible for the general economic supervision of the rearmament programme.

Plowden was to be my faithful watchdog in chief, and his departure for industry in 1953 undoubtedly weakened my position and that of the British economy".