William George Stewart Adams (8 November 1874 – 30 January 1966) was a Scottish political scientist and public servant who became principal of an Oxford College and a leader in the fields of voluntary service and rural regeneration.

[4] Following a year as a tutor at Borough Road Teacher Training College, Isleworth, Adams briefly lectured on Finance and Colonial Policy in the University of Chicago's Department of Political Economy (1902) and afterwards spent three months in the United States and Canada studying the work of governmental and educational institutions.

[8] The annual reports Adams issued while in Ireland were "more than mere statistical tables ... each was a valuable economic treatise on the trade of the country",[9] and in 1909 it was suggested that his work on the Irish economy during the previous five years "has done more to stimulate practical patriotism than all the political speeches of the last decade".

In 1913 he, Sidney Ball and A. L. Smith agreed to buy a house in central Oxford in order "to make it a centre of social economic studies and interests with a good specialist library" and to be named after Samuel Augustus Barnett.

[19] Besides becoming an important resource for the university, the House provided a range of services to Oxfordshire's rural communities, including circulating books to schools and village halls in outlying districts.

The paucity of access to books across the nation's rural communities was highlighted in the comprehensive survey of public library provision which the Carnegie Foundation's UK Trustees had engaged Adams to undertake in 1913.

[20] His Report, published by the Trustees in 1915, argued that such provision should be part of an overall State system and that its administration and funding at county rather than borough level could correct the imbalance between urban and rural facilities.

During 1913 Adams made arrangements with the Oxford University Press for publication of a quarterly journal "devoted to every branch of political science, from the reviewing of its literature to the criticism of current affairs".

Seven further issues followed, with substantial editorials by Adams and articles by Arnold Toynbee, Lewis Namier, Arthur Greenwood, R. H. Tawney and Ernest Barker, before publication was suspended at the end of 1916 owing to war "service in the field or at home".

[30] He became an adviser to the Council for the Study of International Relations,[31] and in 1915 was appointed to the Treasury Committee which reviewed the scheme of examination for Class I of the Home Civil Service.

But it was at the recommendation of Thomas Jones, reinforced by David Davies, that Lloyd George, on becoming prime minister in 1916, appointed Adams to be his Principal Secretary.

[33] The Prime Minister's Secretariat, popularly known as Downing Street's "Garden Suburb", was formed to assist Lloyd George discharge his overall responsibilities within the constraints of the war cabinet system: its function was to maintain contact with the  numerous departments of government, to collect information, and to report on matters of special concern.

He promoted measures to regenerate agriculture and increase national crop production, conceiving and organising the Fertilisers Committee and involving himself with tractor supply.

[39] Personal relationships with prominent figures in Irish public life enabled him both to explore and to influence opinion in a way conducive to the Convention's progress.

In the Joint-Committee he ultimately made common cause with A. D. Lindsay, the philosophers' main spokesman, to finalise the scheme for an Honour School of Philosophy, Politics and Economics which was eventually approved by the university in Convocation in November 1920.

[59] He chaired the British Group which attended the Institute of Pacific Relations Conference in Hangzhou and Shanghai in 1931 and he lectured at eleven universities in China and Hong Kong during the course of that year.

[76] Forging links with the YMCA, the Workers' Educational Association, the Women's Institute and other voluntary bodies, Barnett House arranged for the villages to receive visiting lecturers, circulating libraries, information on social and economic issues, and assistance in applying for financial grants.

[79] With the aid of grants and loans from the Plunkett Foundation, the Carnegie UK Trust and the Development Fund, the RCCs facilitated schemes that provided village halls, playing fields, allotments and other amenities.

[82] The human and material resources of Barnett House were indispensable to the early phase of the rural communities project and the importance of the several interdependent strands of activity based there was recognised by a visit from Queen Mary during her tour of Oxford in 1921.

[83] In 1929 the Ministry of Agriculture asked the NCSS and the Carnegie Trustees to organise a voluntary, self-governing association to which local clubs already formed by young farmers could affiliate and which would have both a social and an educational agenda.

In A. L. Rowse's judgement, "He made a good Warden, and was moreover a dear man, apt to be right", while Arthur Salter recalled that the College "welcomed his practical hold on the reality of every issue of policy with which we were confronted".

[97] During the 1930s Adams was a member of the national Market Supply Committee, which reviewed the distribution and prices of agricultural products,[98] and of the Overseas Settlement Board, which co-ordinated support for emigrants to the British Dominions and colonies.

[104] In 1949 he gave a series of lectures as a Visiting Professor in the Graduate School of History at the University of Toronto, and in 1953 he made a three-month speaking and fact-finding tour of South Africa sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation of New York.

[106] With the support of a group of friends he was able to realise a more modest version of this scheme in 1920, bringing some 700 acres east of Cumnor Hurst into the ownership of a preservation trust.

The university's large sub-Faculty of Politics, which contributes to the governance of both PPE and other degree courses, has been said to be "witness to Adams's faith in his subject at times when it was somewhat despised and when weaker men might have allowed it to fall into a subordinate position".