Andrew McFadyean

Sir Andrew McFadyean (1887–1974) was a British diplomat, economist, Treasury official, businessman, Liberal politician, publicist and philosopher. He was born at Leith in Scotland on 23 April 1887 and died at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, London on 2 October 1974.

He attended University College School, London, and University College, Oxford, where he graduated with a second class in classical honour moderations (1907) and a first in literae humaniores (1909).

His marriage to Dorothea Emily, youngest daughter of Charles Keane Chute, actor, took place on 7 October 1913. There were three children from the marriage: a son, Colin, who was born in 1914, and three daughters, Sybil Barbara (b. 1917), Margaret Ann (b. 1925), and Joan Eleanor (b. 1930).

In 1910 McFadyean joined the Treasury and between 1913 and 1917 he acted as private secretary to six financial secretaries. The latter included Charles Masterman, Edwin Montagu, and Stanley Baldwin; he also doubled as private secretary to Sir John Bradbury, the joint permanent secretary. He accompanied Sir Samuel Hardman Lever on an important financial mission to the USA in 1917; from 1917 to 1919, he served in the Treasury division, where his responsibilities included external finance. During the final four months of the peace conference in Paris after World War 1, he acted as representative for the Treasury, becoming its leading expert on World War I reparations and war debts, and establishing a reputation in the European capitals. From 1920 to 1922, he was the secretary of the British delegation to the Reparations Commission; from 1922 to 1924, he was general secretary to the Commission itself. Later he became secretary to the Dawes Committee (which produced the Dawes plan) and subsequently Chief Commissioner of Revenue in Berlin until his departure from this sphere in 1930.

In 1924, he worked for a reduction in German reparations; in this he agreed with John Maynard Keynes, whose book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, had been published in 1919. German finances had been devastated by hyper-inflation. The Dawes Committee, for which McFadyean was secretary, instituted the Dawes Plan, which proposed that reparations should be paid, but without distorting rates of exchange. The payment of reparations was rescheduled, and they were met by raising taxes in Germany as its economy recovered. The German currency, the Reichsmark, would be stabilised on gold, thus bringing about a restoration of confidence and enabling an international loan to be raised to cover the instalment for the first year. Reparations were to be held in a fund. Conversion of this fund into other currencies would not be permitted if this brought about a depreciation of the Reichsmark. He became one of four allied controllers supervising payments under the Dawes Plan, and he was based in Berlin as commissioner for controlled revenues. McFadyean was knighted in 1925. In 1929 the Dawes Plan was replaced by the Young Plan, with which he had no direct part, and this aimed at a final settlement of reparations.

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