from:https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/article/140/1/111/7105142
HECTOR LEAK was a doyen of the British statistical service. He was in the great tradition of one of his predecessors, G. R. Porter, who had been at the Board of Trade in the first half of the19th century and had produced the first national compendium of statistics, Progress of the Nation. He was, for a short time, the President of the Royal Statistical Society. In February 1941H. W. Macrosty died in office, and Leak was appointed by Council to serve for the remaining four months of the session, until Sir William (later Lord) Beveridge was elected. The first time I met him was in 1937, when I was working with Sir William Beveridge on unemployment and trade statistics and to develop some of the ideas we had worked out I was sent to see him with a letter of introduction. He was just like his legend, keen, completely on top of his job, but most wary about letting any newcomer, especially a very young statistician, put more strain on the Board of Trade statistics than they would bear. He was like his legend too in his dress, very formal with a stiff turned up collar of the old style. I did not get a great deal out of him except some fairly erudite instruction on misuse of Board of Trade figures which he felt was a fairly general practice especially among the new economists and statisticians of the University. I then saw a great deal of him during the war both when I was in the Cabinet Office and in other economic departments. The punctilious, accurate and speedy nature of his statistics was absolutely vital for the rudimentary planning on which the Cabinet Office had embarked, and which developed so greatly during the war. He played a full part with Harry Campion as first head of the Central Statistical Office during the war, in modernizing the statistics, in bringing them together to form a centralized caucus of essential information and also in maintaining a fairly rigorous censorship on venturesome statistical methods by some of the new departments. He had retired during the period of post-war reforms and extensions of the service, under the leadership first of Harry Campion and then of Claus Moser. But he maintained the closest interest in the progress of Government statistics and because it was well-regulated and, above all, honest and informed, he clearly approved of what was being done and of the far wider publication of the information becoming available. After the end of the war I never saw him again until we met at a Presidential inauguration in the early seventies. There he was, enjoying every minute of it, including the discourse and the discussion. But what struck me most of all was that he had arrived, attired in the nattiest, indeed trendiest of modern dress, gaudy-coloured shirt, with a down-turned collar and a very natty modern suiting. In a way he seemed not to have aged, despite the passage of the years; perhaps that was because he seemed ageless and timeless even in his working life. I did not get much chance to talk to him, but I felt that he had entered fully into all the reforms of statistics. Looking back on it, I think one's great regret was that the Government of pre-war days did not give a man of such erudition, integrity and numeracy more scope to develop the statistics that the nation needed. Men like him, Ramsbottom of the Ministry of Labour whom I knew also, and the heads of the Statistical Departments at the Treasury, including Customs and Excise, had they been given more scope, could, I think, have produced a caucus of statistical information long before the war in which Britain, as compared with so many other countries, was deficient. The statistical revolution of the war and post-war years could safely have been entrusted to his hands and those of his colleagues in other departments. HAROLD WILSON