John David Pole
15th March 1926 – 25th May 2021
David was the eldest of three children. His life was somewhat derailed by the arrival of his twin sisters in 1928, but he and Enid remained each other’s best friends for the whole of their lives until she died in September 2020. When he left school in late 1944, he was recruited to the Bedford Language School, an offshoot of Bletchley Park, to do a crash course in Japanese. After his training, he was posted to India and served in the Intelligence Corps in what is now Bangladesh, where he would have been decoding Japanese telegrams but for the end of the war. He was demobbed in 1947 and spent a few months working at the Labour Exchange in Leicester while he was waiting to come up to Queens’.
He lectured in economics at Cardiff University (at that time the University of Wales College, Cardiff) from 1951 to 1970, and then moved to the Department of Health and Social Security as Chief Economic Adviser. After a brief spell at the Treasury, he returned to the DHSS as Under-Secretary, taking early retirement at the end of 1983.
He retained an interest in Japanese for the rest of his life, brushing it up occasionally, as for example when he attended the WHO conference in Osaka in 1973. He also kept up a few friendships from days at the Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys in Leicester and from Cambridge, especially Barry Webb whom he saw from time to time despite their advanced age. His interests were very varied, from politics to secularism to sport (strictly as a spectator). One of the great joys of his later life was seeing Leicester City win the Premier League in 2016 (80 years after his father first took him to Filbert Street), and watching from his hospital bed as they lifted the FA Cup at the fifth attempt (he had been at Wembley in 1949 for their first unsuccessful attempt). Even in his 95th year, he was corresponding with Professor Sally Sheard at the Institute of Population Studies about his time at the Department of Health and with Professor Peter Kornicki at Robinson College about his time on the Bedford Japanese course, for Professor Kornicki’s most recent book.
He is survived by Violet, whom he married in February 1956, by his daughters Laura, Eleanor, Rachel and Elizabeth, and by his seven grandchildren. He was an engaged and devoted husband, father and grandfather. We will miss his thoughtful input into our lives, as well as his noted dry wit. It is a source of great sadness to us, as it was to him, that he was not able to enjoy the company of his children during his last year, because of the pandemic.
Laura Woodruff (née Pole)
26th May 2021
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