18 - SIR HENRY CUNYNGHAME

Summary

The death of Sir Henry Cunynghame on 3 May 1935, in his eighty-seventh year, takes from us the first in the long succession of Alfred Marshall's favourite pupils, one of outstanding gifts and of considerable accomplishment in the early days of what he called ‘geometrical economies’.

Cunynghame, who came of military and legal stock, the son of a general and grandson of a Field-Marshal (Viscount Hardinge), descended on the one side from Lord Chancellor Thurlow and on the other side from Lord Chancellor Camden, wavered at first between the two hereditary influences, and joined the Royal Engineers before he decided to come to Cambridge with a view to the Bar. In 1870 he entered St John's College and, reading for the Moral Sciences Tripos, came immediately under the influence of Alfred Marshall, who had been lately appointed to a lectureship in Moral Science in the College, and of H. S. Foxwell of the same College, who was Senior Moralist in that year. Cunynghame was second Moralist in 1873, the year after Cunningham and Maitland were bracketed senior, the year before James Ward was senior and two years before my father, J. N. Keynes. He was probably the first to whom Marshall's drafts on the Pure Theory of Foreign Trade and Domestic Values were communicated. When in 1904 Cunynghame was writing his book on curves, Marshall wrote to him to remind him of the history of the old Foreign Trade curves on which he had been brought up.