Hooray! The OU Library has published its catalogue of the Geoffrey Vickers papers.

Sir (Charles) Geoffrey Vickers (1894-1982) had a varied life as a lawyer, a soldier, an economic intelligence officer and legal advisor. In the later years of his life he became a prolific writer and speaker on the subject of social systems analysis and the complex patterns of social organisation. The collection includes materials created in this latter stage of his life.

The Geoffrey Vickers Collection at the Open University largely consists of draft material and correspondence relating to his published works, articles and speeches.

I knew him only towards the end of his long life. He was one of the wisest men I’ve ever met. And I guess he was the only winner of the Victoria Cross to write insightfully about complex systems and organisations.

(Image submitted to Wikipedia by Martin Hornby.)

The Wikipedia entry describes how Vickers won his VC:

On 14 October 1915 at the Hohenzollern Redoubt, France, when nearly all his men had been either killed or wounded and there were only two men available to hand him bombs, Captain Vickers held a barrier across a trench for some hours against heavy German bomb attacks (the ‘bombs’ of the citation were early grenades). Regardless of the fact that his own retreat would be cut off, he ordered a second barrier to be built behind him in order to secure the safety of the trench. Finally he was severely wounded, but not before his courage and determination had enabled the second barrier to be completed.

Not exactly your typical academic, then. He was also an astonishingly successful City lawyer, specialising in mergers and acquisitions at Slaughter and May. When Clement Atlee, the great post-war Labour Prime Minister, wanted to nationalise the coal industry, he brought in Vickers to handle the legal side of the process.

One of his sayings has remained with me ever since I first encountered it. “The hardest thing in life”, he said once, “is knowing what to want”. He was right: it is.

It’s a light! It’s a fan! It’s both! And it’s powered by my USB port. Essential for dark nights in the tropics. Quentin brought it back from the Antipodes. It’s badged by Intel. Perhaps they’re getting out of the chip business.

You may remember an idiotic BBC Panorama ‘expose’ of the terrible threat to our children posed by Wi-Fi networks. Here’s Wellington Grey’s useful graphical summary of Panorama‘s investigative methodology.

From Guardian Unlimited…

Seeking to popularise business stories and taking the consumer’s point of view has led to lapses in impartiality at the BBC and has provided ammunition for critics to accuse the corporation of “dumbing down” its business journalism, according to an independent report published today…

What’s this? Ideas in the Daily Telegraph ! Pardon me while I lie down in a darkened room.

The great merit of the Torygraph in the old days was that it was a terrific read — especially if you were interested in the more sordid kind of court case, sports and crosswords — and entirely devoid of any attempt to improve your mind. Sigh. How times change. The marmalade was thicker in those days, too. Have I told you about the Boer War, by the way…?

Thanks to Bill T for the discovery.

Amazing thing, this Internet. I’ve just had a phone call from Anthony Holden, a good friend I haven’t seen in ages, because he’d noticed that I’d quoted him in my post about mismanagement at Channel 4. He kindly pointed out that the Chairman of that benighted channel is Luke Johnson, not Johnston (now corrected — see below). The really interesting thing, though, is that Tony — who despite being a great emailer from earliest days could never be described as geeky — is now a driving force behind a site devoted to poker, one of his abiding obsessions and a subject on which he has written a couple of good books. Not only that but one of his sons has developed Dropping Knowledge, an ingenious site devoted to “the promotion of international understanding and the promotion of art and culture”.