The book will be released in December:

The Quirky Dr Fay: A Remarkable Life

ISBN 978-0-9562041-5-8    Hugh Gault    £11.99

From Liverpool where his father was a shipping agent, Charles Ryle Fay

(1884-1961) was an advocate of co-operation, workers’ and women’s rights,

and a leading British machine gunner in World War I. Professor of Economic

History at Toronto University during the 1920s, his legacy in Canada is still

remembered - as it is in India and elsewhere. He was Chairman of the

Horace Plunkett Foundation for ten years, on the Council of the Royal

Economic Society for almost twenty and taught at Cambridge University for

thirty years. His friends included John Maynard Keynes and Sir William

Beveridge, and he helped and inspired Sir Austin Robinson to become an

economist. He retired to Belfast in the 1950s, but continued to travel and

lecture widely. He was the author of nearly twenty books, some still in print

or recently revived, and led a remarkable life. This is his first biography.

Fay sought to counter inequality and foster the common good through

economic and social reform. Always forthright and motivated by values that

some saw as socialist, he did not accept the status quo. Quirky and

unconventional, his practical interventions and intellectual insights made a

difference to understanding the past and people’s expectations for the future.

More than fifty years on the parallels are obvious and his views remain pertinent today.