Although JJ's work in the 1920s was mostly in outreach mode, with the Barrington Lectures his main vehicle, he did distill some of the material used into his 1926 book 'Groundwork in Economics'. This while being basically a populariser of concepts was firmly grounded enough for him subsequently to claim it in his application for membership of the Royal Irish Academy.

If and when I find relevant additional 20s material I will reference it here. For example, there may be academic output somewhere from his 1926-27 Rockefeller Fellowship, for which he was awarded $1800 with £1200 family allowance. The subject he proposed was '...the "spread" between prices received by the farmer and paid by the consumer in different European countries, and the arrangements for marketing agricultural produce in certain of these countries.'

He had earlier been discussing this possibility in correspondence with GA Duncan; there is among JJ's 1920s papers a letter from Duncan, dated 17/05/25, from the University of North Carolina, where he was working with a Rockefeller Fellowship, prior to his return to TCD, where he had been offered a job in connection with the School of Commerce. Duncan was appreciative of the Fellowship but inclined to dismiss much of the US research in the social sciences as 'bunk and futility'.

He proposed to do the work in Paris From August to October 1926, then in Dublin to December, then again Paris Dec-Jan, then Dublin Jan-March 1927, then in Jersey in July-August 1927. He was obviously constrained by his academic lecture-load in Dublin, and he tried to make this a vacation-project. Some of this work surfaced in his 1927 SSISI paper, but there are no traces of French or Channel Island analyses in this. He had however listed in his application a string of French academic sources: Casiot, Auge-Laribe, Rist, Tardy, Toussaint and Patier. This must have been via the Albert Kahn network, and he used the Albert Kahn Foundation as his base when in Paris. He must have been motivated by his earlier contacts with the French co-operative movement, during the war, and wanted to build on this, in support of his Barrington work, and his Plunkett House contacts. There is also substantial material in his Addendum to the 1926 Prices Tribunal Report which is based on his Rockefeller work in France.

(The Rockefeller application is coded LSRM Series 3 Box 51 Folder 548 and indicates that the Report was filed on December 29 1927, so I have hopes that it may yet surface, courtesy of Dr Darwin Stapleton, the Director of their Archive Center, with whom I am in e-mail contact. RJ July 2000)

There is among his papers some examination papers for entrance to employment in the National Land Bank, dated 1925. It is reasonable to infer that JJ probably set them, and in doing so rendered an academic service to the national movement.

The National Land Bank later became the National City Bank, and ended up being taken over by the Bank of Ireland, after a period of association with Chase. Its origins however were in the war of independence, when it was a sort of underground bank servicing the land reform aspirations of the Dail. Most of the people who banked with the National City Bank, as late as the 1940s, did so because of it early associations, although by then any radical flavour had been lost. JJ certainly did, and he introduced me to it in the mid-40s when I first went to College.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999