Luttrell Bill

 

Bill Luttrell

Born in Devon, Luttrell's family roots had strong radical traditions – his father was Liberal MP for Tavistock and a vegetarian campaigner; his mother, Dorothy Hope Wedderburn, was descended from William Wedderburn, one of the founders of the Congress Party in India. Bill was educated at Malvern and at New College, Oxford, and went on to work for Shell in the Middle East. In Jerusalem he met Margot Raitan, the painter, who came to England to marry him in 1940.

During the 1930s, Bill Luttrell joined the Communist Party for which he was active in the engineering firm, CAV, which he played a large part in unionising.

After the war, he studied economics at the London School of Economics and worked at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research.

He left the Communist Party after the best part of two decades, then joining the Labour Party. Running his own economic consultancy, which developed into a profit-making business, he was involved in many economic planning projects, including the planning of Telford new town and operated in Canada, Bangladesh, Malaysia and elsewhere.

He was vice-president of the Town and Country Planning Association in retirement and died aged 90 in 1999.

Source: The Guardian, Thursday 3 June 1999