SIR RONALD RADFORD

Sir Ronald Radford, KCB, MBE, chairman of HM Customs and Excise, 1973-77 , and Secretary - General of the Customs Co-operation Council, 1978-83 , died on September 3 aged 79. He was born on February 28, 1916. RONALD RADFORD was the first chairman of the Board of HM Customs and Excise in modern times to have spent almost the whole of his work - ing life in the department. He combined a deep respect for the long traditions of one of the oldest of government de - partments with a capacity for managing radical change; and as deputy chairman and then chairman in the early 1970s saw his department through the testing early days of the planning and implementation of value added tax and the adaptation of Customs and Excise to the United King - dom 's accession to the EEC. . Throughout his career, he

was keenly aware of the need for tine department to play a leading role in customs and fiscal policy on the interna - tional as well as the domestic stage, and it was fitting that he should have rounded off his achievements after retirement from the UK Civil Service by becoming Secretary-General of the Customs Co-operation Council in Brussels. Bom in the middle of the First World War, he attended Southend-on-Sea High School, from which he won a scholarship to St John's Coll - ege , Cambridge, graduating as a Wrangler in the Mathe - matics Tripos. Uncertain whether to pursue a career in the Indian or the Home Civil Service, his choice was, he used to claim with some irony, eventually swayed by his tu - tor 's sly assertion that knighthoods tended to come quicker in India than at home. Joining the ICS in 1939, he rose rapidly to become district magistrate and collector in Shahabad in Bihar by 1945.