SIR ALAN NEALE

Sir Alan Neale , KCB, MBE, former Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food died on March 21 aged 76. He was born on October 24,1918. ALAN NEALE enjoyed the distinction, not all that com - mon among Whitehall man - darins , of being almost better known in the United States than he was in Britain. His book The Anti-Trust Laws of the USA, published in 1960 following a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship, was a study of American anti-monopoly legislation, intended for Brit - ish businesses with transat - lantic aspirations. But the work was so highly acclaimed that Americans started snap - ping it up themselves. It quickly ran into several edi - tions and became the standard textbook on the subject. A separate sabbatical at Harvard's Centre for Interna - tional Affairs led to Neale's second publication . The Flow of Resources From Rich To

telligence Corps, he served in North Africa and Italy where his fluent German, refined by visits to prewar Germany while at school, won him a job intercepting and analysing German signals . A captain by the time the war ended, he was appointed MBE (military), which always gave him spe - cial pleasure. Demobilised, Neale joined the Board of Trade where he stayed until 1968, becoming a Deputy Secretary in the previ - ous year. He then transferred to the Treasury where he was made Second Permanent Sec - retary from 1971 to 1972, specialising in overseas fi -