The Charles Reep and Bernard Benjamin Paper 50 Years On (1)


It is 50 years since a paper written by C. Reep and B. Benjamin appeared in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General) Vol. 131, No. 4 (1968), pp. 581-585. The paper was titled ‘Skill and Chance in Association Football‘.
The paper was five pages in length, contained four tables and had no references to other texts.
I aim to write a number of posts to celebrate its 50th anniversary of publication. In this post, I focus on the second author B. Benjamin.
B. Benjamin is Bernard Benjamin. I have provided some biographical information about him in another post.
His presence as a co-author of the paper gave the paper substantial gravitas. It was published in a Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Seven years after the publication of the paper, Bernard received the gold medal from the Institute of Actuaries. The presentation address was given by the President of the Institute, Gordon Bayley.
In that address it was noted that Bernard had published papers that covered medical, statistical, demographic studies, computer usage and operational research in a range of journals that included the Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, the Lancet and the British Medical Journal.
Bernard held positions as Chief Statistician in the General Register Office, Director of Statistics in the Ministry of Health, Director of Research and Intelligence of the Greater London Council and Director of Studies for Statistics at the Civil Service College. He was a President of the Institute of Actuaries, a President of the Royal Statistical Society and a Secretary-General of the International Union for Scientific Study of Population.
Bernard concluded his career as Professor of Actuarial Science at the City University, London. It was the first chair of Actuarial Science at an English University.
Bernard did write a second paper, ‘Skill and Chance in Ball Games‘, with Charles (and Richard Pollard) in 1971. He was President of the Royal Statistical Society when this second paper was published. He received the Society’s gold medal in 1986.

Photo Credit

The Queen presents the 1966 World Cup to England Captain, Bobby Moore (Daily Herald Archive, no known copyright restrictions)

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